Category: News

Asbarez – Over 100 community members gathered at the St. Mary’s Church hall for a Community Rally organized by the Syrian Armenian Relief Fund.

The Rally’s guest speaker was Rev. Haroutune Selimian, President of the Armenian Evangelical Community of Syria as well as a member of the Central Committee of Syrian- Armenian Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Organization.

“It is important for our community to hear first-hand from individuals on the ground in Syria,” said Mher Tavidian, a member of the Syrian Armenian Relief Fund. “Rev. Selimian gave us a glimpse into what the Armenian communities in Syria need and the realistic effects of where the relief funds money is going.”

The rally started with opening remarks by SARF Committee member Vazken Madenlian which reminded the community of the SARF “Save a Life” Telethon which is set to take place this Sunday, February 21 from 2 to 8 p.m. Following his remarks, Rev. Selimian took the stage to discuss the situation in Syria for Armenians and the effects SARF has had on the community.

“Many in the community have asked how long we should continue to keep fighting for our Community in Syria instead of evacuating them,” exclaimed Rev. Selimian. “Of course we must keep the community alive. Today is the day that we stay, not the day that we leave. We must protect our communities, the war will end and our community will thrive again.”

Rev. Selimian continued by thanking every single Armenian-American community member who heeded the call for help and supported SARF and its activities and urged the community to support the SARF Telethon.

“SARF has supported thousands of families so that they can continue their lives not only in the present, but for the future as well,” said Selimian.

 

 

“The Last Inhabitant,” a film directed by Jivan Avetisyan is slated for release later this year. The film tracks the events of 1988-1989 and shows how the Sumgait massacre affected the human destinies.

The shooting of the film was completed last year. The soundtrack of the film is currently being recorded in Armenia.

The music scored by System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian will be performed by the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hover State Chamber Choir.

“The Last Inhabitant” is about an Armenian village that has been forcibly emptied of its residents. The film’s main character, Abgar, lives with his mentally ill daughter. After Azerbaijanis enter the village and attempt to rape his daughter, Abgar has no choice other than fighting to ensure her safety.

The film stars world-renowned Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi, Sandra Daukšaitė, Armenian actors Sos Janibekyan, Aleksander Khachatryan, Naira Muradyan, Anne Bedian, Babken Chobanyan.

The film will be presented to public during the 2016 Golden Apricot Film Festival.

Members of the OSCE Minsk Group themselves should solve the issue of modifying the existing format on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, said Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Feb. 18.

She made the remarks in response to a question of Trend correspondent on the possibility of holding an expanded meeting of the OSCE Minsk Group.

“The current format has been approved, and it is widely recognized and effective in many ways,” said Zakharova. “Of course, everyone would like to have better results, however this format works.”

Earlier, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said in Baku that Sweden offers to convene an enlarged meeting of the OSCE Minsk Group for settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

“If there is a need for a meeting in a broader format for the conflict settlement, we, as an OSCE Minsk Group member, are willing to participate in it,” she added.

The Russian government and the Armenian authorities have signed an agreement providing a ten-year state export loan to Armenia with the payment deferral until early 2018, Russian media inform, quoting a report on the official legal data portal.

“The Russian side is providing the Armenian side with a state export loan of up to $200 million for financing the delivery of Russian military products in line with the list contained in Appendix No1 to this agreement,” the report said.

According to the Appendix, Armenia will buy Russian Smerch rocket launchers and ammunition, Igla-S air defense missile systems, Avtobaza-M ground-based radar jamming and deception systems, the TOS-1A heavy flame-throwing systems with transporter-loader vehicles, 9M113M guided missiles, RPG-26 grenade launchers, Dragunov sniper rifles, Tiger armored vehicles, engineering means and communication systems.

The list may be adjusted with the mutual written consent of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation and the Armenian Defense Ministry, the report said. Armenia will spend the loan on funding up to 90 percent of the cost of each contract for the delivery of military products, with the settlements to be done in Russian rubles. Upfront payments will amount to at least 10 percent of the cost of each contract and will provided done by the Armenian side to Russian authorized entities in Russian rubles.

WVS (the Worldwide Veterinary Service) along with its partners has successfully rescued the Gyumri Zoo lions. The Worldwide Veterinary Service (WVS) is a UK registered charity that provides a sustainable veterinary resource to assist animal charities throughout the world. From disaster emergency response to training and education, our aim is to provide a fast action veterinary response to charities and animals in need.

