The delegation led by Maja Gojkovic, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, visited the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial in Yerevan.
Members of the delegation laid a wreath at the memorial to the Armenian Genocide victims and paid tribute to their memory with a minute of silence.
The Serbian lawmakers visited the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, familiarized themselves with the materials and photos of genocide. Maja Gojkovic left a note in the Memorial Book.
Photo: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images
In his youth, Charles Aznavour was dismissed as being too short (at 5 feet 3 inches), too unattractive (he often jokes himself about his nose job), and having an unusual raspy, hoarse voice.
However, the French Armenian singer proved his early critics wrong, by building a successful career spanning nine decades, writes.
“They said I shouldn’t sing, but nevertheless I continued to sing until my throat was sore,” he says. His tenacity paid off – and then some.
Now 91, he has appeared in more than 60 films, written more than 1,200 songs, sung in eight languages and sold more than 180million records.
His style revolutionized the classic French chanson style, creating his own “Aznavourian” genre: a mix of French soul music, blues, jazz, ballads, pop music and lyrical poetry.
After starting his career at the tender age of 9 – when he dropped out of school and started performing with his sister Aida in plays – he is still writing and releasing new songs and albums, touring the world and performing live.
Charles Aznavour made his UAE debut with a concert at Dubai World Trade Centre on Friday, organized by Alliance Française Dubai, as part of Dubai Classics.
What keeps him going after all these years?
“My love for life,” he said, in an exclusive interview with The National. “I am very lucky to have found my vocation and met interesting people who have fuelled and nourished my curiosity.
“I was able to lead this life because I was born and raised in an artistic family with few means but rich with love and support. “
Last month, he topped People With Money magazine’s list of the highest-paid singers of 2015, with an estimated $46 million in combined earnings.
He is often described as “France’s Frank Sinatra”. He teamed up with the American legend in 1993 for a duet on You Make Me Feel So Young.
Just a tiny sample of this prolific artist’s French hits include: La Bohème(1965), his signature song; his first hit Sur Ma Vie (1956); Tu t’laisses aller(1960); Il faut savoir (1961); Les comédiens (1962); La mamma (1963); Et pourtant (1963); Hier encore (1964); For Me Formidable (1964); Que c’est triste Venise (1964); Emmenez-moi (1967) and et Désormais (1969).
His signature tracks in English are 1970s hits She, which has been covered by artists including Bryan Ferry, Il Divo and Elvis Costello, and was the theme song for the 1999 film Julia Roberts movie Notting Hill; and The Old Fashioned Way, which was also recorded by artists as diverse as Fred Astaire and Shirley Bassey.
As well as Sinatra, he has collaborated with musical greats including Julio Iglesias, Andrea Bocelli, Elton John, Liza Minnelli and Placido Domingo.
Known for his powerful stage presence and his charisma, Aznavour says a sense of humour has proved important through the years.
“Humour plays an important role in my life because it enables me to face even the most difficult of situations,” he says.
Inspired as a child by another legend, Maurice Chevalier, and having worked with Édith Piaf, whose song La Vie en rose has become a national treasure for France, it is fitting that as the last surviving artist from the golden age of entertainment, he has have earned a seat next to them.
“I have had a beautiful life, for a son of an immigrant,” he says. “I’m grateful for what life has given me. Even though I had to work very hard in my career, working makes me happy. The memories of my family and my childhood are my favourite ones.”
Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris on May 22, 1924, to an artistic father and mother who had fled the Armenian genocide. The family, including older sister Aida, intended to travel to the United States but a visa never came.
Aznavour was dubbed “Charles” by a hospital nurse who couldn’t pronounce his name – and it stuck. His parents settled in Paris and opened a small Armenian restaurant, Le Caucase, to which they would invite Hungarian orchestras, and offer free lunches to the less fortunate and friends.
