Armenia has set running the world’s allegedly longest cable car line just about a month after the Caucasus country produced the world’s largest chocolate bar.
The 25-person cabins on October 16 took their first passengers, including the country’s President Serzh Sargsyan, on an 11-minute aerial journey to the ancient mountaintop monastery complex of Tatev, one of Armenia's main tourist attractions. Called the Wings of Tatev, the cable line stretches 5.7 kilometers over a gorge, hills and forests near the Iranian border. “[W]e do not aim to impress anyone, rather this is aimed at reviving the area’s economic and cultural life,” President Sargsyan commented at the opening.
The government intends to ask Guinness World Records to recognize the cable car line as a world record, The Associated Press reported.
Visitors to the region can also check out the world’s highest flag in next-door rival Azerbaijan or the world's allegedly oldest granny in neighboring Georgia. The three countries may not be the biggest places to visit, but they compensate by making frequent use of superlative adjectives -- perhaps another world record in the making?
Azerbaijan is pressing for an official United Nations response to a diplomatic incident at the Armenian mission in New York.
The source of Azerbaijan’s ire was the Armenian mission’s recent move to fly the flag of separatist-minded Nagorno-Karabakh.
“It has been revealed and properly documented that on September 27… the mission of the Republic of Armenia … installed two flags on its premises.., namely the national flag of the Republic of Armenia and a piece of colored stuff or rag purported to be a ‘flag’ of the ethnically constructed subordinate separatist entity, the so-called ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Republic,’” Azerbaijan’s UN envoy Agshyn Mehtyev wrote in a letter sent to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The Karabakh banner flew for only a few hours, reportedly coming down due to Azerbaijani pressure. Baku, however, doesn’t seem inclined to drop the matter. Azerbaijani officials believe the Armenian action violated the UN Charter, and therefore they are seeking an official UN response.
Hazing in post-Soviet militaries is unfortunately common. What's less common is someone getting punished for it, but that's what's happening in Armenia, where an officer was arrested and faces a sentence of up to five years for beating a young soldier. And that's at least in part thanks to the efforts of Armenian activist bloggers, who kept pushing the story until the Defense Ministry was forced to act:
The Armenian Defense Ministry officially confirmed on Wednesday the identity of an army officer who was arrested last week for abusing his soldiers and is now facing up to five years in prison.
The arrest followed the circulation of an amateur Youtube video that shows a uniform-clad man hitting and humiliating two army conscripts during what looks like a picnic. The footage caused public outrage, prompting the Armenian military to order an inquiry.
The Defense Ministry initially questioned its veracity and said those who posted it on the Internet are keen to “discredit” the Armed Forces. Subsequent media reports said military investigators tracked down the officer shown in the clip.
As EurasiaNet reported just earlier this month, the Armenian MoD had been taking stronger action against hazing even before this video came out. But the existence of video makes it much harder for those who are inclined to reflexively defend the army to deny that hazing is a problem. (The same thing happened in Azerbaijan a couple of years ago.) While the promise of cyberactivism can often be exaggerated, this is one case where there's room for optimism.
Every year hundreds of Armenians gather in the village of Musa Ler, west of Yerevan, to celebrate the rescue and escape in 1915 of ethnic Armenians living in six villages on the slopes of Musa Dagh, a mountain in southern Turkey near the border with Syria. Throughout the night, 40 pots of harisa - a dish of wheat, meat or chicken and salt - are slow-simmered to be served for free to all who attend the festivities, which includes dancing, music and games.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
A retrospective photo exhibition titled "Black Life" by award-winning Armenian photojournalist and documentary photographer Ruben Mangasaryan (1963-2009) opened at the Art Gallery on the evening of Sept. 16 in Yerevan, Armenia.
Mangasaryan shot the story "Black Life," which won several awards and was published in Days of Japan magazine and BCC Online, from 2003 to 2009. The project documents the life of an Armenian family that fled the war over Nagorno Karabakh for the village of Bagratashan.
The Gadyans' Black Life is about extreme poverty, trauma and squalor. The family stove, fueled chiefly by plastic, has a leaking stovepipe that lets heavy smoke into the home, coating everything and everyone with soot.
Lida Gadyan, 45, is a refugee from Baku, Azerbaijan where she washed dishes in a canteen. In the 1990s, Lida fled to Bagratashen with her son and mother; her husband left her. In her first decade in Armenia, Lida worked as a prostitute, giving birth to seven children in the process. She left two of them at the hospital, another was stillborn and yet another died of hunger at five months.
Mangasaryan, who was teaching photography at the Caucasus Institute, was one of the most well-known and respected photojournalists in Armenia. He created Patker Photo Agency and his work has been seen at the annual prestigious Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France. Mangasaryan died suddenly on March 21, 2009.
