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ARMENIA
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Armenia (i/ɑrˈmiːniə/ Armenian: Հայաստան Hayastan), officially the Republic of Armenia (Armenian: Հայաստանի Հանրապետություն, Hayastani Hanrapetut’yun), is a mountainous country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia.
Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan to the south.
Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation-state with an ancient cultural heritage.
The Kingdom of Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its religion, in the early years of the 4th century (the traditional date is 301 AD).
The modern Republic of Armenia recognizes the Armenian Apostolic Church, the world's oldest national church, as the country's primary religious establishment.
Armenians have their own unique alphabet invented by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD.
A former republic of the Soviet Union, Armenia is an emerging democracy and as of 2011 was negotiating with the European Union to become an associate member.
It has the right to be an EU member provided it meets necessary standards and criteria.
The Government of Armenia holds European integration as a key priority in its foreign policy.
Remainder of article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia
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and largest city = Yerevan
40°11′N 44°31′E
[image error]
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- President Serzh Sargsyan
- Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan
- Speaker Hovik Abrahamyan
On Politics of Armenia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics...
Legislature = National Assembly
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- Traditional date 11 August 2492 BC
- Nairi 1200 BC
- Kingdom of Ararat 840s BC
- Orontid Dynasty 560 BC
- Kingdom of Armenia formed 190 BC
- Democratic Republic of Armenia established
28 May 1918
- Independence from the Soviet Union Declared = 23 August 1990
Recognised = 21 September 1991
Finalised = 21 December 1991
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http://www.armenian-genocide.org/geno...
In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.
(continued in full below - all from the Armenian National Institute in Washington D.C.'s site)
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The Ottoman Empire was ruled by the Turks who had conquered lands extending across West Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe. The Ottoman government was centered in Istanbul (Constantinople) and was headed by a sultan who was vested with absolute power. The Turks practiced Islam and were a martial people. The Armenians, a Christian minority, lived as second class citizens subject to legal restrictions which denied them normal safeguards. Neither their lives nor their properties were guaranteed security. As non-Muslims they were also obligated to pay discriminatory taxes and denied participation in government. Scattered across the empire, the status of the Armenians was further complicated by the fact that the territory of historic Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Russians.
In its heyday in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful state. Its minority populations prospered with the growth of its economy. By the nineteenth century, the empire was in serious decline. It had been reduced in size and by 1914 had lost virtually all its lands in Europe and Africa. This decline created enormous internal political and economic pressures which contributed to the intensification of ethnic tensions. Armenian aspirations for representation and participation in government aroused suspicions among the Muslim Turks who had never shared power in their country with any minority and who also saw nationalist movements in the Balkans result in the secession of former Ottoman territories. Demands by Armenian political organizations for administrative reforms in the Armenian-inhabited provinces and better police protection from predatory tribes among the Kurds only invited further repression. The government was determined to avoid resolving the so-called Armenian Question in any way that altered the traditional system of administration. During the reign of the Sultan Abdul Hamid (Abdulhamit) II (1876-1909), a series of massacres throughout the empire meant to frighten Armenians and so dampen their expectations, cost up to three hundred thousand lives by some estimates and inflicted enormous material losses on a majority of Armenians.
In response to the crisis in the Ottoman Empire, a new political group called the Young Turks seized power by revolution in 1908. From the Young Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti, emerged at the head of the government in a coup staged in 1913. It was led by a triumvirate: Enver, Minister of War; Talaat, Minister of the Interior (Grand Vizier in 1917); and Jemal, Minister of the Marine. The CUP espoused an ultranationalistic ideology which advocated the formation of an exclusively Turkish state. It also subscribed to an ideology of aggrandizement through conquest directed eastward toward other regions inhabited by Turkic peoples, at that time subject to the Russian Empire. The CUP also steered Istanbul toward closer diplomatic and military relations with Imperial Germany. When World War I broke out in August 1914, the Ottoman Empire formed part of the Triple Alliance with the other Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it declared war on Russia and its Western allies, Great Britain and France.
The Ottoman armies initially suffered a string of defeats which they made up with a series of easy military victories in the Caucasus in 1918 before the Central Powers capitulated later that same year. Whether retreating or advancing, the Ottoman army used the occasion of war to wage a collateral campaign of massacre against the civilian Armenian population in the regions in which warfare was being conducted. These measures were part of the genocidal program secretly adopted by the CUP and implemented under the cover of war. They coincided with the CUP's larger program to eradicate the Armenians from Turkey and neighboring countries for the purpose of creating a new Pan-Turanian empire. Through the spring and summer of 1915, in all areas outside the war zones, the Armenian population was ordered deported from their homes. Convoys consisting of tens of thousands including men, women, and children were driven hundreds of miles toward the Syrian desert.