The family’s struggle with poverty, and life on the road as a young performer during the second world war – when his father hid several Armenian and Russian Jewish immigrants from the German Army – made their way into his songs.
“Like most Orientals, we had a very united family,” he says. “I loved my youth, even if it was sometimes a bit harsh – but we could always count on our family and on all the immigrants that were around us.
“We were genuinely happy and it had nothing to do with money or power. We were all just thankful to be alive and together in France.”
Married three times, with six children, Aznavour values his privacy.
“One of the most painful memories I have is losing my son, Patrick, in the 70s,” he says. “I don’t like to talk about it a lot and I try to keep my private life to myself.”
Besides being an artist, he is also a diplomat and a humanitarian, with a special focus on Armenia, “the country of my soul and roots”.
“My culture has traces of Armenian culture but the country of my heart and of my language is France,” he says. “I hope Armenia will finally live in peace and that all the problems will be resolved with its borders. We are all cousins and brothers, when you think about it, and it is only politics and religion that separate us.”
In 1975 Aznavour, wrote the ballad Ils sont tombés to mark the 60th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. In 1988, he launched a fund-raising campaign to help his stricken homeland after an earthquake killed 50,000 people. Unesco appointed him as their permanent ambassador to Armenia. In 2008 he was given Armenian citizenship and, a year later, he accepted the position as Ambassador of Armenia to Switzerland.
“I am not trying to boast but I have to admit that for an uneducated son of an immigrant, I could have done far worse,” he says.
His most recent album was last year’s Encores, which included tracks about his childhood, Piaf and a tribute to the French wartime resistance movement. But do not ask him to rank it against any of his previous work.
“I think of my songs as my own children, so I have no favourites,” he says. “I love them all equally the same – but there are a few songs that I am especially proud of.
“Some of them are not very well known. I could, perhaps, mention L’instant Present because it’s about the present moment, which is challenging to write about. I also like the songs on my last album, Encores, because they are recent – but really I like think of all of them as my babies.”
And if he could change anything, what would it be?
“For myself, I already had a nose job 60 years ago,” he says. “For the world around me, I know it seems a bit cheesy but if people could live together in peace and harmony that would be great.”
– An elderly Armenian couple in Istanbul were victims of a home invasion robbery, but the manner in which they were found indicates that they were targeted because they were Armenian.
Seta Demirci, 79, and her husband Hagop, 85, were discovered in their apartment gagged and tied by pig skin rope, an act usually “reserved for infidels,” as Armenians are often referred to in Turkey. Hagop Demirci was pronounced dead due to strangulation, while Seta Demirci was rushed to the hospital, according to a report by the news site, which covered the incident in Turkish.
The site reported that the couple’s housekeeper, knocking on the door and not receiving a response, alerted their nephew, who lives nearby, and who opened the apartment door to find the two bound and gagged and their valuables stolen. The couple’s apartment is located near Gezi Park in Istanbul.
Elderly Armenians have been a target of violence in Istanbul and the surrounding suburbs recently.
Photo: Sputnik/Igor Zarembo
Russia’s state security service says it has detained seven people in the country’s Ural mountain region on suspicion of terrorist activities, the Associated Press reports.
The country’s Federal Security Service announced on Monday that the suspects, detained in the regional capital Yekaterinburg, were believed to be plotting to carry out terrorist attacks in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ural region.
Law enforcement officials said they uncovered a laboratory for manufacturing explosives and that members of the group were planning to journey to Syria to fight with the Islamic State group.
According to the press release published on the security service’s website, the suspects included Russian citizens and citizens of Central Asia states.
The head of the group has been identified as coming from a terrorist group in Turkey, Sputnik News reported. After conducting terrorist acts in Russia, the group was to head to Syria to join the Islamic State.
Turkish aid workers have been setting up tents and distributing supplies for thousands of new Syrian refugees kept from entering Turkey at the border, the BBC reports.
