Your Namak for Monday, March 20
Aliyev threatens new aggression against Armenia, former NATO Secretary General visits Lachin Corridor, and Yerevan mayor resigns.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Aliyev Lays Claim to Armenia, Threatens New Aggression if Yerevan Does Not Accept Conditions
In a series of statements, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev threatened new aggression against Armenia should Yerevan not accept his government’s conditions. Those demands include officially recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani land and agreeing to a border delimitation process under his terms. “If Armenia does not recognize our territorial integrity, we will not recognize their territorial integrity either,” Aliyev said.
In a separate address, Aliyev referred to Armenia as “western Zangezur, our historical land,” and claimed that Armenia’s existence “led to the geographical separation of the Turkic world.” Aliyev’s statements follow weeks of speculation by Armenian officials about another war on the horizon, with both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Nagorno-Karabakh President Arayik Harutyunyan warning of imminent military escalations by Azerbaijan.
Former NATO Secretary General Visits Lachin Corridor
On March 14, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen visited the entrance to the Lachin Corridor, where he urged the European Union to pressure Azerbaijan to lift its blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh. In a statement, Rasmussen described Armenia as “a country at a crossroads, both geographically and politically. Since 2018, its democracy has made important strides forward. The EU and democratic world must do more to support this development.” Azerbaijan’s months-long closure of the only road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and the outside world has spawned a humanitarian crisis in the region.
Yerevan Mayor Resigns, Citing Completion of “Mission”
On March 17, Yerevan Mayor Hrachya Sargsyan resigned, stating that his mission had been completed. Sargsyan was elected mayor in December 2021 after the Yerevan Council of Elders, controlled by the ruling “My Step” alliance at the time, ousted Hayk Marutyan in a no-confidence vote. In a Facebook post announcing his decision, Sargsyan said he defined his main mission as to “ensure the implementation of the pre-election program of the ‘My Step’ alliance in 2018, as well as restore effective cooperation with the government.” Sargsyan said he was happy to report that both objectives have been placed on a successful path forward.
Marta Miskaryan: Meet an Armenian documentary director and producer highlighting persistent peoples’ trajectories
“I am fascinated by people who don’t give up, who believe in something so much that they cannot help themselves but to keep pushing. I want to tell those stories.”
Marta Miskaryan punctuates all her sentences with a smile. The 25-year-old director was born and raised in Yerevan to musician parents. She remembers her childhood as full of joy and time spent playing outside.
“I consider myself really lucky because I grew up in this little window where Armenia was already kind of independent, even though the government was corrupt, and it was a window of peace,” Marta says. “My parents had gone through the war in the 80 and 90s, and the Soviet era, and I was a post-Soviet baby.”
After graduating from high school, she moved to Moscow and studied filmmaking for a year at the VGIK Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. “I just never thought of doing anything else for some reason. I saw filmmaking as a way to learn about things and share them in a story,” Marta explains.
The young filmmaker then relocated to the U.K. to join her mother, and in 2019 graduated from the University of the Arts London with a Bachelor of Arts in Film and Television Studies.
Despite her immersion in the arts and humanities, Marta was always fascinated by scientists and their passion for their work. “During my studies, I made a film about the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro which was destroyed in a fire in 2018,” Marta says. Twenty million archives disappeared in the disaster. “I filmed the team of scientists trying to rescue and save some pieces after the fire.”
Marta cites Andrei Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog as her two main references. The filmmaker is also inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Armenian folk music and church choirs.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Marta started a full-time job producing and directing digital content at the London National Theatre, but kept working on her documentary projects on the side. Thanks to the One World Media NGO Global Short Docs forum, she pitched a story in Armenia and was commissioned by Al Jazeera.
Her 2022 film ROT54: Armenia’s Forgotten Space Giant, tells the story of Arevik Sargsyan, a scientist who seeks to revive an abandoned Soviet-era radio-telescope. Marta says she was fascinated by the lost heritage of Soviet Armenia’s astrophysics research program, and sought to tell the story of one of its invisible champions.
“I found Arevik, started talking to her and we got along very well. I wanted to do something in Armenia because I always think about the way Armenia is represented and the way we as Armenians relate to it,” the young director says. “We should not neglect the traumatizing parts of our past but at the same time I wanted to do something with a different lens, not only through genocide and the wars, even though that’s very important too.”
Arevik is very tenacious and has to overcome many patriarchal and administrative challenges to achieve her goal. The telescope also has a personal meaning for her, as it was the brainchild of her uncle, the famous Armenian physicist and engineer Paris Herouni.
“I am fascinated by people who don’t give up, who believe in something so much that they cannot help themselves but to keep pushing,” Marta says.
Marta strives to broaden the ways Armenians are presented in media and the arts, going beyond traditional stories about tragedy and dispossession.
“It’s a shame that there are not many stories about Armenia’s contribution to the world. It’s usually stories about Armenians as victims,” Marta says. “But it was still a painful experience because the war was happening when I pitched the idea and started working on it. It’s a shared trauma we all went through. But at the same time I felt compelled to do it even more.”
Marta hopes to keep on making films around the world, sharing the stories of people who never give up despite difficult circumstances.
To attend: Diaspora Dreams, the first joint concert of Armenian-American musicians Krista Marina and Bei Ru, who collaborated on an album of the same name. The pair will be performing their airy, Middle Eastern-inspired tracks at Gold Diggers in Los Angeles on Wednesday, March 22.
To read: Violence, the Mundane, and Silence, an EVN Report article by scholar Karena Avedissian, who explores the “anticipation of violence” concept as applied to Armenia. In places of protracted conflict, violence is present in the mundane, and the prospect of renewed fighting becomes a regular fixture of everyday life.
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.