The deportations were disguised as a resettlement program. The brutal treatment of the deportees, most of whom were made to walk to their destinations, made it apparent that the deportations were mainly intended as death marches. Moreover, the policy of deportation surgically removed the Armenians from the rest of society and disposed of great masses of people with little or no destruction of property. The displacement process, therefore, also served as a major opportunity orchestrated by the CUP for the plundering of the material wealth of the Armenians and proved an effortless method of expropriating all of their immovable properties.
The genocidal intent of the CUP measures was also evidenced by the mass killings that accompanied the deportations. Earlier, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman forces had been disarmed and either worked to death in labor battalions or outright executed in small batches. With the elimination of the able-bodied men from the Armenian population, the deportations proceeded with little resistance. The convoys were frequently attacked by bands of killers specifically organized for the purpose of slaughtering the Armenians. As its instrument of extermination, the government had authorized the formation of gangs of butchers—mostly convicts released from prison expressly enlisted in the units of the so-called Special Organization, Teshkilâti Mahsusa. This secret outfit was headed by the most ferocious partisans of the CUP who took it upon themselves to carry out the orders of the central government with the covert instructions of their party leaders. A sizable portion of the deportees, including women and children, were indisciminately killed in massacres along the deportation routes. The cruelty characterizing the killing process was heightened by the fact that it was frequently carried out by the sword in terrifying episodes of bloodshed. Furthermore, for the survivors, their witnessing of the murder of friends and relatives with the mass of innocent persons was the source of serious trauma. Many younger women and some orphaned children were also abducted and placed in bondage in Turkish and Muslim homes resulting in another type of trauma characterized by the shock of losing both family and one's sense of identity. These women and children were frequently forbidden to grieve, were employed as unpaid laborers, and were required to assimilate the language and religion of their captors.
The government had made no provisions for the feeding of the deported population. Starvation took an enormous toll much as exhaustion felled the elderly, the weaker and the infirm. Deportees were denied food and water in a deliberate effort to hasten death. The survivors who reached northern Syria were collected at a number of concentration camps whence they were sent further south to die under the scorching sun of the desert. Through methodically organized deportation, systematic massacre, deliberate starvation and dehydration, and continuous brutalization, the Ottoman government reduced its Armenian population to a frightened mass of famished individuals whose families and communities had been destroyed in a single stroke.
Resistance to the deportations was infrequent. Only in one instance did the entire population of an Armenian settlement manage to evade death. The mountaineers of Musa Dagh defended themselves in the heights above their villages until French naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean detected them and transported them to safety. The inhabitants of the city of Van in eastern Armenia defended themselves until relieved by advancing Russian forces. They abandoned the city in May 1915, a month after the siege was lifted, when the Russian Army withdrew. The fleeing population was hunted down mercilessly by Turkish irregular forces. Inland towns that resisted, such as Urfa (Edessa), were reduced to rubble by artillery. The survival of the Armenians in large part is credited not to acts of resistance, but to the humanitarian intervention led by American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. Although the Allied Powers expressly warned the Ottoman government about its policy of genocide, ultimately it was through Morgenthau's efforts that the plight of the Armenians was publicized in the United States. The U.S. Congress authorized the formation of a relief committee which raised funds to feed "the starving Armenians." Near East Relief, as the committee was eventually known, saved tens of thousands of lives. After the war, it headed a large-scale effort to rehabilitate the survivors who were mostly left to their own devices in their places of deportation. By setting up refugee camps, orphanages, medical clinics and educational facilities, Near East Relief rescued the surviving Armenian population.
In the post-war period nearly four hundred of the key CUP officials implicated in the atrocities committed against the Armenians were arrested. A number of domestic military tribunals were convened which brought charges ranging from the unconstitutional seizure of power and subversion of the legal government, the conduct of a war of aggression, and conspiring the liquidation of the Armenian population, to more explicit capital crimes, including massacre. Some of the accused were found guilty of the charges. Most significantly, the ruling triumvirate was condemned to death. They, however, eluded justice by fleeing abroad. Their escape left the matter of avenging the countless victims to a clandestine group of survivors that tracked down the CUP arch conspirators. Talaat, the principal architect of the Armenian genocide, was killed in 1921 in Berlin where he had gone into hiding. His assassin was arrested and tried in a German court which acquitted him.