Some 35,000 people fled a Syrian government offensive in the Aleppo area last week, trying to enter Turkey’s Kilis border region.
But Turkey has so far closed the border to most of them despite appeals by EU leaders to let them cross.
The country already shelters more than 2.5 million refugees from Syria’s war.
Many Syrians have gone on to seek asylum in the EU and made up the largest group among more than one million refugees and other migrants who entered illegally last year, mainly by sea from Turkey.
One of the oldest churches in the world has been evacuated after coming under fire and being damaged in clashes between the Turkish police and the Kurdish guerrilla group, the PKK, reports.
The third century St Mary’s Assyrian Church in Sur, the old district of the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, has been at the centre of fighting which has worsened since the end of a ceasefire last summer.
The priest, Father Yusuf Akbulut, said he had ordered his congregation to leave and taken his own children to safety, but had tried to stay put in his lodgings in the church compound.
But after rocket-propelled grenades had hit the building and broken its doors, he had been forced to flee carrying a white flag.
“We were being shelled by tanks and rocket launchers and we felt like the house was going to collapse on us,” he told The Telegraph. “Our water was cut, the electricity was cut. Then we called the police.
“They told us it was a dangerous area and they could not get there. ‘You should try to save yourselves,’ they said. So my wife and I took white flags and escaped from the area.”
For much of its 1,800-year history, St Mary’s was a part of the extraordinary patchwork of religions and sects that made up the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
Until 100 years ago Diyarbakir was a mixture of Kurdish Sunni Muslims, Turks, Armenians – who were largely Orthodox Christians – and Assyrians, mostly members of the Syriac Orthodox church.
During the First World War, the Ottoman authorities turned on its Christian minorities, with hundreds of thousands killed in the Armenian genocide.
However, Assyrians were also killed and driven out in large numbers. Fr Akbulut last year described to The Telegraph how he had been arrested as late as 2000 for referring publicly to the killings of his community.
There are now around 25,000 Assyrians still living in Turkey, but just 40 in Diyarbakir, the epicentre of the genocide.
“The Assyrians have always suffered a great deal and they have always been the oppressed community,” Fr Akbulut said. “Due to what is going on in Sur, everybody is trying to save their possessions and they are leaving for other places.
“Some go to leave with their relatives, some to other places, some rent houses. Everybody is leaving for somewhere else.”
More than 40,000 people are estimated to have died in a three decade-long war between the Turkish authorities and the leftist PKK, who are demanding more autonomy for the Kurds.
Photo: Reuters/Faisal Al Nasser/Files
Moscow is monitoring how the situation unfolds regarding the possible deployment of Saudi military forces to Syria, Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov said Friday, reports.
Earlier in the day, the Guardian newspaper reported that Saudi Arabia could send thousands of ground forces to Syria, most likely in coordination with Turkey, in order to take part in the fight against ISIS.
“Naturally, we are carefully monitoring the situation,” Peskov said.
He added that the Kremlin currently does not have any facts confirming the validity of the reports on the Saudi plans.
Moscow has been conducting air strikes against IS and Nusra Front targets in Syria since September 30, at Damascus’ request.
is privileged to stand at the forefront in establishing the Armenian Genocide as a distinct focus of doctoral study, setting a landmark on Jan. 5, when Khatchig Mouradian became the first student to complete a Ph.D. in Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Mouradian defended his dissertation, Genocide and Humanitarian Assistance in Ottoman Syria (1915-1917), before Professors Taner Akҫam and Debórah Dwork, who served as co-directors of his dissertation committee. Raymond Kévorkian, Director of the Nubarian Library in Paris, served as the third committee member.
“This graduation marks a historic turning point in Armenian Genocide research,” Akçam said during a celebration to honor Mouradian, held Jan. 29 in the Strassler Center’s Rose Library.
“He is not only the first Doctor of our Armenian Genocide track but also the first doctorate in North America after so many years of silence in the field.”
