Joe Biden made his decisions.

Now I’m making mine.

I will be voting “uncommitted” in Michigan’s February 27 Democratic presidential primary, because I simply cannot vote for the man who armed Azerbaijan’s genocide of Artsakh’s indigenous Armenians. My ballot will represent my protest against his complicity in this crime and his utter abandonment of Armenians – in Artsakh, across Armenia and around the world. His actions run counter to his own campaign statements and, more importantly, to our basic values as a nation – our shared humanity. 

I will be casting my “uncommitted” vote along with my fellow Armenians and countless others who share in our outrage over Biden’s genocidal policies. Together, we will send a message that crimes come with costs, and enabling ethnic cleansing is not “business-as-usual.” To cast a vote for Biden is to endorse his actions. To support him as the lesser of two evils is to accept evil. I will not do that.

I am fortunate to live in the Wolverine State, a must-win political battleground in the 2024 presidential contest. If our votes tip the scale against Biden’s re-election, it will send a powerful message that America stands against genocide, that our people will not allow our government to tolerate such crimes. Not in our name.

Biden’s genocidal record is as reckless as it is irresponsible:

– Biden materially armed and morally emboldened Azerbaijan’s genocide of Artsakh.

– Biden has refused to condemn Azerbaijan’s crimes. He conducts business-as-usual with its genocidal government, and he refuses to enforce sanctions against its leaders.

– Biden sent zero aid to Artsakh prior to Azerbaijan’s blockade and has sent almost no aid to the refugees created by Azerbaijan’s aggression.

– Biden blocked United Nations initiatives to condemn Azerbaijan and has, post-genocide, failed to lead, introduce or even support U.N. resolutions to enable the safe return of Armenians to Artsakh under an international mandate. 

– Biden has opposed each and every congressional measure aimed at holding Azerbaijan accountable, supporting Artsakh refugees or securing the release of Armenian POWs.

– Add to this that Biden just approved the sale of F-16s to Turkey, even though Turkey illegally deployed these advanced fighters to Azerbaijan during its 2020 attack.

For all these reasons, and many others, I invite my fellow Michiganders to join me in voting “uncommitted” on February 27.

In my previous articles delving into photographs from the ARF Archives, we saw some familiar and unfamiliar visuals from our history and culture over the past century and more. One clear takeaway is that the Armenian people have never lived in a vacuum. Empires have passed over the lands where Armenians have lived. Large-scale conflicts have reverberated among the Armenian people, not least of which the Genocide during the First World War. Armenians themselves have also participated in and helped shape fashions and trends around them – including, not coincidentally, the spread of photography in the Middle East.

Unsurprisingly, then, there are subjects among the photographs in the archives outside of exclusively Armenian circles.

ARF Photo Archives – Box 1, Photo 15

For example, here we have a group photo of Turkish military personnel. Below, more specifically, is one Mustafa Vefa Bey who, it says on the back of the photo, was a spy assassinated in Tiflis (Tbilisi).

ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 40

The picture below is a bit more mysterious, as it is merely labeled “Turkish Consul” in Armenian on the back – “Turkish Consul.”

ARF Photo Archives – Box 3, Photo 186

This picture does not match the stereotypical visualizations of Turks in Armenian discourse (for which, see the images above). There is something domestic and avuncular about this man, his dog and a granddaughter, perhaps, on a trike.

There are also a number of photographs with Kurdish themes in the collection – many more than Turkish ones. The ARF photo archives reflect a turbulent time in the 1920s and 1930s after the Genocide and the establishment of the USSR and the Republic of Turkey, when Kurdish and Armenian groups collaborated in armed movements. The most significant such uprising was the Ararat Rebellion in the late 1920s, led by the Khoyboun (Xoybûn) party. Below are two of its members.

ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 47

Ardashes Mouradian, in the picture below, was an ARF agent within that group. He went by Zeynal or Ziylan Bey, and was eventually abducted across the border into the USSR and probably killed on the orders of the Soviet leadership.

ARF Photo Archives – Box 6, Photo 169

Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji also features in a couple of photographs in the collection.

ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 37

He was a Kurdish leader in uprisings against British rule in the north of newly-established Iraq in the 1920s. It is not clearly marked in the images, however, what the Armenian or specifically ARF connection might have been with his activities.

This series of brief articles is meant above all to invite you to visit arfarchives.org/photograph. Click around on the website. You might find a fascinating page from your family history or see directly the ups and downs of the Armenian nation in the last hundred-plus years.

The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) is pleased to introduce its new advisory board members: Shushan Avagyan, Susan Barba and Anahit Ghazaryan.

Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is the author of two experimental novels Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani kanayq (2014), and co-author, with the Queering Yerevan Collective, of Queered: What’s to Be Done with X-Centric Art (2011). She has translated several classics of the early Soviet avant-garde into English, including A Hunt for Optimism, The Hamburg Score, On the Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive Press) and Art and Production by Boris Arvatov (Pluto Press). She revived Shushanik Kurghinian’s work by translating and publishing the bilingual edition I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (AIWA Press). Her articles, translations and interviews have appeared in Contemporary Women’s Writing, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Asymptote, InTranslation, The International Literary Quarterly, Music and Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.

Avagyan grew up in Soviet Armenia and lived in Zambia and Ethiopia with her parents who taught there as part of the Soviet Teach Abroad Program. After graduating from Khachik Dashtents School in Yerevan, she went to study at the Melkonian Educational Institute in Nicosia, Cyprus. She received her undergraduate degree in studio art with a focus on printmaking and book arts from Cedar Crest College, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in English studies from Illinois State University. She lives in Yerevan and teaches at the American University of Armenia, where she coordinates the Certificate in Translation program.

Susan Barba is the author of Fair Sun, winner of the Anahid Literary Award and the Minas & Kohar Tölölyan Prize, and geode, a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is a co-editor, with Victoria Rowe, of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian, and the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic and elsewhere, and her poems have been translated into Armenian, German, Swedish and Romanian. She earned her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. She works as a senior editor for New York Review Books. Learn more by visiting www.susanbarba.net

Anahit Ghazaryan is a writer, visual artist and researcher from Yerevan, Armenia. In the last several years, Ghazaryan has worked with text, audio and visual materials, including photography, and most recently with documentary theater play and film. Ghazaryan was the co-producer of the Akanjogh Podcast (2019-2021), the first podcast on feminism in Armenia. Additionally, Ghazaryan has co-authored two books. The first book, Border-play | The Armenian and the Armenian, is a discussion about the relationship between two language backgrounds, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian. Her second book Dark Matter: Notes on War came out in November 2022 and chronicles a painful, honest conversation between two friends, providing an unfiltered perspective on the personal impacts of war.

Ghazaryan has been researching the life and work of Maryam Shahinyan (1911-1996), the first woman professional studio photographer in the Republic of Turkey, for more than six years. In 2021, she curated an exhibition of Shahinyan’s original photos that she found and collected during her time in Istanbul at the 4Plus Documentary Photography Center in Yerevan. In 2022, she completed the production of “Foto Galatasaray,” a full-length documentary on Shahinyan’s life and work. The film is currently in post-production. In 2023, Ghazaryan, as a playwright, created a Documentary Performance titled “Planned Outage,” delving into the nostalgic childhood memories of those born after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Currently, she is working on a new documentary performance exploring dating culture in Armenia.

IALA supports and celebrates writers by fostering the development and distribution of Armenian literature in the English language. Founded in 2021, IALA develops emerging Armenian writers, supports established authors, promotes Armenian literature and fosters intercultural exchange. IALA’s annual programs include grants in translation and creative writing, a mentorship program for emerging writers and the Young Armenian Poets Awards, which lifts up the next generation of Armenian writers. You can learn more on www.armenianliterary.org.

The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center are pleased to invite you to the second event of their 2024 reading series, Literary Lights, featuring Ariel Djanikian, author of the Barnes & Noble October 2023 book selection, The Prospectors. Djanikian will be joined by Aline Ohanesian, author of the critically acclaimed novel, Orhan’s Inheritance. The event will take place virtually on March 9, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific | 1:00 p.m. Eastern | 10:00 p.m. Armenia time. Register here.

Bringing the Klondike and turn-of-the-century California to vivid life, Djanikian weaves an ambitious narrative of claiming the American Dream and its rippling effects across generations. Sweeping and awe-inspiring, The Prospectors is an unforgettable story of family loyalties that interrogates the often-overlooked hostilities and inequities born during the Gold Rush era. Learn more about the novel.

Ariel Djanikian was born in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the previous recipient of a Fulbright grant, Meijer Fellowship, Cowden Award and Hopwood Award. She is the author of the novel The Office of Mercy, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Millions and The Rumpus. She currently lives near D.C. with her husband and children and teaches fiction writing at Georgetown University.Aline Ohanesian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Orhan’s Inheritance, which was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, an April 2014 Indie Next pick and an Amazon Top 25 pick for 2015. The novel was also a finalist for the PEN Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction and has been translated into 13 languages. She lives and writes in San Juan Capistrano, California with her husband and two young sons.

Literary Lights 2024 is a monthly reading series organized by IALA, NAASR and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event, held online, will feature a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Keep an eye on our website and socials for the exact dates of each event. Read along with the series by purchasing titles from the IALA Bookstore or the NAASR Bookstore.