Category: News

May 8 marks one of the most significant victories in the history of the Armenian nation. Shushi was liberated on this day 24 years ago.

During the Karabakh liberation war of early 1990s, Shushi became one of Azerbaijan’s main military strongholds in Nagorno-Karabakh.  From this strategic location, the Azeri army would bombard Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert and adjacent Armenian village.

The liberation of Shushi in May, 1992, however, became a turning point.

About 3,800 volunteers participated in the operation of liberation of Shushi the night of May 8. The operation was led by Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan, the Commander of the self-defense forces of Artsakh.

Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan declared early on May 9 that all groupings of the rival had left Shushi.

By Raffi K. Hovannisian

Stepanakert, Mountainous Karabagh — I no longer know what to do on April 24—or where to go. This is the day Armenians across the globe commemorate the genocide in 1915 that destroyed the Armenian people and its homeland of thousands of years.

Those killing fields, the homes of my grandparents, are located in historic western Armenia—now eastern Turkey. But a century later, this very region has erupted in all-out war. Turkish forces are on the offensive again, this time, Armenians having been eliminated, against an empowered Kurdish majority. For an Armenian, it is a difficult place to travel to on April 24—to assert our memory amid the bombshells and havoc of another people’s national struggle.

In Washington earlier this April, I was taking several meetings with the Department of State and at other offices. As it is known, official Turkey still denies that genocide was ever committed. And it expects its “strategic partners,” such as the United States, not to call it by that name.

In the past week, respected national newspapers shamefully published Turkish ads denying the Armenian Genocide. Denialist billboards went up, too. And in his address this April, President Obama called the events of 1915 everything but “genocide.” You can see why Washington, too, is also a difficult place to be on April 24.

So I decided to return to Yerevan, Armenia, for April 24. To be clear this is modern-day Armenia—just a sliver of the great homeland which survived 1915, was absorbed into the Soviet Union, and eventually declared independence in 1991. This is the Armenia, whose foreign minister I was and whose flag I raised at the United Nations. Here millions of Armenians and their guests—this year George Clooney, Charles Aznavour, and others—march up to the Eternal Flame of 1915 and lay flowers every April 24.

But even Yerevan, this year, was a difficult place to be on April 24. Because the minds of Armenians were elsewhere. They were drifting a couple hundred miles southeast—where, even as we commemorated the victims of the Armenian Genocide, the groundworks of a new genocide against us were being laid.

A lot has been written about Nagorno (Mountainous) Karabagh, or Artsakh; people have different opinions of it. But the simplest and most irrefutable narrative is this: For as long as we know, since the ancient Armenian kingdoms, Mountainous Karabagh has been an Armenian cultural cradle. Even when Josef Stalin and his Bolshevik entourage, in order to placate nationalist Turkey, unilaterally transferred these lands from Soviet Armenia and subjected them as an autonomous region to Soviet Azerbaijani rule in 1923, Mountainous Karabagh—unlike Nakhichevan to its west—managed to keep its majority Armenian population.

As the USSR collapsed and the people of Artsakh voted by lawful referendum to declare their own independence from Azerbaijan, Baku in turn unleashed all-out war—and lost. As sovereign Armenia’s foreign minister, I helped launch the peace process in Helsinki in March 1992.

Twenty years later, this April, Turkey-allied Azerbaijan launched its largest campaign of racist aggression since the Russian-brokered ceasefire that had been signed in 1994 among Azerbaijan, Mountainous Karabagh, and Armenia. For four days, Azerbaijan’s drones and helicopters bombed peaceful Christian Armenian civilians. Soldier and villager alike were taken captive and, ISIS-style, beheaded alive in such inhumanity that even transcends the definition of a war crime.

From Stepanakert, the capital of Mountainous Karabagh, I can now report the following. Azerbaijan’s belligerent conduct, a hell-bent design developed over the years to wipe out not only Karabagh but Armenia in toto, renders a negotiated settlement no longer possible, and it is imperatively time for the international community to take a stance in equivalent application of international law and, yes, in pursuit of guaranteeing strategic security interests.

