In Azerbaijan, participants in the 44-day war against Artsakh complain of poverty and lack of assistance from the authorities.

One of the veterans, Naid Mammedov, says: “What I have are these medals, these diplomas, you didn’t give anything else, can I eat them?”

“You announced mobilization, I participated voluntarily, I did it for the country, what did you do for me, you didn’t give a dime after your return? How to pay for electricity and gas? ”- said the war veteran.

“Every day one veteran hangs himself, commits suicide, throws himself off a bridge,” he notes.

“These are my medals, I don’t want to, I give them to you, give me money for the trip, let me leave this country, I don’t want to live in Azerbaijan,” the veteran says.

“Why do I need all this, how do I pay for electricity and gas? In the land of oil and gas, I shouldn’t have any problems. We can’t swallow everything, ”the war veteran complained.

By Jessica Bateman
Chania, Greece

When a Syrian stonemason and his family were granted asylum in Greece last year they immediately made their way to the island of Crete – completing a journey begun by their great-grandparents 130 years ago.

Entering a small shop in Chania, on Crete’s north-west coast, Ahmed began to introduce himself. The owner looked at him open-mouthed. He understood what Ahmed was saying, but some of the words he was using were unfamiliar and old-fashioned, and others he didn’t understand at all. It was as though Ahmed had arrived not just from Syria, but from another age.

“He could not believe that someone was still speaking the old language today,” says Ahmed.

Ahmed, 42, was speaking in a version of the Cretan dialect he had learned from his parents, growing up in a village in northern Syria in the 1970s and 80s. His parents had spent all their lives in Syria – but some members of the previous generation had been born in Crete and, living together as exiles, they had kept Cretan culture alive.

“We learned Arabic at school but always spoke Greek at home,” says Ahmed. Children learned Greek dances and recited short Cretan poems known as mantiades. The parents passed on traditional Cretan recipes, such as fried snails, and intermarriage with the Syrian population was rare. Ahmed’s wife, Yasmine, is also from a Cretan family.

Ahmed’s father’s parents were forced to leave Crete in the 1890s as the Ottoman Empire weakened. The island had been part of the empire for two centuries and roughly a quarter of the population, including Ahmed’s ancestors, had converted to Islam. But uprisings in the late 19th Century resulted in the expulsion of the Muslim population.

Some went to Turkey, Libya, Lebanon or Palestine, but Ahmed’s family travelled to al-Hamidiyah, a village in Syria established for the refugees by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

In later years its 10,000 inhabitants would keep in contact with modern Crete by watching Greek television via satellite and occasionally villagers would travel back to the island to work.

“There was always a fragment of Crete in our hearts,” says Ahmed.

“Everyone knew exactly which village everyone else’s family came from. Our grandparents would say how beautiful Crete was and how they had everything they needed there.

“We always wanted to visit, but never had the chance.”

Then Syria’s civil war came, and left them little choice.

Ahmed’s sisters, Amina, Faten and Latifa, and their families were the first to leave. Ahmed himself struggled to find work after suffering from a slipped disk and had difficulty scraping together the money to pay a people smuggler. But finally he, Yasmine and their four children – Bilal, 14, Reem, 12, Mustafa, nine, and four-year-old Fatima – set off for Greece in the spring of 2017.

The journey took three months and included a perilous boat trip from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos, on a dinghy that almost sank. When the family attended their first asylum application interview, Ahmed purposely placed his finger next to his distinctively Cretan surname – Tarzalakis – when asked to show his passport.

“He started shouting to his colleagues, ‘Look, look, there’s a Cretan here! Come and see!'” Ahmed says. “Everyone started crowding round out of curiosity.”

Although many Greeks were aware that Cretan enclaves existed overseas, they were still intrigued by the Tarzalakis family dialect. Their accents are typically Cretan, but a lot of the vocabulary they learned in Syria is no longer used either in Crete or mainland Greece.

“But with a bit of patience, we can understand each other,” says Ahmed. 

And although they speak the language they have never learned to read or write it, so they still needed assistance to fill out forms.

After a month on Lesbos, Ahmed and his family were granted asylum in August 2017. They immediately caught a boat to Crete, where Ahmed’s sisters, two cousins and their families, already living in the town of Chania, were waiting for them.

On arrival, Ahmed was immediately hospitalised, because of problems stemming from chronic epilepsy. Medical staff, amazed to hear the old dialect being spoken, called a reporter from the local paper.