Last week, the (FPWC) in collaboration with the (WVS) organised the rescue of the Gyumri Zoo lioness Mery and her cubs Zita and Gita to the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, a privately protected area managed by the FPWC.

Named “The World’s Saddest Zoo” by the Daily Mail, these beautiful animals were living in unbearable conditions, cramped in small dirty cages, displaying all the signs of creatures slowly being driven mad by their unnatural existence. These animals were starving, barely surviving only on scraps fed to them through bars by kind volunteers.

WVS quickly identified that swift action was required and despite the difficult weather conditions and snow, the transfer of the last inhabitants of Gyumri Zoo was managed seamlessly.

The lions are in a good physical and mental state after the adventurous experience. They are staying in heated cages until the quarantine station has been built. They will then remain there until they are ready to be moved to an appropriate facility outside of Armenia to live out the rest of their lives.

Gyumri Zoo lions are now part of a larger conservation picture. According to the memorandum signed between WVS and FPWC on February 2, 2016, the parties will work together towards in-situ conservation, animal rehabilitation and rescue initiatives in Armenia.

The construction of this quarantine station for animals in the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, where the lions will be kept for vet examination and medicinal treatment, will mark yet another point of successful collaboration between FPWC and WVS. The quarantine station will also be the foundation stone of the Wildlife Rescue Centre, an even larger sustainable project the partners are currently designating.

It’s only because of the huge tide of support that WVS have received that this has been possible. It may only be the first step on a much bigger journey for Mery, Gita and Zita but getting them out of the ‘World’s Saddest Zoo’ asap was imperative and a brilliant achievement by all the teams concerned.

At least two thousand Syrian rebel fighters have re-entered the country from Turkey over the last week to reinforce insurgents fending off an assault by Syrian Kurdish-led militias, rebel sources said on Thursday, reports.

The rebel fighters, with weapons and vehicles, have been covertly escorted across the border by Turkish forces over several nights, before heading into the embattled rebel stronghold of Azaz, the sources said.

“We have been allowed to move everything from light weapons to heavy equipment mortars and missiles and our tanks,” Abu Issa, a commander in the Levant Front, the rebel group that runs the border crossing of Bab al-Salam, told Reuters giving his alias and talking on condition of anonymity.

“There is tight security on the four-hour drive from one border crossing to the other,” he added, saying rebels being transported excluded the hardline Nusra Front fighters and other jihadist groups.

On Sunday, the Syrian government had said Turkish forces were among 100 gunmen who had entered Syria accompanied by 12 pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, in an ongoing supply operation to insurgents.

The route across Turkey has become the only path for rebels to their north Aleppo enclave after recent Syrian army advances closed the main route into rebel territory.

The UK’s Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence across the war torn-country, also confirmed that hundreds of rebel fighters had already crossed with weapons via a border crossing into Azaz.

Another rebel source said the Turkish military have stepped up delivery of munitions and heavy military hardware in the last two days to bolster rebels facing the major offensive launched by the Syrian army and its allies.

– Approximately 60 people filled the chapel at the Granoff Family Hillel Center last night to hear survivors of genocide share their stories as a part of Tufts Against Genocide’s (TAG) 6th annual Survivors Speak panel. The event was held as a component of the Cummings/Hillel Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education.

Senior Shoshana Weiner and sophomore Mariel Kieval, both interns for the Cummings Foundation, introduced the event with a joint speech about the importance of remembrance. Weiner and Kieval organized the event in conjunction with TAG President Caroline Atwood. In their speech, they said that while the phrase “never again” is often used while discussing such atrocities, events of genocide continue to happen to this day.

The first panelist to speak was sophomore Nairi Krafian, the great-granddaughter of Hagop Madoian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

“My experience is so different from [his],” she said.

Krafian shared snippets of her great-grandfather’s fractured childhood working as a forced gravedigger, who recorded the surreal experience of living among the dead in a journal. “Nobody would pay any attention,” she shared from his journal. “People died, and deaths went unnoticed.”

Krafian said that the repercussions of the Armenian Genocide, where masses of Armenian people were murdered in 1915 by the Ottoman government, have been passed onto her, and “that discomfort influences [her] life.” She said she maintains a deep connection to her Armenianidentity, and takes pride in what she describes as the failure of the Turkish people to extinguish her own.

