Your Namak for Monday, February 6
Armenia offers aid to Turkey, Syria following deadly earthquake, Armenia presents case at International Court of Justice, and Blinken appoints new senior advisor for Caucasus negotiations.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Armenia Offers Aid to Turkey, Syria Following Deadly Earthquake
On February 6, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan offered aid to Turkey and Syria after a powerful earthquake struck the region overnight, leaving at least 2,100 people dead and thousands more injured. The 7.8 magnitude quake, whose epicenter was in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, collapsed hundreds of buildings and raised the specter of a new humanitarian disaster in a region already plagued by conflict. Although Armenia and Turkey recognize each other, efforts to normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries remain ongoing.
Armenia Presents Case at International Court of Justice
On January 30, public hearings in the case of Armenia v. Azerbaijan began at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Armenia’s legal team filed the lawsuit based on alleged violations by Azerbaijan of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a treaty that both countries have ratified. In his opening remarks, Armenia’s Representative to the ICJ Yeghishe Kirakosyan highlighted the urgency of the court’s action, saying, “If the court does not act quickly, the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will be faced with an impossible choice: to leave their ancestral homes, or to stay there and starve.” Armenia requested the application of provisional measures by the court in December, including the immediate opening of the Lachin Corridor and the free movement of persons and cargo along the road.
Blinken Appoints New Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations
According to a statement published on February 1, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed Louis Bono as Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations. One of Louis Bono’s main missions will be to work with Armenia and Azerbaijan to achieve long-term peace in the region. “The United States is committed to helping Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement, including a long-term political settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” the statement said. Bono formerly served as Acting Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations in Vienna.
Astrid Artin-Loussikian: Meet a French-Armenian history teacher cultivating the heritage and memory of the diaspora
“Dear Armenians, don’t throw anything away. Anything! Even an old train ticket, a passport or a work contract. These are all treasures, they tell stories, our stories, of immigration, work, our trajectories. Give them to us!”
Astrid Artin-Loussikian easily crawls around the numerous shelves of Association ARAM in Marseille, France. She knows the place by heart –– it was founded by her late father Jean-Garbis Artin in 1997.
ARAM (which stands for “Association for the Research and Archiving of Armenian Memory”), is like Ali Baba’s cave for Armenian archives. Located in Saint-Jérôme, in the 13th arrondissement of Marseille, a port-city home to an important Armenia community, the organization hosts an incredible collection of books, maps, testimonies, photographs relating to Armenia, the 1915 genocide and the Armenian diaspora.
“I always was obsessed with old things and archives. When I was younger I wanted to become a librarian documentalist,” Astrid says.
The 60-year-old history teacher was born and raised in the south of France between Toulon and Marseille.
“I studied history and geography to become a teacher. But when I passed my exams and the contest to become a teacher, I focused on the French expansion in the Black Sea area. I did not choose the genocide and things related to Armenian history right away,” she says.
Growing up, Astrid’s Armenian identity was mostly shaped by culture, through dance, music and the language. But she also was surrounded by Armenian books and archives, as her father started collecting them when she was a child. “We had the ancestors of the internet (laughs), encyclopedias of the French collection Quillet, and history books, things about architecture, different things… But also, Armenian things,” she says.
Jean-Garbis was born in Marseille in 1930, the son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. “He got something many Armenians did not get: his father’s detailed testimony, who was 16 years old during the genocide. It triggered something in him: a need to collect and keep all the testimonies, the memory of the event, and of anything related to Armenian history,” Astrid says.
Her father was a woodworker, but spent most of his free time collecting the testimonies that would become ARAM and rented a little garage where he kept them. “He always went around during events of the Armenian community, and in the streets, and asked people if they had old photos, books, tickets, documents, notebooks, anything really, that they kept somewhere without ever touching it, or wanted to throw away, and he convinced them to give it to him,” the teacher recalls.
ARAM was officially born as a non-profit organization in 1997. Astrid and Christian-Varoujan Artin, her late brother, professionalized the organization through the years, creating a website, digitizing the documents, and sorting them.
“Memory needs to be alive and spread, not locked in a museum. That’s why teaching, organizing exhibitions in schools, is very important,” Astrid says. “I really enjoy teaching and sharing. I am very fulfilled by teaching, especially in middle school. I taught in high schools in Paris for a while, but I prefer teaching younger kids. We can get very creative; I am so impressed by them.”
Now ARAM is quite well known in France and people call from all over the country to give their documents. Many researchers, journalists, artists, filmmakers and photographers come to work with the archives or find ideas. A German novelist is currently doing research for a character she is working on.
“Dear Armenians, don’t throw anything away. Anything! Even an old train ticket, a passport or a work contract. These are all treasures, they tell stories, our stories, of immigration, work, our trajectories. Give them to us,” Astrid says.
The history teacher wants to keep on collecting but is also trying to reach a younger Armenian audience. She is currently looking for a bigger space as the collection is growing, and for more volunteers to help digitize, translate and sort all the documents.
ARAM recently organized an exhibition about Armenians in Marseille, who lived in the Oddo refugee camp, in terrible conditions, for several years upon their arrival in France after fleeing the genocide. Some of them later moved to America. Astrid would love to follow several trajectories from there to the U.S. through Ellis Island and prepare an exhibition in New York City.
“We are still fighting denialism, so for me, archives work is still very important and it is a form of Armenian activism that we can do in the diaspora,” Astrid concludes. “I know that now, with war and the blockade of Artsakh, some people might think it is not a priority, and I get it. But even the current situation, memory and history are also part of it. So it’s important to keep the archive, the proof of our trajectories.”
To read: We can’t let history repeat itself with the siege of Nagorno-Karabakh, an op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times by scholars Mary Papazian and Vatche Sahakian, who equate the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh to the seige of Srebrenica. They argue that Nagorno-Karabakh today is the epicenter of a “conflict between democracy and autocracy, transparency and corruption, and freedom and oppression.”
To listen: Say My Name, Say My Name, the first episode of Name It!, a new podcast co-hosted by Yale doctoral students Kohar Avakian and Iman AbdoulKarim. In each episode, the duo delves deep into a big idea of our time, concepts that they say have helped them navigate life at the intersections of American society.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
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