Steven A. Cook
Every year at Thanksgiving, my family and I share with each other something for which we are thankful. It sounds somewhat hokey, which it is, but it is also heartwarming and beautiful. This year, when it is my turn, I will declare that I am thankful for New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Turkey — the country, not the bird.
Jennifer M. Dixon
On April 24th last year, President Biden officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. Last year’s announcement constituted an important reversal of decades of US complicity in Turkey’s denial of the Genocide. In the wake of Biden’s statement, commentators highlighted its importance in terms of what it said about the state (read: nadir) of US-Turkish relations and about Biden’s commitment to a moral foreign policy. While such analyses captured central factors behind this long-resisted official acknowledgment, its most important function was to end the US’ own denial of the Armenian Genocide.
I.B.Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, has announced the publication of the inaugural book in the Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World series by Dr. Vartan Matiossian titled The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and ‘Medz Yeghern’.
Ofer Aderet
In the summer of 1982, Israel's Foreign Ministry set to work on a special mission. “We continue to spare no effort on this issue, which is currently a central one on our agenda,” an internal ministry document says of the mission. “We shall leave no stone unturned, whether or not this thing succeeds,” another document says. “Intensive treatment that encompasses both institutions and public figures in Israel and abroad… feverish and tireless efforts… at the highest diplomatic levels,” other documents add.
The
mission that so occupied the Foreign Ministry personnel 40 years ago
had nothing to do with the First Lebanon War, which had just begun, but
with another much larger and deadlier war: the Armenian genocide in
1915, during which an estimated 1.5 million people were killed by the
forces of the Ottoman Empire.
Harout Ekmanian
It is human nature, that one turns to friends and dear ones in difficult times. For Armenians who built friendships with Turkish colleagues in civil society, art, journalism, academia and other related fields, these friends were out of sight for the 44-day long aggression and ethnic cleansing against their kin in Artsakh. They were nowhere to be found to counter the State mandated hate propaganda against Armenians. They weren’t even able to send a couple of comforting words let alone any public action.
Talin Suciyan
Herkan. She had one of those special names I had never heard before… It must be one of those old Armenian names, like the ones which I had only come across in the mid-19th century archival documents. She was the mother of four children and my admiration of her started when I got to know her one and only daughter. I had first met her daughter more than 25 years ago, when I was 16 and she was 48. We lost track of each other until reconnecting recently all these years later. I had not remembered her name, I had not remembered where I first met her, but I remembered how much I loved her. A heart full of love, which she inherited from her mother Fatma-Herkan. Now on the occasion of the 8th of March, I write to bring Herkan’s legacy into the present, as it whispers a long-lost song into our ears, one that we all recognize.
The end to active combat in the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war is far from the end of the war on a key victim: the rich and irreplaceable cultural heritage of Artsakh, as the republic is known to Armenians.
Only two years ago, Armenian art, history, and culture were celebrated by some of the world’s most acclaimed cultural institutions. Armenia! at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a major international exhibition of Armenian medieval art. The wonders on display broke attendance records, earned critical praise, and demonstrated the major contributions of Armenians to world civilization. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated Armenian artistic and cultural traditions during its annual interactive exposition on the National Mall in Washington DC, drawing record numbers. That same year, the global consortium of French-speaking nations gathered in Armenia’s capital of Yerevan for the Summit of the Francophonie, hosting hundreds of world leaders, visitors and the international media.
Now, just two short years later, the world looks away as Armenian art, architecture, and history are being destroyed. On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military attack on the Republic of Artsakh. Turkey, which continues to deny its genocidal project of the annihilation of the Armenian people perpetrated in 1915-1922 in their historical homeland, has lent its full political and military support to Azerbaijan in this latest act of aggression.
Avedis Hadjian
With hundreds dead on both sides, the war between Armenian and Azeri forces in Karabakh — in Armenian, Artsakh — a mountainous enclave in the Southern Caucasus, is now anything but ‘frozen’, as it has long been described. A tenuous ceasefire had held since 1994, when the population of this historically Armenian region secured its de facto independence, in close cooperation with the Republic of Armenia. Peace has mostly prevailed since then, except for a four-day war in 2016 and a major flare-up last July.
The immediate cause of the fighting that broke out on 27 September is Azerbaijan’s attempt to reclaim territory that was within its borders during the Soviet period. After the Caucasian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party initially recognised Karabakh’s right to autonomy and promising it to Armenia following the republic’s sovietisation in 1920, Joseph Stalin, then commissar of nationalities of the Soviet Union, intervened, and the Soviets gave Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 1921. Armenians argue that this decision flies in the face of its history of continuous autonomy under Armenian princes since at least the eighth century and, more importantly, its population being more than 90% Armenian. In 1923, the Soviet government proclaimed the enclave an autonomous region within the Socialist Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
Uzay Bulut
Since September 27, Azerbaijan has launched a major offensive against the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, located in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan has since indiscriminately bombed civilians, with the direct support it receives from Turkey, who recruited jihadists from Syria and elsewhere.
The Israeli government, it seems, continues to sell weapons to Azerbaijan during the height of this war. In an open letter on October 5, a group of academics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called upon the Israeli government to immediately cease these arms sales. The letter reads, in part:
“From a reading of independent accounts and analysis we have concluded that this outbreak of violence in the last few days is due solely to aggression of the Republic of Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey and backed up by fighters from elsewhere in the region.”
