Slate: An Armenian Tragedy

COVID-19, unsurprisingly, is rampant in Karabakh and new arrivals at the center get their temperature checked and a face mask if they don’t have one. Many of these people had spent days or weeks in crowded underground bomb shelters in Karabakh before fleeing to Armenia. I couldn’t help but notice that the mask-wearing rate was maybe 60 percent, but who can worry about an invisible threat like the coronavirus when a very tangible one is landing and exploding around you? Besides, it’s pretty much impossible to socially distance when you’re a refugee. [...]

Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation. [...]

Losing Karabakh would be not only a national defeat but also a blow, possibly fatal, to the hopes engendered by Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, in which the man-of-the-people ex-journalist Pashinyan improbably toppled the corrupt, strongman regime that had ruled the country for two decades. For Pashinyan to be the one to lose to Azerbaijan would threaten the country’s prospects for democracy.[...]

The Armenian media had, however, uncritically picked up the official line. This was partly due to a censorship regime: Shortly after fighting started, the government instituted martial law, one of the provisions of which was that it was illegal “to call into question the military capabilities” of the armed forces. But it also seemed to be partly a self-censorship in response to popular demand: There was no appetite for news about how Armenia was losing. [...]

This war had been coming for a long time. In the late 1980s, Armenians demanded that Karabakh—which was inside the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan—be transferred to Soviet Armenia. Interethnic violence broke out and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all-out war. By the time a cease-fire was signed in 1994, Armenia controlled a substantial part of Azerbaijani territory. That included Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as large swaths of other territory surrounding it, which Armenian forces captured during the fighting. Those territories had been almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, who all fled. In total, more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from this area, according to United Nations figures.

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The Red Line: Nagorno-Karabakh II (A Frozen Conflict Goes Hot)

 Like many of the ex-soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been part of the frozen conflict now since the early '90s, but Azerbaijan has spent the last few years building up a massive modern army. Baku has now used that army to engage in a full-scale war with Armenia in an attempt to recapture the land lost in 91. With the Armenians in full retreat and the Azeris moving into their old positions what will this mean for the region? Will Ankara or Moscow have the final say on the battlefield? We ask our expert panel. ALEX RAUFOGLU (Eurasia Journalist) NICK MUTCH (Byline Times) CAREY CAVANAUGH (Fmr US Ambassador) LAURENCE BROERS (Chatham House) More info on - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus Support the show at - www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast

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TLDR News: Why Missiles Are Being Fired: Armenia & Azerbaijan Conflict Explained (Nagorno-Karabakh)

 Over the last few weeks, tensions have been rising between Armenia and Azerbaijan with both sides firing missiles at one another. This is all over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and it's an issue which goes back decades. In this video we explain the history of the dispute, the current situation and if a ceasefire can really work.

The Guardian: The end of tourism?

What goes for cruises goes for most of the travel industry. For decades, a small number of environmentally minded reformists in the sector have tried to develop sustainable tourism that creates enduring employment while minimising the damage it does. But most hotel groups, tour operators and national tourism authorities – whatever their stated commitment to sustainable tourism – continue to prioritise the economies of scale that inevitably lead to more tourists paying less money and heaping more pressure on those same assets. Before the pandemic, industry experts were forecasting that international arrivals would rise by between 3% and 4% in 2020. Chinese travellers, the largest and fastest-growing cohort in world tourism, were expected to make 160m trips abroad, a 27% increase on the 2015 figure. [...]

Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity. [...]

According to the unapologetic elitism that informs the thinking of Van der Borg and other industry strategists, “high-impact, low-value” excursionists should be made less welcome than the affluent independent travellers who stay in a hotel, eat at neighbourhood restaurants and perhaps round off a day in the city’s lesser-known churches with a bellini at Harry’s Bar – like Truman Capote before them. At every step, runs this line of reasoning, “quality” tourists contribute to the city’s wellbeing through taxes, tips and human interaction. [...]