Most of those implicated in war crimes evaded justice and many joined the new Nationalist Turkish movement led by Mustafa Kemal. In a series of military campaigns against Russian Armenia in 1920, against the refugee Armenians who had returned to Cilicia in southern Turkey in 1921, and against the Greek army that had occupied Izmir (Smyrna) where the last intact Armenian community in Anatolia still existed in 1922, the Nationalist forces completed the process of eradicating the Armenians through further expulsions and massacres. When Turkey was declared a republic in 1923 and received international recognition, the Armenian Question and all related matters of resettlement and restitution were swept aside and soon forgotten.
In all, it is estimated that up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman and Turkish military and paramilitary forces and through atrocities intentionally inflicted to eliminate the Armenian demographic presence in Turkey. In the process, the population of historic Armenia at the eastern extremity of Anatolia was wiped off the map. With their disappearance, an ancient people which had inhabited the Armenian highlands for three thousand years lost its historic homeland and was forced into exile and a new diaspora. The surviving refugees spread around the world and eventually settled in some two dozen countries on all continents of the globe.
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The half-hearted reaction of the world's great powers to the plight of the Armenians was duly noted by the young German politician Adolf Hitler. After achieving total power in Germany, Hitler decided to conquer Poland in 1939 and told his generals: "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?"
Terrible statement which shows just what a despot thinks when they see somebody else get away with the unthinkable.
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The Sandcastle Girls
Interesting combination of historical fiction (places and events), non fiction (Armenian Genocide) and fiction (most of the characters and storyline).
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Chris BohjalianSynopsis:
Over the course of his career, New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Midwives brought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy winter’s night and a home birth gone tragically wrong.
In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls, he brings us on a very different kind of journey. This spellbinding tale travels between Aleppo, Syria, in 1915 and Bronxville, New York, in 2012—a sweeping historical love story steeped in the author’s Armenian heritage, making it his most personal novel to date.
When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so different from the wife he lost.Flash forward to the present, where we meet Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents’ ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed the “Ottoman Annex,” Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought. But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Laura’s grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss—and a wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.
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by Grigoris BalakianSynopsis:
Never before in English, Armenian Golgotha is the most dramatic and comprehensive eyewitness account of the first modern genocide.
On April 24, 1915, the priest Grigoris Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. It was the beginning of the Ottoman Turkish government’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey; it was a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, by which time more than a million Armenians had been annihilated and expunged from their historic homeland. For Grigoris Balakian, himself condemned, it was also the beginning of a four-year ordeal during which he would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood.
Balakian sees his countrymen sent in carts, on donkeys, or on foot to face certain death in the desert of northern Syria. Many would not even survive the journey, suffering starvation, disease, mutilation, and rape, among other tortures, before being slaughtered en route. In these pages, he brings to life the words and deeds of survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the massacre process, and also of those few brave, righteous Turks, who, with some of their German allies working for the Baghdad Railway, resisted orders calling for the death of the Armenians. Miraculously, Balakian manages to escape, and his flight—through forest and over mountain, in disguise as a railroad worker and then as a German soldier—is a suspenseful, harrowing odyssey that makes possible his singular testimony.
Full of shrewd insights into the political, historical, and cultural context of the Armenian genocide—the template for the subsequent mass killings that have cast a shadow across the twentieth century and beyond—this memoir is destined to become a classic of survivor literature. Armenian Golgotha is sure to deepen our understanding of a catastrophic crime that the Turkish government, the Ottomans’ successor, denies to this day.
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all by Peter BalakianNote: They are reviewed in the order of the bookcovers. All of the books are by Peter Balakian (cited above).
The Burning Tigris
Synopsis:
Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Peter Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Young Turk government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling he also resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.
During the United States' ascension in the global arena at the turn of the twentieth century, America's humanitarian movement for Armenia was an important part of the rising nation's first epoch of internationalism.
Intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens came together to try to save the Armenians. The Burning Tigris reconstructs this landmark American cause that was spearheaded by the passionate commitments and commentaries of a remarkable case of public figures, including Julia Ward Howe, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Stone Blackwell, Stephen Crane, and Ezra Pound, as well as courageous missionaries, diplomats, and relief workers who often risked their lives.
Reply From Wilderness Island
Synopsis:
Book of Poems
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
Synopsis:
This edition brings back into print the classic memoir by the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who not only documented but also tried to stop the genocide of the Armenian people.
Originally published in 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror during the twentieth century: ethnic cleansing and genocide.
While he served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau witnessed the rise of a new nationalism in Turkey, one that declared "Turkey for the Turks."
He grew alarmed as he received reports from missionaries and consuls in the interior of Turkey that described the deportation and massacre of the Armenians.
