Genocide

Armenians have been going from one crisis to the next, from genocide, deportation, armed resistance, revolutions, responding to earthquakes, blockade, and of course to the urgency of the problems that need to be addressed today. The short-sighted approach for profits now, has derailed the people and the leadership in Armenia from setting priorities that should have used domestic resources, and foreign aid with strategies for success to invest with purpose into the future of the nation....

Summary While the American mainstream media was busy discussing the fly on Mike Pence’s head during Vice Presidential Debate, the Armenian-Turkish conflict entered the second week of violence across the entire line of contact (LoC) between the Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, and many regional and extra-regional powers took a neutral to stand and watch attentively from the sidelines. An attempt by Azerbaijani-Turkish and ISIS-linked formations to encircle Artsakh by taking over its strategic communication highways with the Republic of Armenia while carrying out devastating blows against Artsakh’s Defense Army in a new and enhanced blitzkrieg strategy has failed dramatically....

Three weeks ago, the western region of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) announced that it will be closing its AGBU Vatche and Tamar Manoukian High School in Pasadena, California. A flurry of protests and protestations flooded the public Armenian-American square, unanimously condemning the decision and imploring AGBU to reconsider. Unfortunately, many issues central to the Diaspora’s existence in the West that were inherent to the decision to close the school and were unexpectedly thrust into the limelight went largely ignored....

We are now less than a year away from the 2012 elections and the campaign trail is already heating up. The race for the white house has catapulted various GOP candidates to the top of the mountain, only to see them tumble from its peak. So far we have seen some historic debate gaffes, incredibly bold policy proposals and unorthodox candidates try to distinguish themselves from each other, all in an effort to be the anti-Romney; the presumptive GOP nominee....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now. Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership. In this global and so contracted century of ours, where resources and rights often compete for precedence, domestic demeanor and foreign affairs form part of one and the same policy agenda....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA That an Armenian repatriate, American-born into a legacy of remembrance inherited from a line of survivors of genocide nearly a century ago, feels compelled to entitle his thoughts with a focus on Turkey– and not Armenia– reveals a larger problem, a gaping wound, and an imperative for closure long overdue on both sides of history’s tragic divide. The new Armenia, independent of its longstanding statelessness since 1991, is my everyday life, as are the yearnings of my fellow citizens for their daily dignity, true democracy, the rule of law, and an empowering end to sham elections and the corruption, arrogance and unaccountability of power....

When I attended former Turkish Ambassador Sukru Elekdag’s denialist talk at Columbia University this spring, I was struck by one of the comments by an audience member. Rather than engage Elekdag in a false debate, the gentleman reminded the audience that Poland is only just now undergoing a painful soul-searching about the roles played by ordinary Poles in the implementation of the Final Solution. He cited the controversy surrounding the publication of Jan T....

Yerevan, Armenia On October 27th, 1999 five gunmen broke into the chamber of the National Assembly of Armenia during the weekly session of parliamentary inquiries addressed to the Government and opened fire. Within seconds they had killed the Prime Minister of Armenia as well as the Chairman of the Parliament, his two deputies and 4 other members of the Parliament and the Government, whose nearly total membership was present at the session....

Almost every day now media outlets report on the continuous multinational effort to forge out a final peace settlement in the nine year-old conflict between the government of Azerbaijan and the people of the de- facto independent Nagorno Karabakh Republic-Artsakh. Their reports generally contain a brief on a recent round of talks, where parties would once again reiterate their incompatible positions, with mediators privately promising a diplomatic breakthrough soon. Over the years such reports have become enveloped in the usual repetition of grim statistics: tallies numbering the dead and refugees, and areas occupied....