Your Namak for Friday, November 26
Pashinyan hosts first press conference in over a year, Azerbaijan opens fire in Gegharkunik and Armenian official warned of potential spyware hack.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Pashinyan Hosts First Press Conference in Over a Year
On November 23, Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan held his first press conference in over a year. The Prime Minister said that a direct line of communication had been established between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Ministers of Defense, to address and avoid future ceasefire violations. Pashinyan also stated that at least six Armenian soldiers were killed and 32 were captured during last week’s fighting in Syunik. He confirmed that a meeting had been scheduled with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on November 9, but was delayed because of Azerbaijan’s refusal to return Armenian prisoners of war. Regarding the creation of a roadway connecting mainland Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhichevan through the sovereign territory of Armenia, Pashinyan said that a “corridor” under Azerbaijani control was out of the question. On December 15, Pashinyan and Aliyev will meet in Brussels.
Azerbaijan Opens Fire in Gegharkunik
On November 22, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces opened fire on military positions in Armenia’s eastern Gegharkunik region, fatally wounding one Armenian serviceman. The Armenian Ministry of Defense stated that the incident occurred near the village of Norabak.
Armenian Official Alerted to Potential Spyware Attack
At least one high-ranking Armenian official has received a warning of a “state-sponsored attack” on his phone. Opposition MP and former head of the National Security Service of Armenia Artur Vanetsyan shared a screenshot of an email from Apple notifying him that his phone might have been targeted. On November 23, Apple announced it had filed a lawsuit against the Israeli firm NSO Group and its parent company “to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users,” with its Pegasus spyware. In July 2021, the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories published an investigation revealing that more than 180 journalists around the world, as well as political figures and others, had been targeted by clients of the cybersurveillance company. The Pegasus spyware technology infects phones and gives access to all content, along with camera and microphone. The firm counts many state governments among its clients, including Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Shushan Karapetian: Meet the professor seeking to reimagine our relationship with the Armenian language
“Language and questions about language consume my entire being.”
When you are in conversation with Shushan Karapetian, she is truly listening to you. Shushan –– or Dr. K, as she is known to her students –– is not just focused on the substance of what you are saying, but how you say it.
Shushan is a linguistics scholar, which means she has spent her professional life studying language and its significance in the human experience. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA in 2014, where she delved deep into the Armenian language.
“Language and questions about language consume my entire being,” Shushan says.
Shushan and her family moved to the United States from Armenia when she was 10 years old. She attended public school in Los Angeles before beginning her undergraduate education at UCLA. She promised her Soviet parents that she would earn the “doctor” title, even if it meant taking an untraditional route.
“My big goal was to prove to my parents that their move was worth it,” Shushan says.
Although Shushan entered university not knowing what she wanted to study, she says “light bulbs went off” when she took her first cultural anthropology class. She decided to major in anthropology and minor in French and Armenian studies, enrolling in all the Armenian studies courses on offer.
A voracious reader from a young age, Shushan impressed her peers and professors with her command of the Armenian language. Most of her classmates were first- or second-generation diaspora Armenians, whose relationship with their culture differed greatly from hers.
“Being born and raised in early childhood in Armenia, you just take your ‘Armenian-ness’ for granted,” Shushan says. “It’s not something that’s on the surface for you or explicit for you, it’s just default.”
During her graduate education, Shushan became interested in the particular role that language plays in the cultivation of diasporic identity, and decided to explore Armenian as a heritage language.
Shushan defines a heritage language as “a non-dominant minority language,” that has roots in the home as opposed to the classroom. For her dissertation, “‘How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?’: A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles,” Shushan interviewed dozens of Armenian speakers about their relationship with the language.
“What surprised me was that regardless of my participants’ proficiency, everyone experienced anxiety when speaking Armenian, and it was debilitating anxiety,” Shushan says. “Any interaction was riddled with this fear of judgment, fear of criticism, fear of ‘being caught,’ fear of their errors being displayed.”
In 2019, Shushan joined the USC Institute of Armenian Studies as its deputy director, where she teaches courses to undergraduate students and designs the Institute’s academic and research programs. As a professor, she aims to make her scholarship accessible to young people.
“My students have these stereotypes with things Armenian,” Shushan says. “Things Armenian are old, worthy of respect and veneration, but old, backward, not contemporary, not cutting edge, not relevant to my current reality.”
In her podcast, “Language Therapy with Dr. K,” Shushan explores everything from raising bilingual children to racial justice terminology in Armenian. One recent episode unpacked the meaning of the term “Cheerios,” a label used by young Armenian-Americans to refer to their “whitewashed” Armenian peers. Through hosting these conversations, she encourages people to view the Armenian language as a living, dynamic tool.
“So much of the language ideology has been centered in this preservationist mode,” Shushan says. But rather than focus on antiquated notions of linguistic perfection, she challenges her students to look forward. “Language is never ‘what was.’”
To read: Հայ-ադրբեջանական նոր սահմանին. Գեղարքունիքի դիրքերում (On the new Armenian-Azerbaijani border. At the positions in Gegharkunik), a conversation from last month with Suren Yurik Safaryan, the 19-year-old Armenian serviceman killed on Monday in Gegharkunik.
To listen: Sassountsi Sass, a new bilingual podcast that explores Armenian language and identity, and features interviews with interesting Armenians from around the world.
To read: Self Determination, Remedial Secession and International Law: The Artsakh Crisis in Comparative Context, a deep dive into the competing legal arguments at play in the conflict in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), and how to balance such claims with the human rights of the Armenian population. The report is published by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
Questions? Story ideas? An urge to say barev/parev? You can send us a secure email at namaknews@protonmail.com.