Category: News

US Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group James Warlick today met with the Armenian athletes leaving for Baku to participate in the inaugural European Games in the Azerbaijani capital, the US Embassy in Armenia informed in a Twitter post.

Attending the event were President of the National Olympic Committee of Armenia Gagik Tsarukyan, the Minister of Sport and Youth Affairs Gabriel Ghazaryan, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk, Olympic Champion Albert Azaryan and others.

The European Games will run from June 12 to 28.

A delegation of Iranian lawmakers left Tehran for Yerevan on Wednesday morning for talks on strengthening Iran’s ties with neighboring Armenia, Tasnim news agency reports.

The six-strong team of Iran-Armenia Parliamentary Friendship Group will stay in the South Caucasus country for four days.

Two Christian Iranian lawmakers, an Armenian and an Assyrian, are among the parliamentarians visiting Armenia.

The delegation is going to hold talks with high-ranking Armenian officials to explore avenues for the enhancement of relations between Iran and its northwestern neighbor.

Iran’s parliament has in recent months intensified measures to strengthen ties with parliaments of the other countries, following President Hassan Rouhani’s announcement that his administration will adopt the policy of constructive interaction with the world.

Armenian weightlifter Andranik Karapetyan became the winner at the Junior World Championships held in Wroclaw, Poland, the website of the Armenian Weightlifting federation informs.

Andranik Karapetyan, 19, lifted a total of 335 kg (155+180), three kg more than Iran’s Ali Miri in the 77 kg weight category.

Interim head coach of the Armenian national team Sargis Hovsepyan allowed forward Yura Movsisyan to stop trainings and leave for the US to pass a medical.

Hovsepyan told the website of the Football Federation of Armenia (FFA) that Yura Movsisyan was called up to the national team, as he was supposed to recover until the match against Portugal.

“The first days of the training campaign showed that Yura is not ready for the upcoming match. Together with the coaching and medical staff, we decided to allow Movsisyan to pass a medical in the US before he joins his club,” Hovsepyan.

Malaysian authorities have detained four tourists – two Canadians, a Briton and one Dutch national – for allegedly stripping naked on Mount Kinabalu, an act some locals say angered tribal spirits and caused a deadly earthquake, officials said, AFP reports.

Pictures of 10 naked tourists had spread on social media and infuriated locals following the 6.0-magnitude quake that struck near the mountain on Friday and killed 18 people. Six other tourists are still apparently at large, according to police.

Mount Kinabalu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular climbing destination, is considered sacred by Malaysia’s Kadazan Dusun tribal group, who believe it is a resting place for spirits.

“We detained all four of them on Tuesday … and yes we are still searching for the other six tourists, and we will catch them,” said Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman, the police commissioner for the Malaysian State of Sabah where the mountain is located.

Jalaluddin said those detained might be charged for causing public nuisance.

Sabah Provincial Tourism Minister Masidi Manjun tweeted that legal proceedings against the four foreigners had begun and that they would be remanded for four days.

Arsenal and Manchester United target Matteo Darmian is on the verge of joining Bayern Munich from Torino, it has been claimed, accoring to .

The 25-year-old Italian international has grabbed headlines this summer as a number of top clubs are involved in a mad scramble to acquire his signature.

Arsenal and Manchester United have maintained a long term interest in the full-back and were hoping to take him to England this summer but the German powerhouses seemed to have beaten them to the post.

German champions Bayern Munich have been on his trail and it has been claimed that they are on the verge of clinching Darmian’s signature.

According to Italian daily Tuttosport, the Bavarians are close to agreeing a deal worth €16m plus add-ons with Torino for the transfer of the Italian right-back.

Other than enjoying an impressive season with Torino, Darmian has also established himself in the Italian national team and has earned 11 caps for the Azzurri.

According to , the right-back of an Armenian origin played 46 matches for Torino in Serie A and Europa League this season, scoring twice and assisting one goal.

At Bayern, Darmian could become an alternative to Rafinha, who played as a right-back in the most important matches in Bundesliga and Champions League.

President Serzh Sargsyan today received US Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Ambassador James Warlick.

The interlocutors discussed issues related to the current stage and perspectives of the Karabakh conflict settlement.

President Sargsyan reiterated Armenia’s willingness to continue to work with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to find a solution to the Karabakh conflict through peace talks.