The event also celebrated Asya Darbinyan, a third-year doctoral student who defended the prospectus of her dissertation, Russian Response to the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarian Assistance for Armenian Refugees on the Caucasus Frontline of WW1 (1914-1917).
Dwork, director of the Strassler Center, commented on both milestones: “The award of the first Ph.D. in Armenian Genocide Studies is a huge step forward in the field. Happily, the first recipient is followed by a robust pipeline of students pursuing groundbreaking dissertation projects. The Armenian Genocide continues to be beset by deniers. These young scholars’ research shows how risible such arguments are. Scholarship trumps propaganda.”
Mouradian is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University and is the coordinator the Armenian Genocide Program at Rutgers’ Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR). He teaches courses on imperialism, mass violence, and concentration camps in the history and sociology departments at Rutgers. Mouradian is also an adjunct professor in the philosophy and urban studies departments atWorcester State University, where he teaches courses on urban space and conflict in the Middle East, genocide, collective memory, and human rights.
Mouradian was the editor of the Armenian Weekly from 2007-2014. The recipient of numerous awards, Mouradian held the Gulbenkian Armenian Studies research fellowship in 2014 to study the Armenian community in China in the 20th century. The Organization of Istanbul Armenians awarded him the first Hrant Dink Freedom and Justice Medal in 2014.
Carolyn Mugar and her late husband John O’Connor ’78, who was a Clark University trustee, donated the first-ever endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History and Armenian Genocide Studies at any university. They challenged others to join them in supporting this innovative professorship named in honor of Carolyn’s parents Stephen and Marian Mugar, as well as Robert Aram ’52 and Marianne Kaloosdian. Clark alumnus Robert Kaloosdian, a lawyer in Watertown, MA, and former president of the Washington, D.C.-based Armenian National Institute, is a leader in Armenian affairs. In 2002, the Kaloosdian Mugar Chair was established in the History Department and as a constituent member of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
“The award of the first Ph.D. in Armenian Genocide Studies is a huge step forward in the field. Happily, the first recipient is followed by a robust pipeline of students pursuing groundbreaking dissertation projects. The Armenian Genocide continues to be beset by deniers. These young scholars’ research shows how risible such arguments are. Scholarship trumps propaganda.” ~ Debórah Dwork
Taner Akçam joined Clark University as Kaloosdian/Mugar Professor in fall 2008. A leading genocide scholar and an authority in the history of political violence and torture in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey, Akçam is the first scholar of Turkish origin to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and to publish groundbreaking research on this topic.
Clark University is committed to scholarship and inquiry that addresses social and human imperatives on a global basis, and has played a prominent role in the development of several academic disciplines, including psychology, geography and interdisciplinary environmental studies. The pioneering Strassler Center program in Armenian Genocide Studies embodies the University’s history of academic innovation.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin held a meeting with the EU Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia Herbert Salber.
The parties discussed the situation in the South Caucasus in the context of the complex international situation, fight against terrorism and threats to security and stability in the region.
Special attention was paid to the situation at the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The interlocutors exchanged views on the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
Pope Francis will hold a historic first meeting with Patriarch Kirill, the head of Russian Orthodox Church, in Cuba next week, the BBC reports.
The Russian Orthodox Church said the “persecution of Christians” would be the central theme of the meeting.
Pope Francis will stop over in Cuba on his way to Mexico.
It is the first meeting of its kind since a schism between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity emerged in the 11th Century.
The meeting is due to take place at Havana airport, where the two leaders will sign a joint declaration.
Patriarch Kirill is due in Cuba for an official visit at the same time as Pope Francis’ stopover in Havana.
In a joint statement, the two churches said the meeting would “mark an important stage in relations between the two churches”.
They invited ” all Christians to pray fervently for God to bless this meeting, that it may bear good fruits.”
Since becoming Pope in 2013, Pope Francis has called for better relations between the different branches of Christianity.