Category: News

The 6th session of the General Assembly of the States Parties to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was held at UNESCO headquarters from May 30 to June 1.

Elections to the Intergovernmental Committee for the term of 2016-2020 were held within the framework of the session.

Armenia was unanimously elected member of the Committee from the second regional group (Eastern Europe) for a four-year term.

Countries elected from other regional groups include Cyprus, Austria, Guatemala, Columbia, Cuba, Philippines, Zambia, Senegal, Mauritius, Palestine and Lebanon.

The core functions of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage are to promote the objectives of the Convention, provide guidance on best practices and make recommendations on measures for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage.

The Committee will further examine requests submitted by States Parties for the inscription of intangible heritage on the Lists as well as proposals for programmes and projects. The Committee is also in charge of granting international assistance.

The Members of the Intergovernmental Committee are elected by the States Parties meeting in General Assembly according to the principles of equitable geographical representation and rotation.

States Members to the Committee are elected for a term of four years, and every two years, the General Assembly shall renew half of them. A State Member of the Committee may not be elected for two consecutive terms.

The province of Entre Rios, Argentina, has approved a bill recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which establishes every April 24 in Argentina as the “Day of Action for Tolerance and Respect between Peoples,” reports.

The Senate of Entre Rios unanimous passed the bill “in commemoration of the genocideagainst the Armenian people and with the spirit that its memory is a permanent lesson for the present and our future goals.”

Also on Tuesday, May 31, the Deputy Governor of Entre Rios and President of the Senate, Adan Humberto Bahl, along with Senator Lucas Larrarte, Chairman of the General Law Committee of the Senate, met with Nicolas Sabuncuyanand Jorge Dolmadjian, members of the Armenian National Committee of South America.

“The meeting was extremely positive and we deduct that the Government will enact the law. In addition, this will be the beginning of a way to work together with the province in the issues of human rights in different areas,” said Jorge Dolmadjian.

The bill (), was filed on March 30, 2015 by the then deputy Maria Laura Stratta, who is now Minister of Social Development. On May 12 of the same year it obtained the initial approval in the Chamber of Deputies of Entre Rios. Among the grounds, it is mentioned that “the memory of the Armenian Genocide interpellates modern society about the consequences that can lead to intolerance and discrimination, and invites us to reflect on the meaning of respect between peoples and individuals and the importance of active memory and ongoing injustice and impunity. The recognition, condemnation and denunciation are the basis for preventing the repetition of this abhorrent crime.”

“Ten years after the enactment of the law that put Argentina in first place in the struggle for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, it is very important that the representatives of the people of Entre Rios decided to join that path,” said Nicolas Sabuncuyan, Director of the Armenian National Committee of Buenos Aires.

The Article 4 of Law 26,199, that was enacted on December 13, 2006 and promulgated on 11 January 2007, invited provincial governments to “adhere to the provisions of this law.” The provinces that have already joined the recognition law are: Buenos Aires, Catamarca, Chaco, Chubut, Córdoba, Corrientes, Jujuy, La Pampa, Misiones, Neuquen, Rio Black, San Juan, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero and Tierra del Fuego.

Armenia was the first to condemn the crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq and Armenians in Deir Zor and Kessab committed by the Islamic State and the Al-Nusra Front, Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ashot Hovakimyan said at an anti-terror conference on “Preventing Terrorism and Countering Violent Extremism and Radicalization” in Berlin.

According to him, it’s necessary to pay greater attention to the prevention of crimes committed on the basis of hatred, since they immediately link violent radicalism to terrorism.

The Deputy Foreign Minister said ‘the existing conflicts create a fertile soil for violent extremism, especially when the state authorities use the conflicts to restrict human rights and seed hatred towards conflicting parties.

“Unfortunately, the recent developments in our region come to prove the concerns of the Armenian side. Following the example of Ramil Safarov and Islamic State, the Azerbaijani armed forces were beheading and torturing not only servicemen, but also civilians, including elderly people and women. The perpetrators of these crimes not only escaped criticism, but were also awarded by Azerbaijani President,” Ashot Hovakimyan said.

The Deputy FM stressed that any attempt on the part of states to make radicalism and terrorism serve their goals should be strongly condemned.

Ankara does not want to see relations with Berlin damaged, as the German parliament prepares to vote on a resolution aimed at recognizing the deaths of Armenians in 1915 as ‘genocide’, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Wednesday, Anadolu Agency reports.

Yildirim’s remarks were delivered to reporters at Esenboga Airport in the Turkish capital ahead of his first official visit to the Northern Cyprus.

“We do not have anything secret or hidden…Let the past and history of all countries be investigated. But, let historians do this,” he said.

Yildirim warned that history was being made an “instrument of politics”.

Referring to Germany’s large Turkish community, Yildirim added: “I hope that the German parliament and decision makers will not turn a deaf ear to 3.5 million voters. Therefore, we do not desire that such a resolution be passed,” Yildirim said.

“This is null and void for us but we do not want [it] passed,” he added.

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip by phone to share Ankara’s sensitivities over the resolution.

Teams from 12 unrecognized states have come together for  the CONIFA World Cup in Abkhazian capital Sukhum.

The Western Armenian team beat the Chagos Islands 12:0 in the first group stage match held in the “Dinamo stadium” of Sukhum.