There is, of course, a financial cost to limiting tourism. As Fermín Villar, the president of the Friends of La Rambla, which represents the street’s residential and commercial interests, told the Guardian two years ago, “La Rambla is above all a business … every year more than 100 million people walk along this street. Imagine,” he enthused, “if each person spends only €1.” But mass tourism displaces other businesses, while the exodus of many creative and productive residents, as well as the stress placed on local infrastructure by visitors in such numbers, carry a cost of their own. Da Mosto told me that, in purely economic terms, Venice is a net loser from an industry that has set up shop on its premises and remits much of its revenues elsewhere. [...]

While in many places getting rid of tourists may be the only way to restore a healthy natural world, in countries where the tourist industry focuses on the environment, the opposite may be true. When I suggested to Karim Wissanji, Elewana’s CEO, that the best way to conserve Africa’s wildlife might be for human beings to migrate to the cities and leave them in peace, he retorted: “The future of our wildlife and their habitats are intrinsically linked to the future of the safari adventure industry.”

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The Red Line: Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia vs Azerbaijan)

In the South Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan lies an island of Armenians in the middle of Azerbaijan, two countries now firmly at war with each other. The Armenians have invaded and now occupy a quarter of the Azeris territory, but they assert are only doing to protect their people from the government who threatens to "cleanse" the pocket of Armenians.

A complicated conflict with Russia selling to both sides and Turkey (and therefore NATO) obligated to defend the other, this war is a classic situation of "the tail wagging the dog". Will we see another 1914 with a small mountain nation dragging the great powers into war, well for that we turn to our experts?

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euronews: LGBT rights in Europe: Some countries 'moving backwards on equality for first time in a decade'

An example provided was in Bulgaria, where the means for trans-people to change their names or gender markers in official documents has been removed.

In Serbia and Kosovo, the governments have failed to renew action plans on gender equality, the report said.

Hungary and Turkey had also regressed, with the latter doing so since 2015, due to each governments' "failure to uphold fundamental civil and political rights". [...]

Azerbaijan ranked the worst country in Europe for LGBT equality policies and laws, with Turkey and Armenia scoring second and third last respectively.

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Foreign Policy: In Ukraine’s Election, Pro-Russian Candidates Can’t Win

In the other 93 percent of Ukraine, however, things have not gone in the Kremlin’s favor. For Ukrainian politicians focused on consolidating their country’s independence and national identity—and that includes Poroshenko and most of the country’s political class—the status quo is tolerable. They would prefer to get Crimea and the Donbass back, yet Russia’s ongoing occupation has its benefits too. In seizing those areas, Russia chopped off the two regions with the least-developed sense of Ukrainian identity. And with them gone, no pro-Russian candidate could win a Ukrainian election. Long gone are the days when candidates such as former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was openly sympathetic to Russia, could win a majority of votes. [...]

It is less clear what Russia is getting from the status quo. The Kremlin has proved willing to bear the costs of occupation, paying for soldiers’ salaries, tolerating the collapse in Russia-Ukraine trade, and putting up with Western sanctions that will persist until Moscow agrees to return the Donbass to Ukrainian control. Why? There are several potential explanations. [...]

Yet Russia’s neighbors do not seem to have gotten the message. Just last year, Armenia tossed out its pro-Russian government, installing a younger crowd that wants better ties with Europe. Fearing blowback, the new Armenian government has insisted that its revolution is not anti-Russia. But the country is tacking closer to the West all the same. [...]

European Union membership for Ukraine is no more likely in the short term. But here, too, the Donbass is not the most important factor. More significant is the EU’s own expansion fatigue. Ukraine, with 44 million people, would be the most populous country to join the EU since Spain joined the then-European Communities in 1986. Integrating countries such as Romania and Bulgaria caused plenty of difficulty. Ukraine is significantly bigger, and it would be significantly harder to integrate. Existing member states aren’t eager to take on that challenge now.