The United States, Europe, and their partners to the east and south must officially recognize the Mountainous Karabagh Republic within its constitutional frontiers.  It is no less deserving of recognition, under the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, than Kosovo, East Timor, Eritrea, or South Sudan.

It gives no consolation that Azerbaijan is a blatant clan-based dictatorship or that official Ankara is in the throes of realizing xenophobic rhetoric domestically and in foreign affairs, but it would help along the way if the Republic of Armenia itself, naturally among the first to recognize, put its own democratic house in order, rooting out the corruption of its own authorities, systemic fraud and falsification, stolen elections and political prisoners.

This is a complicated issue indeed; let us not pretend otherwise. But on the verge of a new genocide this April, let us also not mince words and find pretext for inaction.

Armenians living peacefully in Mountainous Karabagh were murdered this April. They will be murdered again. Do you recognize a genocide when you see it?

The Mayor of Yerevan, Taron Margaryan has issued a statement on Radio Day.

“Under the conditions of the plurality of mass media and sources of information, radio has always been and remains a convenient and accessible source of information.”

Addressing all employees of radio stations, the Mayor said: “I’m glad to note that you have been doing your work of reporting timely and true information to the public with all responsibility, cordiality and honor. Our conviction was further reinforced this April, when you headed for the frontline together with your colleagues to promptly inform the public about the developments.”

“I’m confident that you’ll continue your responsible work of providing exact and unbiased information with the same devotion and responsibility and will have your important and considerable contribution to the development and prosperity of the country and capital,” the Mayor said.

The New South Wales Parliament’s Armenia-Australia Parliamentary Friendship Group has released a joint statement supporting “the people of Nagorno Karabakh in seeking self-determination” and expressing “its strong concern at recent Azeri aggression” towards the Armenians of Artsakh.

The statement, was moved as a Group Resolution by Chairman Jonathan O’Dea MP and supported by all members during their joint meeting this week, attended by members of the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia).

The Armenia-Australia Parliamentary Friendship Group includes members of all parties, as well as Independents of the Upper and Lower Houses of the NSW Parliament.

ANC Australia Executive Administrator, Arin Markarian praised the move by O’Dea and his colleagues, at a time when reports indicate that Azerbaijan is again building up its border military resources after its unprecedented post-Ceasefire attacks on the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh from April 1-5.

“This resolution shows the unequivocal and continuing support from members of a Parliament, which has already recognised the rights to self-determination of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh in its Legislative Council,” said Markarian.

“The people of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh seek and deserve peace, and this statement shows that a bi-partisan group of NSW Parliamentarians stand with the government and people of Artsakh,” Markarian added.

The full statement reads:

“The Armenia-Australia Parliamentary Friendship Group indicates its support for the people of Nagorno Karabakh in seeking self-determination, and expresses its strong concern at recent Azeri aggression towards the people of Armenian background in that region.”

May 7 is Radio Day, an invention that changed the world, in general, and the world of communication, in particular.

On August 27, 1926 the “Soviet Armenia” newspaper informed: “The construction of the radio station in Yerevan has been completed. The station will start operating in five days.”

The Voice of Yerevan was first heard on air in September, 1926. On April 6, 1927 the first radio schedule consisting of news and concerts was printed in the press.

The Day of Radio was first observed in Moscow on May 7, 1945. From that time on May 7 has been marked in Armenia as Radio Day.

Serj Tankian, who is best known as the spasmodic vocalist and surrealistic lyricist for art-metal group System of a Down, has always held a deep respect for film soundtracks. “When I’m exercising or driving, a lot of what I listen to is soundtracks,” he says. “I think it’s great that people are paying attention to the value of scores. It’s very important,” Tankian said in an interview with the .

He finally got the chance to write a soundtrack of his own last year for a film that addressed a subject near to him, the Armenian genocide.

