How Gen Z Is Using TikTok to Save Western Armenian

 Ella Chakarian

Anelga Hajjar started posting videos on TikTok feeling the way most people do — like she was just talking into the void. In Chicago, where she works as an actor and writer, Hajjar, 23, said the majority of Armenians around her speak Eastern Armenian. She said she struggles to find other Western Armenian speakers herself. So, she turned to social media.

“I just wanted to have a space where I myself could speak Armenian, because there’s no one here I can speak Armenian [with],” said Hajjar.

Armenian-Turkish lawmaker targeted as Erdogan courts far-right

Amberin Zaman

 

Turkish prosecutors are seeking to lift the parliamentary immunity of an ethnic Armenian lawmaker in order to prosecute and potentially jail him, marking a further escalation of the government’s assault on free expression.

Prosecutors in Ankara have invoked Article 301, which criminalizes insulting the Turkish nation, and Article 299, which penalizes insulting the Turkish president, against Garo Paylan of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the largest pro-Kurdish bloc in the Turkish parliament.

Society for Armenian Studies Elects New Executive Officers

On Wednesday, December 6, 2017, the Society for Armenan Studies Executive Council held its first meeting. Executive Council officers were elected with Bedross Der Matossian (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) as the new SAS President. Also elected were Vice-President Vartan Matiossian (Armenian National Education Committee, NY); Secretary Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia University); Treasurer Vahe Sahakyan (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor); and advisors Alison Vacca (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Barlow Der Mugrdechian (California State University, Fresno), and Arpi Siyahian (NUtech Ventures-UNL).

Diyarbakir's Christians suffer in margins of Turkey-PKK war

Amberin Zaman

 

The peal of church bells mingles with children’s laughter. The Muslim call to prayer floats through the air. In the cobbled courtyard of the Surp Giragos Armenian Orthodox Church, young lovers sip wine and plan their weddings and lives. It’s a typical day in Sur, the ancient heart of the Kurds’ unofficial capital, Diyarbakir.
So it was until armed teenagers with the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the urban youth branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), declared “self rule” over large swathes of Sur, erecting barricades and digging trenches to keep state authorities out. The pattern is being repeated in towns and cities across the Kurdish-majority southeast, part of the escalating war between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK that was reignited following the collapse of a two-year cease-fire in July. Over 150 civilians, including dozens of children, have been killed, most of them by the security forces, claim rights advocates.
In Sur, Turkish special forces teams backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and armored personnel carriers have laid virtual siege to the district, which now lies in ruins.

The Blackberries of Kharpert

Eric Nazarian

 

It’s been an unspeakably bloody summer in the Middle and Near East. The awful war in Gaza, the beheading of James Foley, the sniper shootings on border villagers in Tavush, the endless mayhem and quagmire of Syria, the micro-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan inflamed by Aliyev’s Twitter threats to bomb Yerevan, and the Yezidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS that has created mushrooming humanitarian disasters all over the region.