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The New York Review of Books: Between Two Empires

The vibrant khachkars hit the eye in the exhibition’s rooms as the manuscripts do not. But they were both produced for the same reason. Behind each lies a heroic determination not to forget. Each manuscript volume carries a colophon—a final comment added by the scribe—that begs the reader to remember him (or her, for we know of at least one woman scribe) as well as the patron and family who had commissioned the book—usually a gospel or a hymnal. Like the khachkars, the manuscripts come from a society in which memory was not simply (as it often is with us) an attic of the mind—a neutral storage space of past events. Memory was loyalty, and forgetfulness was treason.

As we walk through the exhibition, somewhat bemused by the sheer beauty of bright color set on radiant gold leaf, we should remember the world revealed to us by those humble colophons. They were often written by scribes perpetually on the move across the uplands of what are now eastern Turkey and the Republic of Armenia (and on similar slopes in what is now northwestern Iran), against a landscape shaken by warfare and caught every year in the murderous grip of a mountain winter. As one scribe explains in a colophon to a copy of the gospels written in Erzincan, on the highway from Erzerum to Istanbul, which drops in a series of great slopes beside the quiet headwaters of the Euphrates: [...]

Hence a paradox: Armenia may have been the first country whose ruler converted to Christianity. King Trdat IV did so before 312, thereby preceding Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome. But this was a decision made at the royal court, and its principal beneficiaries were a narrow elite of Christian clergymen and unmarried ascetics. Armenian society continued to run on the richer, more explosive values of a pre-Christian society condensed in legend and song. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, one would have had to travel as far as the Atlantic, to early-Christian Ireland, or to the headwaters of the Nile in the mountain kingdom of Ethiopia, to find such a bracing combination of saints and warlords, of literate scholarship and tenacious loyalty to non-Christian oral traditions. We are looking at a remarkable phenomenon—the birth of an authentically non-Mediterranean Christianity. It was in this distinctive form that the Armenian Orthodox Church has survived up to the present day as a dynamic member of the wide spectrum of Christian communities known to us as the Eastern Orthodox Churches. [...]

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was like the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century—an overbrimming reservoir of military manpower and skilled adventurers of every kind. As soldiers, Armenians fought with equal vigor in the armies of Eastern Rome and Iran. They were not only military men. In the fourth century, the Armenian Prohaeresius was a leading professor of rhetoric in Athens. In the tenth century the engineer Trdat, who reinforced the supports for the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was also an Armenian. The most remarkable evidence of this constant drift of a hardy and enterprising mountain people into the Mediterranean world was found on an Egyptian papyrus. It was a conversational handbook in which Greek phrases were transcribed into Armenian letters, so that the owner could discuss, in perfect Greek, the pithy sayings of Diogenes the Cynic, among others.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Soviet Union’s Glimpse of an Architecture for the Many

Our journey begins in Slavutych, a town built to rehouse those displaced in the evacuation of Pripyat following the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Starting here is like starting nowhere — the city is built in the middle of a forest, seemingly untethered from any preexisting infrastructure, and everywhere — the eight districts of Slavutych are each designed by the architects and built by the builders of eight Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine.

Slavutych is a Soviet microcosm (or “Microcosmos,” as Hatherley terms it). It is a dream town, if not in its final manifestation, then certainly in its inception. It’s built in the woods; there are no variables; nothing to connect to, no forces behind its design other than the political will of the Soviet government and the aesthetic will of the architects. [...]

Slavutych is the perfect place to start our journey because it is an actually existing example of a fully realized ideal Soviet city plan. In examining the city’s built environment, we see an attempt to rectify what hadn’t worked elsewhere in the Soviet Union, whose cities were often criticized for being too inhuman, too cold, too prefabricated. In an attempt to “show off how good and reformed the system could be,” the designers of Slavutych doubled down on Soviet values but changed the way they manifested physically and aesthetically. Because it was a city-from-scratch, they were able to do so without resistance. [...]

Within these loose boundaries, Hatherley’s project becomes apparent. This book is not about Soviet architecture, though it certainly spends plenty of time describing it. Rather, it’s about what architecture reveals about Soviet history and the process of “de-communization” that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.[...]