The movie, 1915, takes place in the present as a theater director attempts to stage a play about the genocide, and the actors begin feeling a visceral, realistic connection to those who died a century earlier. Its tagline is “You can’t escape the past,” and it takes surrealistic turns accordingly. The music that Tankian composed is at once traditional, otherworldly and urgent. A soundtrack album, which contains bonus tracks and extended versions of the music, came out late last month around the 101st anniversary of the day the genocide began.

Tankian has spent a good portion of the past decade writing classical and classical-inspired music, when he wasn’t writing rock or jazz albums. He turned his 2007 solo debut, Elect the Dead, into the orchestral Elect the Dead Symphony and his 2013 release, Orca Symphony No. 1, was wholly classical. He scored the video game Midnight Star and now he has begun work on another score for a film called The Last Inhabitant, slated to come out in Armenia this year. It’s a discipline he says, during a lively interview with Rolling Stone, that has come naturally to him.

Some of the music on the 1915 soundtrack sounds like traditional Armenian music, specifically the first track, “Ari Im Sokhag With Guitar.” “I’m not an Armeno-ethnic musical-expert musicologist , but it is my culture, so it definitely has that vibe. It has the melancholy and kind of traditional nuances and chord progressions,” Tankian says.

“The war that started for the sake of recognition of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic is not yet over, it will come to an end after the international recognition of NKR independence, and first of recognition by Azerbaijan,” Major-General Artak Davtyan, Head of the Operative Department of the General Headquarters of the Armenian Armed Forces, said in an interview with .

Speaking about the term “four-day war” used for the large-scale military actions in early April, the Major-General said: “Before the April events we had a ceasefire regime, which the rival was periodically violating, forcing us to respond.”

He said the ceasefire violations grew more intensive over the past few years. “What happened on April 2 was also a violation of the ceasefire, but unprecedented in scale, in terms of the weapons and equipment used and with the number of losses,” Artak Davtyan said.

He refrained from comments on the recognition of Artsakh, saying “it’s a political issue.”

The Public Radio of Armenia will air the full interview at 19:00 today.

“We feel much more secure, it was great this time. I just need to fix the in-ears, that’s the only thing. Everyone is taking good care of me here”, Iveta commented on her second rehearsal in the press conference of the Armenian delegation.

Iveta Mukuchyan’s musical repertoire includes songs in several languages. “I also sing in Armenian language, and we have more plans to mix it with those groove sounds. As to German, I think it’s more difficult even though sometimes I wanna sing in German, when I want to express my emotions. We have a couple of songs in German but I haven’t released them yet.”

“The German show business is different. Buying CDs is over, live gigs are more important”, Iveta explains the music scene of her home country Germany. “The feedback of Germans and Europeans in general has been amazing, I never imagined that before.”

“We had Swedish composers in our national selection but in the end of the day, somehow the whole team just decided to take LoveWave, which was written by Armenian authors. The only reason was that it was tailored to me”, Iveta states on her choice of song.

The has launched the of its official website.

The website is now available in four languages: Armenian, Russian, English and Azerbaijani.

 

 

 

The German Bundestag will approve the Resolution on recognition of the Armenian Genocide on June 2, Member of Bundestag, Head of the Germany-Armenia Forum Albert Weiler declared in Yerevan today.

“I assure that the Armenian Genocide recognition bill will be put on a vote at the plenary session of the Bundestag. I think the resolution will pass with a vast majority of the votes, he said.

According to Weiler, the parliamentary forces are still holding discussions on the content of the bill, but one thing is clear – the term ‘genocide’ will be included in the title, and the events of 1915 will finally have the right formulation.

Referring to Turkish Ambassador’s warning to Germany, Weiler noted that “not only the Turkish, but also the Azerbaijani side is trying to interfere with the issue.” Despite that he hopes that the bill will pass almost unanimously.

The German lawmaker said “part of the resolution will refer to the restructuring of the Armenian-German relations.” “Germany should take up the responsibility of contributing to the normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations,” he said.

“Recognition of the Armenian Genocide will be a message to Armenia and Turkey to normalize the bilateral relations irrespective of the forces in power in Turkey. I hope the day we’ll be able to cross the Turkish border with my Armenian friends is not far away,” the Member of Bundestag said.