The final match will be played the following Sunday, the 05.06.2016.

The following 12 teams play the World Football Cup #Abkhazia2016 to determine the World Champion outside FIFA: Abkhazia, Chagos Islands, Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus, Padania, Panjab, Raetia, Sapmi, Somaliland, Székely Land, United Koreans in Japan and Western Armenia.

The Football Federation of Western Armenia (FFWA) was established in 2015.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan is set to reject Borussia Dortmund’s offer of a contract extension, with agent Mino Raiola saying in : “Why should we prolong it now?”

Dortmund have been trying to tie Mkhitaryan to a new deal since the turn of the year but, going into the summer break, the 27-year-old has yet to put pen to paper and is about to enter the final 12 months of his current Borussia contract.

However, German tabloid Bild said on Tuesday that the Armenia international is set to reject club’s latest offer, and Raiola told the paper: “Why should we prolong it now? ‘Micki’ is under contract until 2017, and we continue to think about his future.”

Raiola, who also represents the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku, reportedly wanted to include a release clause in Mkhitaryan’s contract that would allow the midfielder to switch clubs should current BVB coach Thomas Tuchel leave the Westfalenstadion in the future, according to ESPN.

However, Dortmund have said in the past they will no longer allow players to insert release clauses into their contracts.

“I won’t comment on this,” Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke told Bild when asked about the breakdown in negotiations.

Mkhitaryan, the club’s record signing when he joined from Shaktar Donetsk for €27.5 million in 2013, has excelled under Tuchel and was by his Bundesliga colleagues in the prestigious annual kicker player poll.

Bild also reports that Chelsea and Arsenal are interested in signing the skillful midfielder, but it’s unlikely that Dortmund are prepared to sell considering the club have already sold Mats Hummels to Bayern Munich and İlkay Gündoğan could also be set to move on.

Shortly before the planned vote on the Armenian Genocide resolution at the German Bundestag, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a phone conversation with Turkey’s new Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, Spiegel reports.

The PM called the resolution a “baseless and unjust political judgment.” He said “Turkey and millions of Turks in Germany” are watching the developments with concern.

The Turkish PM said “Ankara expects a “respectful attitude” from the Federal Government and the Bundestag.

The Bundestag is set to vote on the bill on June 2.

The trial of Argentina and Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi on tax fraud charges is due to start in Spain, the BBC reports.

Messi and his father Jorge, who manages his financial affairs, are accused of defrauding Spain of more than €4m between 2007 and 2009.

The authorities allege that the two used tax havens in Belize and Uruguay to conceal earnings from image rights.

The Spanish tax agency is demanding heavy fines and prison sentences. They deny any wrongdoing.

The trial is expected to last for three days, with Messi appearing in court on Thursday.

The Public Services Regulatory Commission ruled today to cut the gas price. Those consumers, who use up to 10 thousand cubic meters of gas monthly, will now pay AMD 146,700 including VAT (down from  AMD 156.000).

For those with a monthly consumption of 10 thousand cubic meters or more, the current price will be calculated under the formula of P = 257.56 * E, where P is the cost of natural gas for consumers of 10 thousand cubic meters of gas or more, and E is the average exchange rate of AMD against USD 1 as of the 25^th of the previous month.

The changes come into force from July 1.

From his grandmother beginning at an early age, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Balakian heard occasional hints of a darker family history set in Armenia. And he began to explore a past that remains fought over to this day, the expulsion and killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. Many members of Balakian’s family died. Others, like his grandmother and aunts, survived after a horrific flight on foot.

Balakian would write about these events in history titled “The Burning Tigris” and in a family memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.”

“One of the reasons for my writing “Black Dog of Fate” was to try to make sense of growing up in a family in which a traumatic history was really repressed. It wasn’t spoken about. It was silenced. And yet the leakages that I experienced as a kid growing up in affluent suburbia were beguiling and weird and strange, and they stayed with me,” Peter Balakian said in an interview with

“I began writing poems with a kind of passion, and I never stopped. I was working my way as a young guy in his 20s writing lyric poems. And around the mid to late 1970s, for various reasons, the news of history started percolating in me,” Balakian said.

“And I started understanding more of the big picture of my own family’s historical experience as genocide survivors. The poem in its unique form, its form of compressed language and particular kinds of probe images, I like to call them, or incisive, compressed image language, is capable of going to history and its aftermath in ways that no other literary form can,” the poet added.

“Who drowned waiting in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There, the sky is cochineal. There, the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There, the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes.”

Many Armenians, including Balakian’s grandmother, fled into what is today Syria. Most were killed or starved to death along the way. In 2009, just before the civil war began, Balakian joined a “60 Minutes” crew in Syria for a report on their fate.

“It was extraordinary then to be there. Looking back at it now, I feel like it’s a dream. But for me, it was also exciting to be there, because there’s a very rich Armenian culture and community in Aleppo and a gorgeous church. And so all that was a kind of connecting with a diasporan culture,” Peter Balakian said.

“And then when the war started, when the war began to just destroy all of this, I would look on, on the screens and on the TV images and the computer images with pain and disbelief that, just in the little case of Armenian cultural life there, churches that were hundreds of years old were gone. Whole communities were disbanded. And if that was true just for the smaller Armenian population of Syria, we all knew what was happening to the broad Syrian population,” he added.