The ambassador beseeched the U.S. government to intervene, but it refrained, leaving Morgenthau without official leverage.
His recourse was to appeal personally to the consciences of Ottoman rulers and their German allies; when that failed, he drew international media attention to the genocide and spearheaded private relief efforts.
June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
Synopsis:
For three decades, Peter Balakian's poetry has beenpraised widely in the United States and abroad. Writing in the Boston Globe, Marcie Hershman called Sad Days of Light "a piercingly elegant volume," and John Naughton in World Literature Today praised Dyer's Thistle as "a remarkable and profoundly visionary work." Now the poet whom James Dickey called "an extraordinary talent" gives us June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000, a discriminating selection from his first four books, with a group of startling new poems.
In book after book, Balakian has created a unique voice in American poetry -- one that is both personal and cosmopolitan. In sensuous, elliptical language, Balakian offers a textured poetry that is beautiful and haunting as it envelops an American grain, the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide, and the wired, discordant realities of contemporary life.
In his explorations of history, Balakian often deals with the transmission of trauma across generations in ways that bring daily American life into play with the dark frequencies of the past. The evolution of Balakian's form from volume to volume encompasses an expansive imagination, one always able to engage reality in its starkness, difficulty, and moments of revelation. June-tree is a stunning body of work by an original poet.
Ziggurat
Synopsis:
In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed June-tree, Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation.
Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with catastrophe and trauma, many of Balakian’s new poems wrestle with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11.
Whether reliving the building of the World Trade Towers in the inventive forty-three-section poem that anchors the book, walking the ruins of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, meditating on Andy Warhol’s silk screens, or considering the confluence of music, language, and memory, Balakian continues his meditations on history, as well as on the harshness and beauty of contemporary life, that his readers have enjoyed over the years.
In sensual, layered, and sometimes elliptical language, Balakian in Ziggurat explores absence, war, love, and art in a new age of American uncertainty.
Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
Synopsis:
The author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poet and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey.
He is shadowed by his relatives' carefully guarded memories of past trauma: the brutal Turkish extermination in 1915 of more than a million Armenians, including most of his maternal grandmother's family.
Balakian seamlessly interweaves personal and historical material to depict one young man's reclamation of his heritage and to scathingly indict the political forces that conspired to sweep under the rug the 20th century's first genocide.
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by Dagmar Herzog (no photo)Synopsis:
Tracing sexual violence in Europe's twentieth century from the Armenian genocide to Auschwitz and Algeria to Bosnia, this pathbreaking volume expands military history to include the realm of sexuality. Examining both stories of consensual romance and of intimate brutality, it also contributes significant new insights to the history of sexuality.
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by Richard G. HovannisianSynopsis:
The Armenian Genocide that began in World War I, during the drive to transform the plural Ottoman Empire into a monoethnic Turkey, removed a people from its homeland and erased most evidence of their three-thousand-year-old material and spiritual culture. For the rest of this century, changing world events, calculated silence, and active suppression of memory have overshadowed the initial global outrage and have threatened to make this calamity "the forgotten genocide" of world history.
This volume squarely confronts the denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government, which has expended considerable political and financial resources to repress the facts surrounding this event and even enlisted American and European pseudo-academics to rationalize the issue.
Fourteen leading scholars from the United States, Canada, France, England, Germany, and Israel here examine the Armenian Genocide from a variety of perspectives to refute those efforts and show how remembrance and denial have shaped perceptions of the event.
Many of the chapters draw on archival records and court proceedings to review the precursors and process of the genocide, examine German complicity, and share the responses of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.
Other contributions consider the impact of the event on Jews before and during the Holocaust; the role of memoirs, oral histories, and literature; the various manifestations of denial; and the contest between remembrance and denial in the academic arena.
Public awareness of this tragic event has now been heightened by studies of both comparative genocide and the Armenian Genocide itself. Remembrance and Denial shows that although rationalization of theArmenian Genocide is far more advanced than denial of the Holocaust, strong similarities exist in the approaches and strategies of the deniers. It seeks redress for eighty years of silence and stakes out a position that will be difficult to deny.
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Arnold Joseph ToynbeeSynopsis:
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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by Vartan GregorianIn this humorous, learned, and moving memoir, Vartan Gregorian recounts his journey from an impoverished childhood as a Christian Armenian in Muslim Tabriz to cultured citizen of the world. Gregorian's odyssey begins in an obscure poor quarter of a provincial city (thought by some to be the location of the Garden of Eden).
Childhood centered on his brilliant, beloved, illiterate grandmother who taught him so much, the beauty of Church, school, American movies, and the larger world he read about in his borrowed books.