Outside of Slavutych, though, with more variables and much less controlled conditions, the architecture, as well as its history, tend to be much more complex and more difficult to understand, and certainly more difficult to consume as objects of tourism. In the Ukranian towno of Dnipro, for example, we see how the late-Soviet (very late — built in 1991) Palace of Pioneers blends in its design the gaudy decoration and fine materials associated with the Stalin era with structural elements meant to evoke the techno-centric, futurist ethos of its contemporaries, like the Pompidou Center in Paris. On the exterior, a smooth, sand-colored stone combines with rough, geometric concrete structural elements, while inside, carefully patterned and glossy-finished parquet floors contrast brightly colored, kistchy murals.

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Foreign Policy: Armenia’s Democratic Dreams

First, Armenia’s Velvet Revolution represented the climax of a decade of peaceful protest centered on human rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and labor and employment issues—all explicitly non- or minimally political causes. Such activism created a model for advocating and securing tangible compromises from government figures. Small-scale protests also established nonviolence as a credible strategy. By the time Sargsyan announced his intention to become prime minister, there was already a well-known template in place for responding. [...]

These cases stand in stark contrast to the post-Soviet color revolutions, which were often sudden and driven by reformist elites, who were themselves usually backed by outside players, most notably the European Union and the United States. Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, for example, included mass protests but really resulted from the loss of faith at the top rather than a push from below. The revolution’s top-down nature allowed one of its leaders, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was quickly elected as president after the protests died down, to strengthen the executive branch of the government with little pushback from largely compliant parliamentary forces. Interelite competitions in the aftermath of the other color revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine produced paralysis within their governments, paving the way for illiberal forces to retake power later on.

The Velvet Revolution’s emphasis on consensus building also had more in common with Latin American revolutions than the color ones. Pashinyan spent his time bargaining both within parliament and the executive branch and among the mass mobilizers in the street. For example, he negotiated with various factions in parliament to hold a vote for the prime ministership as a way to reconcile the preferences of the protesters with parliamentary processes. He has likewise worked with both civil society movements and unaligned parliamentary groups to gain support for holding snap elections.

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The Calvert Journal: Destination unknown

Armenia declared independence from the USSR in 1990. Two decades on, the young country is still finding itself, not helped by an ongoing sporadic war with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh. French photographer Julien Lombardi first travelled to Armenia in 2012 in order to explore the enigmatic country of his mother’s origin. His dreamlike and fragmentary photo project, The Unfinished, reveals a nation reluctant to address its past and facing an uncertain future.[...]

On a second visit in 2014 I embarked on a series of interviews and discussions, aided by a translator, with people from different backgrounds, including an historian, a manual worker, a civil servant, a politician, an artist and a farmer. The interviews transformed my personal approach into a more collective project. We spoke openly about the history, memory and future of the country, which has only been independent for two decades. I delved into their memories, the towns and villages where they grew up and the places where they work — subjective perspectives and fragments from which I freely drew inspiration for my photos. [...]

I had the impression that I was experiencing a place that was evolving on the fringes, according to its own rules and notion of time. Armenians are an ancient people in a young country marked by the remnants of a bygone Soviet civilization. You come across timeless scenes in a setting that is occasionally reminiscent of science fiction: shepherds with their flock in abandoned factories, children playing in a fountain in a deserted town, train stations no longer expecting the next train. The atmosphere is very peculiar.

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openDemocracy: The struggle for Yerevan: how city elections became a referendum on Armenia’s revolution

Yerevan city council elections have become an important touchstone for Nikol Pashinyan’s revolutionary team. The “struggle for Yerevan” started on 16 May, a week after Pashinyan’s appointment as Prime Minister. That day, photos showing that trees had been felled in a park outside City Hall as part of a beautification project went viral. As a result, civic activists first occupied the park and then the municipality building as they demanded that Taron Margaryan, the mayor of Yerevan and member of former ruling Republican Party, resign. [...]

