Your Namak for Monday, August 14
Founding ICC prosecutor warns of genocide against Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, former Yerevan mayor announces candidacy to lead city, and two Armenian soldiers die in unknown circumstances.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Founding ICC Prosecutor Warns of Genocide Against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh
In a report published on August 8, the founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warned that Azerbaijan is committing genocide against 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Luis Moreno Ocampo wrote that the blockade of the Lachin corridor by the Azerbaijani government should be considered a genocide under international law, noting that the Genocide Convention defines the crime as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” The report pointed to famine as a tool in perpetrating genocide, saying, “There are no crematories, and there are no machete attacks. Starvation is the invisible genocide weapon. Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.”
For more than eight months, Azerbaijan has deliberately blocked access to the only land route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and the world. In recent weeks, the humanitarian situation in the region has reached a critical point, with acute shortages of food, fuel and medicine. In late July, Azerbaijani troops abducted a patient being transported by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Armenia for emergency medical treatment, raising concerns about the ability of aid workers to access the region.
Former Yerevan Mayor Announces Candidacy to Lead City
On August 8, former Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutyan announced that he will seek the post once again, arguing his work to effectively manage the Armenian capital remains unfinished. In a Facebook video announcing his candidacy, Marutyan said his investment in the city’s future outweighs his own personal interests. In 2021, the ruling My Step faction of the Yerevan City Council ousted Marutyan from his post in a no-confidence vote, arguing the mayor had failed to fulfill his party obligations. In his announcement, Marutyan said the promises of the 2018 Velvet Revolution remain unfilled and those who came to power on the wave of widespread national protests have reverted to “old ways of ruling.”
Two Armenian Soldiers Die in Unknown Circumstances
On August 11, the Armenian Ministry of Defense reported that serviceman Granik Khnkoyan was fatally wounded in unknown circumstances, the second Armenian soldier found dead in two days. One day earlier, the Ministry reported that conscript Zhora Karapetyan died in an apparent suicide. Two soldiers from Karapetyan’s unit have been arrested on suspicion of “inciting” him to take his own life.
Namak x Sunrise: Meet Tamar Haytayan, a Canadian-Armenian artist exploring memory and mystical traditions
“Old family pictures fascinate me. We don’t actually know some of these people, but we have been told so many things about them.”
Tamar Haytayan has a warm voice that makes you feel immediately comfortable, as if you are old friends, five minutes after you meet her. Born in Antelias, Lebanon in 1971, a few years before the civil war that tore the country apart between 1975 and 1990, her childhood is filled with early memories of conflict and moving, first to London, then to Armenia, and finally to Vancouver, Canada, where she has been based for the last 20 years.
As a child, Tamar was always creative and fascinated by daily activities that some people would not obsess about, but that she perceived as mystical. “The coffee ritual intrigued me,” Tamar says of the Armenian tradition of reading fortunes from leftover coffee grounds.
“My mother was able to read the coffee remains but she did not want to at some point because people just started coming to our house in Lebanon wanting her to read their cups because one time she said something and it happened,” Tamar says. “Someone got married exactly how my mother said it would happen.”
The artist’s biggest inspiration was her grandmother, a teacher in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian neighborhood of Beirut. Tamar’s grandmother grew up in Syria before moving to Lebanon as an adult. “At that time there were not many women performing on stage, but she performed with her husband on stage and was very creative,” Tamar says of her grandmother, who also wrote and recited poetry.
But studying art or becoming an artist were not really options for young Tamar. “It was not encouraged by my family. You know there is this typical Armenian survival instinct, that says do something that will give you a good income and you can afford a safer life with that,” she explains. “I wasn’t that courageous. It’s one of my regrets. I am carving my way now after 30 years, since starting art.”
After studying business and French, the 52-year-old photographer began a career in investment banking in London. But Tamar never stopped making art on the side, writing and making photographs that she tried to merge together. Later on, she studied photography at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design in the UK, and writing at the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio.
Tamar’s work focuses on grief, memory and loss. She cites Christian Boltanski, a French artist famous for his installations about memory, the Holocaust and the concept of loss, as one of her main inspirations. Merging writing on these topics and medium format film photography, she makes many nostalgic diptychs.
Her work has been shown at the Armenian Centre for Contemporary Art in Yerevan, PhotoHaus Gallery in Vancouver, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, The Los Angeles Center of Photography, and The Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, among other places.
At the 2023 edition of Sunrise Stepanakert Art Festival, Tamar’s “Fragments of a breath” was exhibited in Yerevan and Stepanakert, despite the blockade. The project is a collection of eight pictures, old family photos, with macro photos of coffee remains, illustrating two of the artist’s obsessions –– the transmission of memory and storytelling around coffee.
“Old family pictures fascinate me. We don’t actually know some of these people, but we have been told so many things about them,” she says. “Reading coffee remains, it’s like Armenians are always looking and hoping for good news.”
The context of Sunrise Stepanakert this year –– the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh that has lasted for more than eight months –– is another round of traumatizing news and worry for Armenians.
“I think this festival is an amazing act of resistance,” Tamar says, even as she ponders her own ability to visit Nagorno-Karabakh in the future. “I would like to say to the organizers and people there that I feel honored to have been a part of that.”
This profile is part of a collaboration between Namak and Sunrise Stepanakert Art Festival.
To listen: Life and Death Behind the Karabakh Blockade, an episode of the Popular Front podcast featuring an interview with Nina, a teacher living inside the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade. She says the inhumane living conditions have only strengthened the local population’s demands for independence.
To read: ‘You learn to hide your identity’: being queer in the Armenian army, an OC Media article by Ani Avetisyan about persecution of queer people inside Armenia’s military. Many face an impossible choice: brand their gender identity as a mental illness to seek an exemption from mandatory service, or fear mistreatment and abuse within the armed forces.
To listen: Hapuma, musician Rozalia’s hauntingly beautiful spin on the Armenian folk song, about deception and heartache in the context of interpersonal relationships.
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.