"Black Life" will run until Sept. 30.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
The U.S.'s embattled nominee to be the next ambassador to Baku, Matthew Bryza, raised some eyebrows during his confirmation hearing in July by appearing to say that a serious skirmish on the Nagorno Karabakh line of contact was Azerbaijan's fault. This is what he said in July:
"What transpired that day remains not entirely clear to us, but we do know that there were several people killed. There was an Azerbaijani move across the line of contact, Armenia responded, resulted in deaths which, yes, Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton did condemn."
But now he appears to be backing away from that statement. In responses to follow-up questions (pdf) from Barbara Boxer, a pro-Armenia senator, Bryza stepped back from blaming Azerbaijan:
While I said that the Azerbaijanis moved across the line of contact (LOC), the full details of what triggered the June 18 incident are unknown. Unfortunately, there are a number of LOC violations each year by both sides.
So was he right the first time? According to Jane's, yes. The skirmish was not planned by either government, but was a shouting match between soldiers on each side that got out of hand, resulting in an Azerbaijan non-commissioned officer opening fire (article not online):
[T]he skirmishes around Nagorno-Karabakh between 18 and 21 June may not have been as co-ordinated and planned as at first perceived. The fighting left four Armenian soldiers dead and four wounded...
The official version of the fighting provided by the Armenian military on 19 June was that an Azerbaijani unit tried to capture an Armenian forward position, but failed to do so and retreated, abandoning one of its dead. The Armenian soldiers died or were wounded defending their position.
In a lengthy piece in this week’s Foreign Policy, longtime Caucasus reporter and current Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Associate Thomas de Waal takes readers beyond the cliché view of the South Caucasus as a West-Russia chessboard. The Caucasus’ inhabitants are not helpless marionettes in the hands of competing great powers, de Waal asserts. Rather, he argues, they can “manipulate the great powers at least as much as the other way round.”
Insightful as that argument is, the piece makes some points that beg debate.
Many Georgians would balk at de Waal’s assertion that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev personally devoting time to talks on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan suggests that Moscow is not necessarily “neo-imperialist.” The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Mediating the peace talks over breakaway Karabakh does not easily mesh with the image of Russia setting up army bases in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Calling for the South Caucasus to be left to its own devices is another mixed message. Europe and the United States have become the audiences of choice for complaints about alleged abuses of human and civil rights in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. While such complaints -- and their responses -- may not always improve matters, many locals believe that having access to those outside ears can often – at least, in some small way -- help bad situations from getting worse.
The piece’s strongest argument is about how small business and trade can surmount borders , "mythical 'ancient hatreds,'" and help bring the Caucasus together. De Waal calls on Western policymakers to direct the bulk of their Caucasus efforts toward that end.
Delicious news from the South Caucasus, the land where small countries compete for producing the world’s largest, tallest and oldest sensations. Shortly after Azerbaijan unveiled the world’s tallest flag, confectioners from neighboring Armenia busted out the world’s largest chocolate bar. The Grand Candy factory lived up to its name, producing a 4.4-ton, world- record-breaking marvel. An axe was used to chop off chunks from the 5.6-meter-long and more than 2.7-meter-wide dark chocolate mass. Georgia, the third country in the region, has yet to come up with something to match its two rivals, but it shouldn't take long.
NATO's disaster-preparation exercise in Armenia has begun, and the Turks taking part did not, in the end, cross the border:
More than half of the exercise participants are Armenian rescuers and firefighters employed by Yeritsian’s ministry. Ten others represent neighboring Turkey, with which Armenia has no diplomatic relations.
With the Turkish-Armenian border remaining closed, the Turks had to travel to Armenia via Georgia. Turkish officials indicated in July that Ankara might temporarily reopen the frontier for the exercise. Officials in Yerevan dismissed such possibility as public relations stunt.
On 11 September 2010 at 09:05 a.m., an earthquake of 7.2 Richter Scale (equal to the moment magnitude) occurred in the Kotayk region of the Republic of Armenia. The hypocenter was located in 10 km depth, and the epicentre was located 8 km north-east of the city of Abovyan.
A high number of casualties have been reported (first estimations amount to 12,000 dead and 17,000 wounded) and thousands of buildings have been destroyed. The cities of Charencavan and Abovyan, as well as the adjacent rural communities are amongst the most affected areas.
The water supply and drainage systems of the region are no longer functioning. Means of communication, gas and energy supply systems, as well as infrastructure and means of transport are heavily affected. Fires have spread, the hospitals of the region have been destroyed and humanitarian organisations cannot operate anymore. Thousands of citizens have lost their homes. The international airport of Yerevan was affected by the earthquake but is still usable...
With summer holidays ending and a new school year beginning in Armenia on Sept. 1, cars, buses and trucks once again snarl in long congested lines and stall at intersections, such as the crossing of Isahakyan and Nalbandyan streets in front of the Armenian State University of Economics in the capital Yerevan.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