The background for these events was the intensification of decentralised public protests across Armenia. On that same day (16 May), roughly 20 protests on very diverse issues were taking place in different parts of Armenia. The revolution, it seemed, was being disseminated and localised. At the same time, these decentralised protests questioned the capacity of Pashinyan’s government to control the situation. This concern was raised by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia and a former ally of Pashinyan’s against the Republican Party regime. “Pashinyan is the Prime Minister now, the head of the state whose most important duty is to secure the normal workflow of government bodies,” said Ter-Petrosyan. “Consequently, although these spontaneous protests, seizure of buildings and blocking of roads are done with good and sincere intentions, they actually work against Pashinyan.” [...]

Yerevan is too big a city for Armenia, with its population of three million. More than a third of them live in Yerevan. All governmental and administrative agencies, institutions are centralised here. While looking at the economics, more than 60% of Armenia’s GDP, 74% of retail, 61% of construction, and 80.6% of services are produced in Yerevan. In other words, Armenia looks like a man whose head is far bigger than his body — and to find its balance, this man has remain upside down, causing disproportionate distribution of everything among the country’s other regions. [...]

These attempts to transform the elections into a referendum narrowed the political space which had been opened, ironically, mostly by Pashinyan’s previous efforts. But while the presence of Pashinyan does not cancel out the fact of holding city council elections with 12 participating forces, it should be noted that his strategy requires only two political subjects — himself and the public. No other political subjects are envisaged under this logic. From the one side, this strategy clears the political arena, but from the other it devastates it. Any other subject finds itself in a love triangle — where the third person is superfluous. Moreover, to bring sense to his own active participation and therefore replacing the city council agenda with the revolutionary agenda, Pashinyan targeted people in his speeches who weren’t candidates for the city council or even represented via any of the forces. In this sense, the city council elections became impossible: voters could not elect the “light” and “dark” forces as described by Pashinyan per se, but could give their votes to the My Step bloc in approval of the April-May events. These kind of post-revolutionary elections are always approximate.

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Jacobin Magazine: The End of Armenia’s Old Regime

With a population of a little under 3 million and an economy entirely reliant on favorable trade with its larger neighbors and remittances from abroad, Armenia has been incredibly vulnerable to the shifting winds of the global economy. With the arrival of the worldwide recession in 2008, the country was hit exceptionally hard. On paper, the recovery began two years later, with GDP growth back in the black by 2010 and further growth from then on (reaching a high of 7.5 percent for 2017). But this “recovery” was not felt by the vast majority of Armenian people. Unemployment actually increased from 16 percent to 17 percent during the last decade and roughly one-third of the population remains below the poverty line. [...]

The revolt that came to engulf Armenia in 2018 was born from the ripples of the bloody consolidation of Republican Party rule in 2008. That year, the country’s opposition — a loose coalition of middle-class urbanites, a handful of oligarchs, and members of the ruling elite that had been deposed in 1998 — coalesced around the controversial figure of Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia’s first postcommunist president. Likely inspired by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Ter-Petrosyan ran for president and when, as expected, he was defeated in a blatantly rigged election, he called on his supporters to come out into the streets. But his daring attempt to repeat history was met with overwhelming state force. When the dust settled, eight protesters and two police officers were dead, Ter-Petrosyan was under house arrest, and the Republican Party was unquestionably the only dominant political force in the country — having crushed or co-opted any formerly disloyal elites. Yet this victory came at a cost. The fratricidal bloodshed and the ensuing financial crisis meant that the HHK came to rule through managed coercion mixed with societal apathy, while outside the halls of power a new extra-parliamentary opposition began to develop. [...]

The first successful civic initiative was small. Led by a group of young environmentalists in 2012, it was organized around an occupation — a couple hundred strong at its peak — that successfully blocked the slated conversion of a major park in central Yerevan into a trade zone for shops. The following year an even bigger mobilization, organized by a coalition of groups, arose in response to the Yerevan municipality declaring a 50 percent increase in public transport fares. This time thousands of Yerevan’s citizens joined the protest and the attendant fare boycott, refusing to pay anything above the standard price. And once again, the government backed down. [...]