“When I left hospital everyone in the town already knew me,” says Ahmed, whose family was settled in an apartment near Chania’s historic Venetian port.

“People would stop me in the street to ask questions about Syria and the war.

“They view us as Cretans that have returned.”

Ahmed then made a pilgrimage to his grandparents’ native village, Skalani, just outside the capital, Heraklion.

Walking down its streets, gazing at the shady tavernas and small stone houses, he felt goosebumps all over his body. Although it was his first time visiting the village, he’d been hearing about it all his life.

“I couldn’t find their exact houses, but the locals showed me the fields that the Muslim community would have worked on,” he says. 

Ahmed and his siblings have to tread carefully when looking into their family history. “I don’t want the people living there to think I’m trying to claim the land back,” says Ahmed’s brother-in-law, Mustafa.

The family is learning to read and write modern Greek and the children are enrolled in school. “We’re learning new phrases but we’ll still hold our own language close, because it’s part of who we are,” says Ahmed.

Although Chania had no Muslim community for more than a century, things are now changing. As well as the 25 members of Ahmed’s family, several hundred refugees from the Middle East have settled in the town over the past few years. The long-closed Ottoman mosque on the seafront is now used as an art gallery, so Muslims pray in rented rooms.

A recently-opened Arab supermarket sells imported goods, and Ahmed and his family enjoy eating a fusion of local and Syrian food, such as Greek salad, pitta bread, and hummus.

So far, Crete is not quite the land of milk and honey described by Ahmed’s grandparents. He’s grateful for financial assistance from the EU-funded Estia (Home) programme, run by the UNHCR, but says it’s not enough to bring up four children. The men in the family would like to set up a stonemasonry business and the women talk about doing bridal hairdressing, but that remains a goal for the future.

And although Ahmed appreciates the chance to experience life in his ancestors’ homeland, the circumstances that led him here make the experience bittersweet.

“When you are forced to leave the place you were born, you lose a part of yourself,” he says. 

“If it was safe for us to return to al-Hamidiyah, then I would. But I would like to keep ties with Crete and visit regularly.”

Photographs by Louiza Vradi

Alberto Camastra had never lived anywhere but Damascus. But as Syria’s war closed in around his family, Alberto’s long-dead grandfather – a man he had never met – offered a way out.

The PACE spring session started today, on the agenda of which the issue of preservation of cultural and religious values ​​was discussed. Naira Zohrabyan, a member of the Prosperous Armenia parliamentary group, spoke about Azerbaijani vandalism in Armenian settlements under the control of the Azerbaijani armed forces after the November 10 capitulation agreement, noting that in the 21st century, a fascist state desecrates and destroys Armenian cultural monuments. The woman personally instructs to remove all traces of Armenianness from the churches.

Naira Zohrabyan called on the Assembly to send an observation mission to the Armenian settlements under the control of Azerbaijan and to stop the cultural vandalism of the 21st century. The Armenian MP presented Ali’s anti-Armenian statements to the Assembly, noting that the Assembly should silence Ali, who considers Armenians dogs and dogs. In his speech, Zohrabyan said. “Dear Colleagues, Mrs. Kovacs, you have prepared a wonderful report on the importance of the protection of the identity, culture and religion of national minorities in Europe.

Yes, you are right. Preserving the identity of national minorities is an important issue today. However, the protection of human rights and the protection of cultural and religious values ​​are equally important in countries that have not yet been recognized. Today I will talk about Artsakh, most of which came under the control of Azerbaijan under the November 10 agreement. Today I will sound another alarm in connection with the destruction of centuries-old Armenian cultural monuments in Artsakh – churches, khachkars, monasteries, vandalism – and I will address our Assembly to form an observation mission, visit Armenian settlements under Azerbaijani control and see the state of Armenian cultural heritage. Immediately after the signing of the November 10 agreement, Azeri militants desecrated the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Shushi, desecrated the Green Hour Church in Shushi. Gabriel) The disappearance of the Holy Mighty Church. We all saw how Aliyev and his wife were instructing in front of the cameras to delete the Armenian letters from the Armenian churches. And all this is happening in the 21st century. Dear Colleagues, This report also speaks about incitements to ethnic hatred, and I will present to you the anti-Armenian and racist statements made by the President of Azerbaijan in the last few months, which have not been evaluated so far. “We will continue to expel those liars, the Armenians. For 30 years Artsakh has been in the hands of wild monsters, wild beasts, jackals. We have succeeded in isolating Armenia from all international and regional programs.

” These are Aliyev’s words. “The younger generation has grown up with hatred for the enemy, and the results of this war are the result of that upbringing,” Aliyev said at a March 5 congress of the New Azerbaijan Party. Another example. Aliyev’s famous words, “We will expel the Armenians like dogs,” and just like that, “Praise iti”, that is, expel them like dogs, they called their new production drones. Dear colleagues, In the Armenian settlements under the control of Azerbaijan, the Armenian cultural heritage, which is part of the world culture, is endangered: hundreds of churches, monasteries, sanctuaries, khachkars. The generation that grew up with hatred for Armenians desecrates those monuments with joyful screams and spreads the videos on social media. This vandalism must be stopped. Otherwise, it will be too late, as it was too late in the case of the destruction of medieval Armenian khachkars in the Jugha settlement of Nakhichevan, when while we were thinking what to do, the Azeris razed those unique monuments of world culture to the ground. ”

President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian together with Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan paid a working visit to Syunik Province on April 19.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the President’s Office, Armen Sarkissian visited one of the military positions, got acquainted with the living conditions of the servicemen and talked with them.

President Sarkissian awarded a group of servicemen for excellent service.

Armen Tatoyan noted that he has visited that positions a few times, where the servicemen carry out a really heroic duty in harsh conditions.

‘’You carry out your responsibilities best. Help each other, be vigilant and take care of your health. Remember your families, serve your motherland and help each other’’, President Sarkissian said, wishing all safe service and successful demobilization. ”Be sure, we are all thinking about you. Stay firm”, Sarkissian concluded.

The opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaksutyun (ARF-D) has announced its plans to join the campaign for possible parliamentary elections, expressing its commitment to oust the current government as a major evil to the country.

In a recently released statement, members of the party say they arrived at the decision at their 24th Supreme Assembly earlier today “after a consideration of the political and security-related situation in Armenia and an evaluation of the dominating sentiments and atmosphere in public life”. Also, the internal and external post-war challenges are cited as a major concern.

The ARF-D condemns the current authorities for attempts to ensure their self-reproduction through the process, highlighting the crucial role of pre-term elections for the preservation of the Armenian national identity and statehood.

It has reserved the decision-making authority to the ARF-D Supreme Body in Armenia, which will be responsible for determining the format of participation and a range of other technical issues.

The party also reiterates its call upon the Armenians to pursue the campaign towards unseating the current government (in case of any scenario), citing the safe future of the country as a pressing demand on their agenda.

We need the international community’s strong efforts to rapidly react to the recently inaugurated “Military Trophies Park” in Baku to have real guarantees that the enforcement of international law will be essentially protected, says Danièle Cazarian, a member of the French National Assembly representing the department of Rhône. 

In an interview with Tert.am, the French-Armenian politician addressed the global political players’ role in the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) peace process, focusing especially on her country’s efforts and expressing regret about the OSCE Minsk Group mission’s not quite effective work.  

“I regret to say that the OSCE Minsk Group did not work effectively. I sincerely hope France will urge and engage all the interested sides to find common ground for the captives’ return and the elimination of all forms of violence in Artsakh. The destruction of Armenian cultural heritage is the proof of Azerbaijan’s policy of pursuing ethnic cleansing. That is why, I think, international recognition is the only way towards ensuring the protection of Artsakh. And that is what the French parliament has actually represented,” she said. 

Commenting on the French authorities’ collaboration with Armenia, the lawmaker stressed her good working relations with the Armenian ambassador in Paris (and close contact with him like many colleagues from different political parties in France).  

“It is not anyway my responsibility to evaluate a foreign government’s work in France, but you may have no doubt that the mobilization of French citizens of Armenian descent was very effective in terms of raising awareness of Artsakh,” Cazarian added. 

She said she was terrified by the Azerbaijani authorities’ move to open the trophy park featuring mannequins of Armenian soldiers. “That too, constitutes a blatant violation of international treaties. Now that the war is over, Baku must immediately halt all the forms of provocation to demonstrate the kind of conduct that would be in line with the agreement signed in Moscow. To protect the enforcement of international law, we urgently need an abrupt reaction by the international community, including France and the EU. I officially asked the French foreign minister about the Armenian POWs’ return. And I will remain extremely vigilant when it comes to this very important issue,” she said.