The next panelist, Holocaust survivor Jack Trompetter, said that genocide stems from a process of demeaning and dehumanizing another people.

“To have a genocide, you need to have ‘the other.’ Once you have that other, the path is clear for an atrocity to occur,” he said.

Trompetter was born in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942, and was separated from his family as they split up to avoid persecution, ultimately reuniting with his family at the close of the war.

“When people went into hiding in those days, nobody had any idea how long it would be,” he said. “I was one of the lucky children.”

The next panelist, Edina Skaljic, spoke about living in constant fear during the Bosnian Genocide, where ethnic cleansing in the late 1990s took the lives of thousands of Bosniaks. Skaljic said she remembered being given a shopping bag by her mother, and being told to pack only what she needed while leaving their home.

“I didn’t understand. Why did I have to choose?” she said. “That was the moment my childhood ended.”

Skaljic said out of fear of danger, she was forced to assume a new name and hometown to shield the truth of her heritage. She recalled arguing with her mother at the time about pretending to be something she was not.

“Your name could actually mean life or death in Bosnia at that time,” she said.

The last panelist to speak was Claude Kaitare, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide, where the Tutsiswere being targeted and slaughtered by the Hutu majority in 1994. Kaitare said the conflict began without warning; suddenly, neighbors were turning on neighbors, and weapons and checkpoints were sprouting up everywhere.

He recalled a time when a Tutsi boy went up to

a checkpoint and was beat by the guards with the blunt ends of their machetes. One guard hit the boy with the wrong side of the blade, drawing blood, he said.

“Once they start seeing blood, it’s like open season,” Kaitare said.

After the boy fell to the ground, the guards announced they were taking him to the hospital, which was really “a mass burial place,” he said.

The survivors on the panel all spoke about the importance of remembering genocide.

“In telling you these stories, that makes you witnesses,” Trompetter said.

Students should now carry the burden of preserving his history, he said. Skaljic echoed this sentiment, expressing her fears that their stories of death and survival would go untold.

“Silence is betrayal,” she said. “We say we have to forgive, but not forget.”

The panelists also discussed the difficulty in the healing process after surviving genocide. All of them said that no survivor can ever fully recover, but that educating the next generation helps survivors personally come to terms with their difficult histories.

“There is nothing more amazing, there is nothing more healing for a genocide survivor than to see people who actually care,” Skaljic said.

Ethnic Armenian member of the Georgian parliament Samvel Petrosyan criticized some of his colleagues on Wednesday for voting for a controversial Council of Europe resolution regarding access to water in Nagorno-Karabakh, reports.

The at the Council of Europe parliamentary Assembly on January 26  asserts that “inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water”. 98 MPs voted for it, 71 against, and 40 abstained.

Georgian MPs Tedo Japaridze, Irakli Chikovani and Giorgi Kandelaki voted for the resolution.

At a plenary session of parliament, Petrosyan called the resolution biased and said people in the community he represents, the southern town Akhalkalaki, were astonished by the way the Georgian delegates voted.

“Despite the anti-Armenian views of certain politicians, I am confident that brotherly ties between the Georgian and Armenian nations will deepen and develop in the future.”

Head of Georgian Dream’s faction Giorgi Volsky called Petrosyan’s statement ‘populist’ and said the Georgian delegation to PACE did not do anything to cause tension in Georgia’s neighborhood.

“The closer we get to the election the more populist statements there will be. Georgia is our common country for Georgians, Armenians and Azeri. Let’s keep stability in this state,” he said, adding that the energy supply problem has gotten worse and needs to be solved.

–  When Armenian soccer club Ararat Yerevan FC kicks off Thursday night against the Fresno Fuego at Chukchansi Park, it’s not just another preseason exhibition.

For Ernest Hekimian, 69, it’s a heartwarming salute and reminder of his days with the Fresno Ararat Soccer Club.

The year was 1970 and Hekimian was a 24-year-old striker eager to play soccer.

But as a newcomer to the San Joaquin Valley, emigrating from Soviet Russia and eventually settling in Fresno, he was left searching for that missing piece of home.

“I was asking some Armenian guys if they had a soccer team,” Hekimian said. “They had a league, they said, but they didn’t have an Armenian soccer team.”

So Hekimian made one and named it after his favorite club from the motherland: Ararat Yerevan FC.

“I chose the name because (Ararat Yerevan) was a good team, a very good team. Other villages and cities had clubs but none stronger than them,” Hekimian said.