While the attempts to bar government buildings met with near universal failure — security forces were always nearby — the road blocks were another story. The choice of roads to be blocked was not planned in advance and was up to protesters’ self-organization, which added an element of unpredictability and surprise for which the authorities had not prepared. Security forces, likely with previous occupation-style protests in mind, had hunkered down, setting up barricades lined with phalanxes of riot police, barbed wire, and water cannons in the city’s key locations. They had prepared for a siege, a frontal assault, a proverbial storming of the Bastille. Instead, they found themselves forced to play authoritarian whack-a-mole, furtively trying to find and dismantle dozens of tiny, shifting, yet effective roadblocks throughout the city center.    

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Haaretz: Israel Must Stop Playing Political Games With the Armenian Genocide

Under pressure from Israel’s government, the Knesset has again postponed the debate on the bill to recognize the Armenian genocide until after the Turkish elections on June 24. Meanwhile, prominent figures in the fight against genocide denial have been doing their own lobbying and are strengthening appeal to Israel to recognize the genocide against the Armenians. [...]

But Israel should not worry about Turkey’s diplomatic threats against countries that dare to recognize the genocide. Take, for example, what happened in the wake of the international wave of recognition in 2015 that marked the centenary of the genocide.

Turkey railed against it, protested, recalled ambassadors, suspended diplomatic relations, uttered threats and then the course of relations between nations and states resumed its normal course, that is to say sometimes chaotic, but built mainly upon well-known interests and alliances. [...]

Israel’s recognition of the Armenian genocide will contribute to preventing mass atrocities in the future. Theodor Herzl launched Zionism when he understood the existential threat facing Jews. Since its creation, Israel has been the refuge of Shoah survivors and of every Jew threatened around the world.

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statista: The worst countries to be gay in Europe

The latest edition of ILGA Europe's Rainbow List has found that Malta, Belgium and Norway are the most LGBTI-friendly countries in Europe. The annual review ranks 49 European countries on a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent. Those closer to 0 percent are considered worst for gross violations of human rights and discrimination while the other end of the scale respects human rights and full equality.

LGBTI people planning a trip are best advised to avoid Turkey, Armenia and Azerbeijan. The latter is rock-bottom of the ranking with 4.70 percent. Russia, host of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, also scores poorly on the list with 10.90 percent.

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Haaretz: Knesset to Debate Recognizing Armenian Genocide Amid Spat With Turkey

In an exceptional move, the government informed the Knesset earlier on Wednesday that it would not submit a response to the motion to hold the debate on recognizing the Armenian genocide. In the past, the government objected to holding such a debate in the Knesset plenum. [...]

The Knesset has been marking the Armenian genocide every year since 2012, but proposals of the sort are usually blocked because of the special relationship with Azerbaijan. The assumption is they will be blocked again.

Last week, several coalition MKs announced their intention to submit draft legislation on recognizing the Armenian genocide in response to anti-Israel comments and actions by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Education Minister Naftali Bennett asked Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to “approve official recognition by the State of Israel of the Armenian Holocaust committed by Turkey.”

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Social Europe: Armenia’s Velvet Revolution

In 1978 Vaclav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in which he argued against the communist regime, maintaining that it forced people to “live in a lie”. For Havel, the resistance against the lie was to begin living in the truth and to challenge one’s own powerlessness through recognising one’s agency. Fast forward forty years, and we are now witnessing a new velvet revolution in post-socialist Armenia, a country which proclaimed its independence from Soviet rule in 1991, but which has long struggled to create a democracy. More than anything else, this is a revolution about values. It is about the values of Armenian society and its domestic, socio-economic and political realities. The revolution is not about geopolitics or foreign relations. [...]