By Harut Sassounian
The California Courier

Armenians worldwide applauded the Cilician Catholicosate for filing a lawsuit in the Turkish Constitutional Court on April 27, demanding the return of its historic seat in Sis, Kozan district of Turkey’s Adana province. The Cilician See’s former headquarters, established in 1293, was confiscated by the Turkish government in 1921, at the culmination of the Armenian Genocide.

Catholicos Aram I announced that should the Turkish court reject the lawsuit, the Catholicosate intends to appeal the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights, which requires that all domestic legal remedies are exhausted before it considers appeals on cases filed against Council of Europe members states. Skeptics of Turkish acceptance of European Court decisions should know that the Republic of Turkey has complied with all rulings since its acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction in 1990.

The Catholicosate’s lawsuit is a landmark case for several reasons:

— It seeks to restore partial justice for the enormous human, material, and territorial losses suffered by Armenians during the Genocide.

— It shifts “Hai Tad [Armenian Cause] efforts beyond the recognition of the Armenian Genocide into the legal sphere,” as stated by Catholicos Aram I.

— It could set a precedent for similar legal claims, as His Holiness informed The New York Times last month: “After 100 years, I thought it was high time that we put the emphasis on reparation…. This is the first legal step. This will be followed by our claim to return all the churches, the monasteries, the church-related properties and, finally, the individual properties.”

Despite the noble objectives pursued by the Catholicosate’s lawsuit, a controversy surfaced in the Armenian community last week, when several websites and newspapers reported that the Catholicosate of Cilicia had demanded that the Turkish government “either return the property of the Catholicosate of Sis or pay a compensation of 100 million Turkish Liras ($37 million).” Garo Armenian, a prominent Armenian community leader, wrote a cautionary article titled, “Our Sacred Sites are not Personal Possessions.” He stressed that “the Catholicosate’s lawsuit raises a series of important questions which must be collectively considered forthwith with prudent diligence in order to prevent any undesirable precedents.” He also urged the Catholicosate to clarify this issue if the news reports have not accurately reflected the content of the lawsuit.

I contacted last week the Catholicosate’s representatives seeking such a clarification. I was assured in an e-mail by Father Housig Mardirossian, Assistant to His Holiness Aram I, that “The lawsuit of the Catholicosate has one clear objective: The return of the Catholicosate of Cilicia.”

In response to my request for a copy of the lawsuit, Payam Akhavan, a prominent international lawyer and lead counsel for the Catholicosate, stated that “it is not possible or advisable at this stage to share the full application while it is still pending before the Turkish Constitutional Court.”

On questions regarding monetary compensation, attorney Akhavan provided the following explanation: “The fundamental claim before the Turkish Constitutional Court is that Turkey should return the Monastery and Cathedral of St. Sofia, both because of the Catholicosate’s property rights, as well as its religious significance for Armenians. The claim is not for compensation, given that this is not merely private property, but rather, property of religious and historical significance. However, I have been advised by our Turkish lawyer that under Turkish laws and procedures it is necessary, with respect to the property rights claim (and not the religious rights claim) to reserve the Catholicosate’s alternate right to seek compensation by providing a provisional amount…. But I want to emphasize that the claim is not for compensation; it is for the return of the property, to be used for religious worship and related cultural purposes.”

I contacted an independent lawyer in Istanbul who confirmed that Turkish law indeed required that a specific value be stated for a property under litigation.

Now that the financial issue is clarified, there are other important matters facing the Catholicosate and Armenians in general. Some of these questions might be a little premature, but Armenians may want to reflect upon them in order to anticipate the consequences of any eventual decisions by Turkish or European courts:

1. What would the Catholicosate do should the Turkish court or government allow the restoration of the Sis church and its use for religious worship without returning ownership of the property to the Catholicosate? Moreover, what if the Turkish government also offered monetary compensation for the repair of the church headquarters while retaining the property rights?

2. In case the Turkish Court or the European Court of Human Rights decided to return the Sis church property, would the Catholicosate relocate to its historic headquarters or continue to remain in exile in Antelias, Lebanon?

In view of the Turkish government’s recent overtures to the heads of Assyrian and Syriac churches to return to their historic headquarters in Turkey from temporary exile in Syria, Turkey’s leaders may use the Armenian lawsuit as a cover vis-à-vis their own hardliners, and make a similar offer to the Catholicosate of Cilicia.