From there, he continued on to a Beirut lycée, Stanford University, and the presidencies of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and Carnegie Corporation.
He tells us that education is an openness to everything, and describes his public and private life as one education after another. This is a love story about life
I actually conduct fieldwork in Armenia every year...a beautiful country.
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Your post is very accurate and we appreciate it. And of course you are welcome.
Bentley wrote: "Do you - what type of fieldwork do you do? Do you have any images you can post?"I'm actually a Paleolithic archaeologist. Here are a couple photos:
1. A shot of Mt. Aragats
2. And a shot of the Debed River canyon, where we conduct excavations (in the northeastern part of the country)
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The other picture is gorgeous. The Debed River Canyon. Thank you.
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It is my pleasure, it is a wonderful country for archaeology. I look forward to reading about and discussing the country's history (and, dare I say, prehistory) with everyone.
Charles wrote: "It is my pleasure, it is a wonderful country for archaeology. I look forward to reading about and discussing the country's history (and, dare I say, prehistory) with everyone."Thank you for sharing. Indeed -- a beautiful country,
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So in other words,
The People in Between: A Cyprus Odyssey
Note: Historical Fiction
or if the book happened to be a novel and not non fiction (like in the case of message 32)
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Note: Novel
Once you edit 32 I will remove the above. We are primarily a non fiction and history group and that is why we have to spell out the difference. I know you mentioned that in the first four words of your review but we like it to stand out.
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Martyred Armenia
by Fa'iz El-Ghusein (no picture)Synopsis
An eye witness, narrative account of the historically contentious but now largely recognised acts of genocide against Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1917.
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by Fa'iz El-Ghusein (no photo)Synopsis:
An eye witness, narrative account of the historically contentious but now largely recognised acts of genocide against Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1917.
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You have the title in Bold which you have done correctly
Then you skip one blank line
Then the citation - which you are pretty close on - but instead of (no picture) - we say when there is no author's photo (no photo)
Then we skip one blank line which you did.
Then we type Synopsis: and we make that word bold Synopsis:
Notice that you did not bold the word Synopsis and you are missing the colon:
Then skip a line which you did
Then the synopsis itself.
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by Manoug Somakian (no photo)Synopsis:
This work traces the emergence of the "Armenian Question" through an account of the Great Power interests in the region, including Russian Imperial expansion, the geopolitical and strategic concerns of Britain, France and Germany, and the major stakes of the Great Powers in the Ottoman economy. Somakian gives a vivid account of the rise of Armenian nationalism and radical politics, and of Armenian support for the overthrow of Abdul Hammid II in 1908 and the victory of the Young Turks. He uses this historical context to explore the growing hostility towards Armenians in the First World War, and shows how they came to be regarded as a dangerous fifth column and subjected to forced population movements and one of the most brutal genocides of the 20th century.
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Sounds like it might be interesting, but the price is a bit steep.
That's very interesting. I think I'll take a look at the book.
I took out the 'sample' and it starts with Britain so I have to wonder how much time he spends on Armenia. I love Britain, but it's Armenia I need to know more about.
I decided to go ahead and order it. Am almost done with the Britain part which is quite interesting, especially if you are interested in the discovery of Richard III's bones in Leicester. More when I finish the book.
I finished the book. It has some really interesting facts about both countries. I just wish he had included some pictures, especially for Armenia. It's well-worth reading, but when you know so little it's difficult to absorb all he is saying. Armenia has had so much heartbreak in its history that it deserves more than this book was able to give it.
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Source: Getty
Author is PAUL STRONSKI
Armenia is at a turning point. The economy remains troubled, the population is growing tired of its politicians and their decisionmaking, and the security situation in and around the Caucasus has deteriorated, as was most visibly seen in the April 2016 Four-Day War with Azerbaijan. In fact, a series of events beyond Yerevan’s control, combined with missteps of its own making, has exposed a widening chasm between the population at large and the ruling elite. The old social contract, in which the population accepted limited democratic choice and a struggling economy in exchange for security, is eroding.
Remainder of article:
http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/12/...
Source: Carnegie Endowment of International Peace
Note: Beautiful image
More:
by Thomas de Waal (no photo)
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The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (other topics)Empires in Conflict: Armenia and the Great Powers, 1912-1920 (other topics)
Martyred Armenia (other topics)
Martyred Armenia (other topics)
The Road to Home: My Life and Times (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Thomas de Waal (other topics)Manoug Somakian (other topics)
Fa'iz El-Ghusein (other topics)
Fa'iz El-Ghusein (other topics)
Vartan Gregorian (other topics)
More...
This thread will focus on Armenia.