Through these actions Armenia’s citizens, who some had described as apathetic, fatalistic, and demoralised, began to challenge the regime’s hold on power and its legitimacy to govern. Today, per official statistics, over one third of Armenians live in poverty and the country’s population has declined below 3 million due to both emigration and a declining birth rate. On the one hand, there is a desire to be rid of the oligarchic system of governance and to implement a more democratic and just system of governance which recognises and respects the rule of law and the human rights of Armenia’s citizens. On the other hand, there is a desire to live in a fairer society, where citizens live with dignity and where nepotism and corruption do not lead to extremes of social and income inequality and poverty.  [...]

Inclusion and tolerance are new values to Armenian society, where not only disabled people, but also people who identify as LGBT have faced discrimination, marginalisation, and even violence. Indeed, the RPA old-guard has used the presence of feminists and LGBT activists involved in the movement to attack Pashinyan as promoting ‘Western values’. And to be sure, the old divisions may return after the revolutionary euphoria passes, but for now, suited doctors and lawyers are rallying and marching alongside young tattooed hipsters, grizzly-bearded old men, and vocal young feminists, in an atmosphere characterised by peace, joy, and tolerance.

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The New York Review of Books: Armenia’s Bad Week for Autocrats

Back in December 2015, Armenia held a constitutional referendum to transform the government from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary system. The ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), a coterie of free-market business elites, oligarchs, and allied politicians, engaged in its usual election habits of vote-buying and other irregularities to make sure the referendum passed. The object was to enable the RPA’s leader, the former president Serzh Sargsyan, to become prime minster instead, once his presidential term elapsed—which it did on April 9 this year.  [...]

Sargsyan is of a different breed to Assad. He is a member of a quasi-oligarchic, nationalist party with wide support in the military. While his government refrained from a draconian crackdown, the Republicans have lacked legitimacy among the population for a long time. An OSCE report documented that election-rigging and outright vote-buying were rampant in the 2013 presidential election. [...]

The confrontation between Sargsyan and the street movement reached a boiling point on Sunday, April 22. A highly anticipated meeting between the opposition leader, Nikol Pashinyan, and the prime minister lasted minutes, and within hours the opposition leader had been detained at a local police station. That night, the rallies swelled to more than 100,000, as demonstrators poured into the streets. On April 23, unarmed soldiers joined the rallies. Pashinyan was released and, within hours, the prime minister had resigned. It was the day of our younger, glass-smashing son’s fifth birthday. The gift was unexpected.

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Al Jazeera: Who is Armenian opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan?

He was the editor of Armenia's best-selling daily liberal newspaper, The Armenian Times, which has always been highly critical of the governments of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan. [...]

In 2004, Pashinyan's car - parked just outside The Armenian Times office in downtown Yerevan - burst into flames after an apparent explosion.

Pashinyan has said the blast was an assassination attempt engineered by a wealthy businessman, Gagik Tsarukian.

Not long before the explosion, Pashinyan's newspaper published a story that accused Tsarukian of illegally cutting down trees to build a villa in an Armenian resort town. [...]

Way Out is a merger of Civil Contract, Bright Armenia, and Republic political parties that together form the opposition in Armenia's parliament. It has nine out of 105 seats in the National Assembly.

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Independent: In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history

In 2015, Ukraine passed laws that forced its citizens to honour nationalists who briefly collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the mass killing of Jews. No uproar from the West, of course, since we currently support brave little Ukraine against the Russian beast that has gobbled up Crimean Sevastopol. [...]

So here’s the real hypocrisy of this story. The Israeli government, so outraged by Poland’s Jewish Holocaust denialism, refuses to recognise the Armenian Holocaust. Shimon Peres himself said that “we reject attempts to create a similarity between the [Jewish] Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” [...]

For 13 years ago, the Polish parliament passed a bill which specifically referred to the “Armenian genocide”. The speaker of the Polish parliament, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, said at the time that the Armenian genocide did indeed take place, that responsibility fell on the Turks, and that Turkish documents – though not yet those which Akcam has just revealed – “confirm” this.

So there you have it. Poland punishes anyone who speaks of Polish participation in the Jewish Holocaust, but accepts the Armenian Holocaust. Israel insists that all must acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust – and Poland’s peripheral guilt – but will not acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust.

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