President Erdogan may make such a gesture for three reasons:

1. To preempt a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in favor of the Catholicosate, and avoid setting a legal precedent for future Armenian lawsuits;

2. To score a public relations victory in international circles, particularly after his party’s loss of parliamentary majority in last Sunday’s elections;

3. To reap the economic benefits of foreign tourists and Armenian visitors to the historic headquarters of the Cilician Catholicosate at Sis.

A collection of about 2,000 posters from the World War One era, considered to be one of the world’s finest and amassed over more than a decade by a U.S. Army officer, will be sold at auction later this month, Guernsey’s auction house said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

The collection, which will go under the hammer during an online, unreserved auction with no minimum bids on June 30 and July 1, includes the famous poster of a stern-looking, top-hatted Uncle Sam pointing a finger with the words, “I Want You for U.S. Army.”

Another patriotic poster shows the American flag and laborers with the words “Teamwork Wins,” while a third is of French women working in a laundry inscribed “Four Years in the Fight.”

Although all of the posters, works of art which are expected to fetch between $200 to $5,000 apiece, are patriotic, their topics range from fundraising and food rationing to women’s war efforts, enlistment and animal aid.

About half of the posters are from the United States, while others are in various languages from more than 15 countries such as France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Cuba and China.

The largest poster is a massive 9- by 14-foot American work urging people to “Give, or we Perish,” that was made on behalf of the Armenian Relief Fund.

 

A congregation in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi is being threatened by Muslim criminals who want to seize the church’s land. The menacing group is trying to intimidate the Christian community by saying that they’ll accuse them of the highly punishable offense of blasphemy if they don’t vacate their church property and stop worshiping there, the reports.

Members of the Jerusalem Church, a Pentecostal, 300-family congregation in Karachi, have informed International Christian Concern that they’ve been receiving deadly threats from a group of armed Muslim miscreants, who are known for seizing property from the poor and various targeted killings.

Church members said they were approached in May by the group and were told to leave the church and never return. However, the interaction in May was not the only time that church members were confronted by the group, according to one of the church’s pastors, Ilyas Masih.

“These Muslims have been pressuring the church people not to play musical instruments and asked the church leaders to stop girls from singing with boys in the church,” Masih explained. “Several times they stopped and threatened the worshipers and pastors for going into church for prayers and harassed the women in the past.”

“The Christians of the locality have responded in a brave manner and announced that they will die before they let them grab the church property,” Masih asserted.

John Nazareth Adil, a local activist, told ICC that the group of Muslims probably want to use the church property to carry out “their agendas.”

The congregation has submitted a request to the local police department for extra protection, however, the church is still being threatened, Masih said.

“Yet again a church in Pakistan faces harassment of its women and threats about how and when church services and worship should be conducted,” Wilson Chowdhry, president of the British Pakistani Christian Association, told The Christian Post on Tuesday. ”

“The threats that involve blasphemy are common in Pakistan and Muslims of Pakistan … if any Christian is accused of blasphemy then the whole community has to suffer,” Gill asserted. “Last month, the Muslim mob of about 500 attacked Christians’ homes [in Lahore] on pretexts that one Christian man burned some papers on which Islamic text was written,” Sardar Mushtaq Gill, a leading Pakistani-Christian human rights lawyer said.

Chowdhry explained that most Christians who flee Pakistan do so because of religious persecution and they end up in Malaysia, Sri Lanka or Thailand, and added that each country has a population of about 10,000 Pakistani asylum seekers.

But in most cases, those seeking refugee status in those countries are not recognized as refugees and are often arrested and fined.

“This treatment of [Pakistani] Christians is not unlike the treatment of Armenian Christians, who later faced the awful extermination during the Armenian Genocide as quoted by Lemkin. Just like Turkey before them, Pakistan denies that Christians face brutality, persecution and hatred, and Britain, as a nation, due to vested interests, remains shockingly silent,” Chowdhry contended.

“I hope we do not see a repeat of the mass killings faced by our Armenian brothers and fully understand why Christians in their droves are fleeing Pakistan despite being re-persecuted in other nations such as Thailand, where there is said to be 10,000 Pak-Christian refugees. It is time the world listened to the stories that the victims are desperate for humanitarians to hear.”