Fresno Ararat rose through the ranks of the San Joaquin Valley Soccer League’s senior division until the club’s end in 1989.

The team was mostly coached by the late Edward Baladjanian, a visionary for the city’s youth soccer programs alongside Harold Young.

“I loved him like an older brother,” Hekimian said. “He helped a lot. We had practices in the rain, and even though he was sick, he was always out there.”

Baladjanian died in 1995, but his legacy lives on in the name of the Fresno Ararat Soccer Club, which won SJVSL titles 1977-78, ’80-’81 and ’82-’83.

In 1974, the team made an impressive run for an amateur state title, reaching the championship of the Division II Northern California Soccer Football Association.

Ararat eventually fell to Juventus Soccer Club of the Peninsula League in San Francisco.

The Fresno side fielded just two American-born players in David Hollingsworth and Greg Brittan. The rest were from all over the globe, not just Armenia, according to a 1974 Fresno Bee article: Hekimian, who was known on the field by his middle name Massis, was born in France; Yussef Aibaseeri, Kuwait; Hagop Der Boghossian, Neshian Soghomonian, Hampig Kasparian and Kaled Skuate, all from Syria; Herman Murganyan, Turkey; Fayez Shahian, Palestine; Ahamed Shomroukh from Lebanon; and Mike Ross from Scotland.

It wasn’t always about results. It was about an atmosphere created every Sunday on the soccer fields in Fresno, Tulare, Hanford and other cities around the Valley.

Hekimian’s son, Alex, 42, remembers vividly those afternoons at Romain Playground, where he would order a pita bread sandwich from one of the many food trucks and sit on the grass to watch his father play.

“It was a Sunday thing like people go to church, we’d go to soccer,” Alex Hekimian said. “It’s no joke. There was nothing else to do. It was life. Soccer was life. That’s what came first in the family.”

Holmes and Romain playgrounds were the hot spots of amateur soccer in Fresno and the sidelines would fill with hundreds of spectators – mostly the friends and families of the coaches and players.

Each team – such as Fresno Oro, Mexico, Fresno Internationals, Académica from Hanford and more – had its own rich history.

Jaime Ramirez, the Fresno Pacific men’s soccer coach who also was the Fuego’s first coach from 2003-07, remembers playing with Fresno Ararat on Sundays and the impact it had on him as a 19-year-old freshly graduated from Clovis High.

He played five years with Ararat, at the same time as his playing career at Fresno Pacific.

“It helped me make the transition from high school youth into adult soccer that eventually propelled me into the kind of soccer player I became. It was very competitive,” Ramirez said.

But as much as the personal growth, he remembers the impact the SJVSL clubs had in the region.

“It laid a foundation of soccer in this community,” he said. “It was the golden era of soccer in the San Joaquin Valley. It was a beginning point that, in an amateur way, professionalized the sport in the area.”

It’s been more than 40 years since Ararat Yerevan FC last visited Fresno. In 1974, the club played an exhibition against Mexican side Jalisco in front of a sellout crowd at Ratcliffe Stadium. It was part of a three-stop California tour for Ararat Yerevan FC, which was celebrating its 1973 Soviet Cup championship.

“It was packed,” Ernest Hekimian recalled. “There was no place to walk.”

This week’s return visit by the team sparked fond memories of that visit, as Hekimian ruffled through old newspaper clips and photos from that day.

“It was very exciting. I was following them like a little kid,” he said.

But most of all, it was the the beautiful game and the joy it brought to him and his brothers on the soccer field.

“It was pleasure and happiness to bring the Armenian young men together, to do something together we did back home. We were all so happy.”

“Soccer,” Hekimian added, “it made Fresno home.”

Photo: AP

 

A bus has crashed into a truck in northern Ghana, killing at least 53 people, police say, the BBC reports.

The Metro Mass Transit coach reportedly collided head-on with a cargo truck carrying tomatoes near the town of Kintampo on Wednesday evening.

Regional police chief Maxwell Atingane told Reuters news agency that many passengers died at the scene.

He said police were investigating the cause of the crash, believed to be one of the worst in many years.

Joy News, a Ghanaian website, reported that a passenger told police that the bus had been experiencing brake problems.

At least 23 people are being treated at a local hospital.

The coach was full of passengers and travelling north from Kumasi, the second largest city after Accra, the capital.