Lebanon's short-lived venture into outer space

Sam Brennan

 

“Back in the 1940s [when I was a child in Jerusalem], schools were often closed due to regional conflicts,” Manoug Manougian, former head of the Lebanese Rocket Society (LRS), told Al-Monitor. “To entertain myself, I read science fiction books.… It was Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ that was the genesis of my fascination with space exploration.”

Even in Manougian’s youth, his passion for space travel and the pursuit of knowledge were closely tied to the politics of the time. This relationship would see him create, and then leave, the Lebanese space program in the 1960s. He had been attracted to the program's potential for groundbreaking technological feats, but repelled by the government's increasingly militaristic goals.

Before all that, Manougian had landed a job teaching mathematics and physics at Beirut’s Haigazian College in 1960, a time when the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. It was also a time when some Middle Eastern states, among them Egypt and Israel, were scrambling to develop militarized rocket technology.

A Deplorable Attack to Silence a Colleague

Ara Khachatourian

 

I am trying to wrap my head around news that my colleague, Raffi Doudaklian, with whom I have worked side-by-side at Asbarez for years during the heyday of the Artsakh war, the early days of our independent republic and whose column we published in our newspaper, was brutally beaten by unknown assailants in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon earlier this week.

Doudaklian is now executive director of the Tufenkian Foundation,  which focuses on humanitarian efforts in Artsakh, border villages and of late providing housing for wounded soldiers. He was visiting Lebanon last weekend, accompanied by the Artsakh director of Tufenkian on foundation business.

Lebanon's new women's affairs minister fails to charm

Florence Massena

 

Since the new year, several Lebanese rights groups have been demanding that the government established by Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Dec. 18 implement a quota of 30% of seats for women in the May parliamentary elections. Women's rights organizations had expressed dissatisfaction over the appointment of a man to head the new Ministry for Women's Affairs, Jean Ogasapian.

Hariri's newly appointed government is composed of 29 men and one woman, and a ministry for women's affairs was implemented for the first time in Lebanon. Led by Ogasapian, a parliamentarian from the Future Movement and consultant for private and public institutions on social cohesion and women's empowerment, this ministry will have the task of advocating for new laws and amendments favorable to the advancement of women in Lebanese society.

Lebanon: Bird’s Nest Orphanage Refutes Erroneous Press Reports

Last week, articles appearing in various Lebanese press outlets, in several languages, reported that the historic Bird’s Nest (Թռչնոց բոյն) Orphanage was being sold to make room for a beach-front development.

One of the last vestiges of the Armenian genocide, the Bird’s Nest facility, which was run by the efforts of Near East Relief and founded by Danish missionary Maria Jacobson, was a refuge for orphans who survived the genocide and today continues to operate as a safe haven for underprivileged children under the auspices of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia,

The Child of a Refugee

Jennifer Manoukian

The following story was written by Siran Seza in April 1946. Seza was the penname of Siranoush Zarifian, a Lebanese-Armenian writer born in Constantinople in 1903. She is best known for founding the Beirut-based feminist journal The Young Armenian Woman (Երիտասարդ Հայուհի) in 1932.

After attending Armenian, French and American schools as a child, Seza graduated from the American College for Girls in Constantinople in 1919. Her grasp of English allowed her to continue her education in the United States. She moved to New York in the late 1920’s to pursue a master’s degree in literature and journalism at Columbia University. After graduating in 1931, she settled in Beirut where she established herself as a leader in the Lebanese-Armenian intellectual community until her death in 1973.

A Bold New Plan: Interview with Razmik Panossian

 Nanore Barsoumian

As Diasporan Armenian organizations struggle to shift their focus to better accommodate the needs facing Armenians worldwide—both in the independent republics, as well as in communities faced with renewed challenges—the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation recently drafted a bold five-year plan of action that it hopes will “create a viable future for the Armenian people.” Mindful of the challenges ahead, the foundation’s director of Armenian communities, Razmik Panossian, discussed the plan in a Skype interview with the Armenian Weekly.

The Exodus of Musa Dagh Armenians: From the Sanjak of Alexandretta to Anjar, Lebanon

Vahram Shemmasian

 



The Sanjak of Alexandretta/Iskenderun was an autonomous province within Syria during the interwar years. Its inhabitants included a significant number of Armenian natives and refugees, among them the indigenous population of Musa Dagh near Antioch. A political crisis beginning in 1936 shook Sanjak society to its core, as winds of change from a French mandate to Turkish suzerainty increasingly caused panic. The turmoil grew to alarming proportions for the Arabs, Alawites, and Christians when a farcical “election” in the summer of 1938 installed a Turkish majority in the Sanjak’s legislature. A year later Turkey annexed the area. This was the final straw that compelled the overwhelming majority of Armenians, among other groups, to seek refuge in other parts of Syria as well as Lebanon, refusing to live under Turkish rule.

Losing the Core

Historian Hovann Simonian, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, has written a thought-provoking article in the July 26 issue of Hetq Online (http://www.hetq.am/), the publication of the Investigative Journalists of Armenia. Simonian argues that the fashionable topic of Turkified, Kurdified, and Islamicized Armenians deals around a few thousand people who may want or may not want to reintegrate into the fold of the Armenian nation. Meantime, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are on the verge of being lost, because of both diasporan processes and exodus from Armenia over the past two decades. The core of the Armenian is on danger (the demographic decline of Armenia, including Mountainous Gharabagh, is a case in point), while we play around third- or fourth-generation citizens of Turkey, for instance, who have started to realize that they have some kind of Armenian ancestry forcefully imposed on their identity after 1915. The challenge needs strategic thought at the level of leadership. Some passages from Simonian's essay are excerpted below: