Latest news with #ArmenianGenocide
The Onion
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Onion
Hacked Elmo Account Posts Antisemitic Messages
Popular Muppet character Elmo's verified X account was hijacked, resulting in the posting of antisemitic and racist content before it was secured. What do you think? 'How am I supposed to explain to my child that Elmo doesn't use two-factor authorization?' Colton Horn, Rottweiler Advocate 'I still haven't forgiven him for the hateful comments he made about the letter 'G.'' Paolo Ferreira, Margarita Innovator 'I still remember when Bananas In Pajamas denied the Armenian Genocide.' Bella Tucker, Fruit Photographer
Balkan Insight
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Balkan Insight
Armenia's precarious position on Iran
June 26, 2025 - Sossi Tatikyan - Articles and Commentary Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visiting the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran in July 2024. Photo: Press release from the Office of Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Relations between Armenia and Israel have been limited primarily because Israel maintains a strategic alliance with Azerbaijan. Israel serves as one of Azerbaijan's main military suppliers, a role that has been pivotal in Azerbaijan's victory in the 2020 Second Karabakh War, subsequent military offensives against Armenia resulting in the occupation of over 200 square kilometers of its border areas in 2021–2022, and the military conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. This alliance has created an environment of mistrust, limiting Armenian-Israeli cooperation. Israel has also exploited the issue of the Armenian Genocide by simultaneously refusing to officially recognize it while at the highest levels of leadership invoking it as a political tool against Turkey to deter criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza. Armenia on its turn recognized Palestine in 2024. Conversely, Armenia has recently strengthened ties with the United States, formalized through a formal strategic partnership agreement signed by the outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2025. While scepticism initially emerged within Armenian society regarding whether the Trump administration would commit to its implementation, this uncertainty has been dispelled. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other prominent American officials publicly reaffirmed the agreement's validity, signalling continued support for strengthening US–Armenian relations. Several US delegations and interagency teams have visited Armenia in recent months to follow up on the implementation of the Strategic Partnership Agreement, supporting Armenia's broader objectives of diversifying its security partnerships, the civilian use of nuclear energy through small modular reactors, and thus reducing its longstanding dependence on Russia. Armenia and the US have also conducted the joint 'Eagle Partner' military exercises in 2023 and 2024. Despite their fundamentally different political and ideological systems, Armenia and Iran share certain regional interests that have fostered pragmatic cooperation. Armenia has embraced democratic governance and a commitment to human rights. It also maintains a secular political system, while holding the historical distinction of being the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion. In contrast, Iran is an Islamic authoritarian state in which the religious authority is deeply embedded in the structure of political power. Iran's regional posture is shaped by stigmatization and isolation by the West and economic sanctions. As regional powers compete over the future of connectivity in the South Caucasus, Iran has emerged as a key actor providing an implicit security buffer for Armenia amid Azerbaijan's contentious demand for an extraterritorial corridor through Syunik. The contrasting visions represented by the proposed 'Zangezur Corridor,' Armenia's 'Crossroads for Peace' initiative, and the Iran–Azerbaijan 'Aras Corridor' underscore broader geopolitical rivalries and competing interests over the modalities of regional transport routes. Azerbaijan's notion of a 'Zangezur Corridor' refers to its demand for establishing an extraterritorial route through Armenia's Syunik province to connect mainland Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave. The project is backed by both Russia and Turkey: Russia supports the establishment of such a corridor under the control of its Federal Security Service (FSB), viewing it as a means to circumvent western sanctions. Turkey, in turn, envisions the corridor as a key component of its broader pan-Turkic or pan-Turan aspirations, linking the Turkic world through contiguous territory. This notion leaves Armenia in a blockade and threatens its territorial integrity. Armenia's project 'Crossroads for Peace' envisions opening regional transportation routes, crossing its territory under its national sovereignty and reduced customs procedures, including from Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, expecting to use other regional communications in exchange. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested that Armenia could become part of the Middle (Trans-Caspian) Corridor, positioning it as a key transit hub between Europe and Asia. However, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev swiftly dismissed the proposal, publicly rejecting any plans to include Armenia in the Middle Corridor framework. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has recently discussed Armenia's vision with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, seeking to convince him that the 'Crossroads of Peace' could also serve Turkey's regional economic interests. Iran, on the other hand, has shown little enthusiasm for the project. These divergent models of connectivity reflect deeper strategic orientations: Armenia advocates for cooperative, sovereignty-respecting solutions, while Azerbaijan, supported by Russia and Turkey, pursues a coercive and unilateral approach aimed at asserting regional hegemony. The Azerbaijan-Iran Aras Corridor is an infrastructure project under construction along the Aras River, that connects mainland Azerbaijan to its exclave Nakhchivan via Iranian territory – bypassing Armenia. It reflects the cooperation between Azerbaijan and Iran, and serves as a strategic alternative to Azerbaijan's demanded extraterritorial route through Armenia. However, it also diminishes the relevance of transit options through Armenia in regional planning. Iran opposes the so-called Zangezur corridor, viewing it as a threat to its 44 kilometres-long northern border with Armenia, as it provides Tehran with direct access to the South Caucasus and serves as a buffer against regional isolation by Turkey and Azerbaijan for both Iran and Armenia. At the same time, faced with growing risks, Iran may be tempted to soften its red line on the so-called 'Zangezur Corridor' in the hope of reducing Azerbaijan's support for Israel or securing backing from Russia. Given the blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey, Armenia's access to international markets remains constrained. In this context, Iran and Georgia serve as Armenia's only land gateways to the outside world. Iran provides Armenia with vital connectivity to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia – including growing strategic and trade ties with India, now an important military supplier and trade partner. The viability of Armenia's border with Iran is therefore indispensable to its economic security and strategic diversification. Since the Trump administration took office, Azerbaijan has reportedly tried to leverage its close relationship with Israel to secure tacit approval or at least minimize US opposition to its potential military actions aimed at creating the 'Zangezur corridor' through Armenia by force. Nevertheless, senior US officials, including Rubio, have publicly noted a 'real risk' of an Azerbaijani invasion of Armenia, emphasizing that the US is actively working to prevent such an escalation. This stance combined with the opposition of Iran and the presence of the EU civilian observation mission in Armenia, effectively serve as security deterrents against a potential Azerbaijani military offensive. The defence of Armenia's territorial integrity represents a rare point of convergence among the US, the EU, and Iran, despite their broader geopolitical disagreements. A further risk stemming from the Iran–Israel–US conflict is the erosion of the global rules-based order. The normalization of unilateral military offensives, especially those launched under the pretext of 'preventive war' which lacks clear justification under international law, sets dangerous precedents. When such actions are driven by ambitions of regional hegemony, they pose an even greater threat. For a small state like Armenia, which has recently been subjected to cross-border attacks and coercion by Azerbaijan, these developments represent a serious and enduring risk to its security and sovereignty. A critical dimension of the Iran–Israel conflict's impact on Armenia is the potential risk of nuclear disaster. Military targeting of nuclear facilities could trigger catastrophic regional consequences and is therefore prohibited under international law. Any attempt to legitimize such actions also sets a highly dangerous precedent. Given Armenia's proximity to Iran and its small territorial size, this risk further heightens its vulnerability, reinforcing the urgency of returning to negotiations on Iran's nuclear deal. Looking ahead, potential 'regime change' in Iran could trigger profound regional instability, beyond a change in governance system. Iran's multi-ethnic composition includes approximately 20 million ethnic Azerbaijanis residing near the Armenian border, with a history of irredentist sentiments promoted by both Iranian and Azerbaijani nationalist actors at different times. Any future political upheaval could risk the fragmentation of Iran's multi-ethnic structure and destabilization of its border regions. Iran's Armenian community, estimated at around 70,000 people and recognized as a religious minority under the Iranian constitution, may face increased security risks. In such a scenario, a potential refugee influx into Armenia could pose both economic and hybrid challenges for the country. Ultimately, Armenia faces a strategic dilemma as it seeks to balance neutrality and multi-alignment amid growing regional and global polarization. It relies on both Iran and the United States as de facto security deterrents against Azerbaijani aggression. Balancing relations between these two actors, who are adversaries in the Iran-Israel conflict, places Armenia in a vulnerable position. Maintaining neutrality may become increasingly difficult as regional tensions escalate, and Armenia risks becoming a collateral victim of the broader Iran–Israel–US rivalry. Sossi Tatikyan holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School, has been a NATO Defense College Partnership for Peace Research Fellow, and is currently a PhD Researcher in Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her main research topics are: Ethnic conflicts, cognitive and information warfare and lawfare, Euro-Atlantic integration, and security dilemmas of small states. New Eastern Europe is a reader supported publication. Please support us and help us reach our goal of $10,000! We are nearly there. Donate by clicking on the button below. Armenia, Armenian foreign policy, Azerbaijan, Iran, Israel, South Caucasus, turkey, USA
Mada
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mada
The indigenous, the current and the art of the Sharjah Biennial
The Sharjah creek runs parallel to the old Sharjah market. While searching for freshly grinded turmeric for a friend, we came across Photo Kegham, quietly nestled between the shops. Photo Kegham, part of the 16th Sharjah Biennial, is a reproduction of Gaza's first photo studio, originally located on Gaza City's central Omar al-Mukhtar street. The installation draws from an archive preserved by artist Kegham Djeghalian, grandson of Kegham Djeghalian Sr., who founded the studio. Born in Anatolia, Djeghalian Sr. fled with his family to Syria during the Armenian Genocide, later moving to Jerusalem, where he trained in photography, before eventually settling in Gaza and establishing Photo Kegham in 1944. Djeghalian curated the content of three boxes of his grandfather's negatives, revealing an intimate portrayal of everyday life in Gaza. Before its current iteration at the Sharjah Biennial, the project was presented in various forms: at Rawabet Art Space in Cairo (2021), the Institut français d'Égypte (2024), the Photographers' Gallery in London (2024), and Fonderie Kugler in Geneva (2025) — each offering a distinct curatorial approach, beginning with Cairo. At the biennial, a selection of the photographs are separately exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum's main venue, restaging glimpses of lives once lived in Gaza. Each photograph carries with it a lineage of histories and experiences to be imagined through the captivity of the image. But then there is the shop outside, its stark presence signaling disappearance more than return. The literal apparition of Gaza in Sharjah is disorienting. The architectural reconstruction of Photo Kegham's facade is striking — subtly embedded within the fabric of Sharjah's old market, yet unmistakably staged. In contrast to the generative, layered substance of the photographs in the museum, the careful replication of the studio verges on fetishism. The tension between art as spectacle and its political potential is a defining and perhaps inevitable feature of the Sharjah Biennial. Biennials amplify the question through the density of artistic production, but also, perhaps, augment the promise: will this profusion of art sharpen our attention? Will it unsettle us? Will it reorient our perception? Or does the very inclusion in the biennial risk neutralizing art, muting its performative potential? Does the biennial open up a platform for possibility, or does it risk becoming a structure of containment? What, if anything, allows art to exceed the terms of its exhibition? The curators of the 16th Sharjah Biennial — Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz — pose a perennial question: 'What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on?' The answer, for many participating artists, lies somewhere in indigenous roots. Over 40 of the biennial's 190 participating artists center indigeneity in their work, celebrating marginalized cultures of origin while mourning erasure and dispossession. Some works present a spectacle of indigeneity, a quest for visibility, a form of signage within the binds of a contemporary art biennial. Others stage indigeneity to pose questions or offer propositions. While the former tend to perform a predictable role of political responsibility within the exhibition, the latter manage to transcend its confines. One of the works that depart from indigeneity to ask political questions is Hylozoic/Desires, the mutli-media performance duo of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Their film, The Hedge of Halomancy (2024), features Mayalee, a woman performing rituals using the same salt extracted by the British from the native Great Indian Hedge in the late 1800s. The Hedge of Halomancy contrasts rare archival findings documenting the salt extractions, in which its protagonist appears only marginally as a 'dancing girl' or a courtesean, with the fictional account in which she performs a salt ritual. The duo also present a series of staged photographs from the film's imagined world. One of them, titled عراف الهالة (The Halomancer), portrays a diviner who seeks insight by casting salt into the air. For the duo, what appears in the archive as a courtesan resisting the loss of her right to salt becomes a woman enacting a ritual. We don't know what made this piece stand out in its wrestling with the native's right — is it the rigor of the research and its layered, speculative morphing? the quality of the form that both reveals and withholds? Perhaps not knowing is better. The biennial is dizzying, with countless works that reenact indigeneity in a quest to make the native visible or to declare the plight of the indigenous. This presence demarcated the politics of this edition, yet it did not pass without the tension of being curiously housed in Sharjah, where indigeneity is neither clearly defined nor synonymous with marginalization. But the oddities of Sharjah's homemaking for the art world is nothing new. Sri Lankan artist Rajni Perera paints Lover not a Fighter (2024), which takes inspiration from traditional oral rituals suppressed by the colonization of his home country. American artist Sky Hopinka from the Ho-Chunk Nation of the Midwest mounts a three-channel road trip video titled In Dreams and Autumn (2021), where they use Chinuk Wawa, an indigenous language, as a 'means of return.' Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia, presents Operation Buffalo, an installation that opens the Hamriyah coastal site with shimmering glass pieces suspended from the sky like atmosphere — the work is a spectral prelude to this liminal industrial shoreline north of Sharjah, one of the Biennial's key off-site venues. Their technique of making gestures to the mushroom clouds left by nuclear tests in the Maralinga desert of South Australia in the 1950s — tests that contaminated land inhabited by indigenous communities for years after. Hopinka's images are scenic, Perera's paintings adroit, and Scarce's installation spectacular. Yet their aesthetic craft somewhat lock their political potential, they are often consumed in their exhibitionism. In a way, interventions like Fabio Morais's murals unintentionally respond to the dilemma of aesthetics dispersing political potential. The Brazilian artist turns aesthetics into gesture, placing discourse at the forefront. One of his murals reads: 'We fulfilled pacts and agreements, but suddenly…' — a sentence that repeats and then fragments into scattered letters. Morais's nod is to the shaky foundation of the textual tradition of the law, but the erosion he evokes could just as easily belong to contemporary art. One of this year's biennial exhibition sites is the decommissioned Al-Qasimiya School, renovated in 2019 by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Vacant of schooling, yet full of its traces — educational signage and classrooms encircling a playground. It was one of the most magical spaces we encountered. We wonder if it's a kind of nostalgia for a school that has not yet been, a space of childhood emptied of indoctrination, where art takes on the role of pedagogy, while admitting to its vulnerability, its shakiness. The school holds one of the works most resonant with us, and with anyone grappling with being an incapacitated witness to Israel's genocide in Gaza, a genocide unfolding in intimate spatial and psychic proximity, the stuff of hauntology. Gazan artists Mohamed al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar were invited to exhibit works they managed to rescue during their escape from Israeli airstrikes on the Bureij camp in Deir al-Balah. Hawajri shows several of his inked bone-based sculptures alongside a vivid, staggering painting of their flight from war — a scene also depicted in Mattar's works and in a video by the two artists' eldest son, Ahmed. Their younger children, Mahmoud and Lea, contribute too: Mahmoud with crafted puppets whose wide eyes stare back at us, and Lea with drawings of houses, birds and suns, often delicately adorned with pasted bougainvillea petals. The exhibition does not change our position as incapacitated witnesses to the genocide. If anything, it throws into sharper relief the dissonance of our daily lives as politically engaged, middle-class cultural workers — lives that, in moments like this, feel unavoidably complicit, even hedonistic. But this exhibition specifically offers a slight reprieve from the burden of consuming the spectacle of art in the context of genocide. It felt like a kind of homecoming. One can barely escape seeing the pieces as both artworks and survivors — self-contained objects in a spectacle, and at once witnesses to and traces of their conditions of making. These are works that carry more than the intention of art; their fleeing journey is now part of them. They bear the messiness of staying alive amid genocide — the horror not yet rendered legible, the fugitivity they aspire to. When writing critique, we are often invited to learn how to read works immanently, but in this art space, mounted in a bygone school, we find ourselves unlearning the rules. Each work gestures toward something beyond itself. They are bearers of their own negativity. Palestinian singer and sound artist Bint Mbareh presented a new sound work titled What's Left? (2025) at Qasimiya as well. She assembled a choir as a communal act, summoning the air it takes to vibrate herself away from the heaviness of genocide through singing. The piece draws on her research into communal singing practices around rainfall in Palestine — traditions that resist colonial narratives of water scarcity. Like other ancestry-bound artists in the biennial, Bint Mbareh works with revolutionary songs passed down across generations. Among them is the iconic سـاعة التحرير دقّت (The hour of liberation has arrived), featured in Jewish-born Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Sorour's film about the Dhofar rebellion against British colonizers in Oman. Layered and embodied, yet deeply contemporary, the work manages to flip the game of nostalgia. And just as we might ask the exhausted question, does nostalgia impede urgency?, What's Left? seems to offer another: Can sharpening our gaze on what we are nostalgic for liberate it from impotence? But the perils of nostalgia are often evoked in sound — and the double LP on vinyl Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2025), also presented in Qasimiya, got to us. We were drawn in by a magnetic remix of a chant that always managed to tremble through us: علي وعلي وعلي الصوت اللي بيهتف ما بيموت (Raise, raise, raise your voice; those who chant do not die). The remix, by Ruanne Abu Rahme and Bassel Abbas, stems from their ongoing performance May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth (2020 – ongoing), and features music commissioned from DJ Haram, Julmud, Makimakkuk, Muqataa, Freddie June, among others. The LP is part of a broader show, Speaking with the Dead, curated by Palestinian writer and curator Adam HajYahia, and undertaken by Bilnaes, or In the Negative, an 'adisciplinary' platform that also intervenes in how artistic collaborations are distributed. HajYahia engages the question of debt as a discursive device indexing colonial history and an ongoing capitalist condition. With it, he brings together Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça's raw scribbles, Asian-American artist Martin Wong's bestial painting of White Cypress, Palestinian artists Dina Mimi's montage of images of resistance for liberation and Muhannad al-Azzeh's embodied facial sketches of Palestinian imprisonment. There is nothing poetic or complete in this show — it is precisely 'in the negative,' and this is where its authority lies: in its wrestling with art forms that exceed the totality of discourse, and with discourse that floods art with its certainty. Many artists in Sharjah worked with textiles, and each time we encountered these works, it felt like a hug. Isn't clothing a form of hugging? In Qasimiya, the school's central grounds are embraced by recycled cotton bedsheets, pillowcases, burial cloth and other fabrics — including silk and chiffon — by Emirati artist Hashel al-Lamki. One hanging cloth even had some questions for us: Were you the reason behind someone's tears? Were you the cause of an animal's distress? Did you torture a plant and forget to give it water? The work's statement claims to summon wisdom. Its presence amid classrooms housing different artworks evokes the kind of knowledge weaving that once threaded through schools. In Dhaid, a more distant oasis in Sharjah, the biennial extended into a palace, an old clinic, and a farm — spaces where the artworks seemed to take up more room. We walked into a formidable pool-like architectural installation and recognized Mahmoud Khaled, a compatriot and member of our community in Egypt. In Pool of Perspective – 2030 (2025), he stages a voided future as a site of malfunction, referencing the mega-national construction projects back home, laden with the promise of futurity. This illusory future is embedded in the structure through various forms of optical play. We also found Wael Shawky's I am Hymns of the New Temples (2023) and enjoyed a fragment of his theatrical production crafted through tableaus that fantasize the real. The work belongs to a similar repertoire of films Shawky makes, using similar form to stage a different protagonist: In this case, it's the story of the ruins of Pompeii. On our way out, we stopped at the farm in Dhaid, where musicians and sound artists composed with trees, waterways and other lifeforms in the deserted oasis. Among them were Joe Namy — whose main work Dub Plant, tracing connections between radio and agriculture, we sadly missed — Başak Günak, Sandy Chamoun, Hauptmeier|Recker, Berke Can Özcan and Sary Moussa. It was magical. Many of the works predictably engaged with ecological questions, especially around resources. Italian Libyan artist Adelita Husney-Bey uses art and pedagogy to think with water about scarcity, famine and colonialism. Brazilian artist Luana Vitra imagines attraction and desire between minerals as a refusal of extraction for profit. Filipina-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang takes us to the curious worlds of pearl diving and industrialization in the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China. From the Gulf, most of the art deals with similar questions. Saudi artist Ayman Zedani spotlights an ancient fungi, recovered in Saudi Arabia, in an experimental film about its violent extraction — an echo of the oil industry. Kuwaiti artist Monira al-Qadiri presents an oil refinery that shimmers as both metropolis and sci-fi city. Bahraini artist Mariam Alnoaimi collaborates with fishermen and biologists to explore the Gulf's waters not as sites of trade and transfer, but as lived environments. An unconventional work in this Gulf tapestry is Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah, who turns more directly to the everyday. Her You Ask, We Answer (2024) — a massive canvas sprawling across several rooms — brims with images, paintings, and collage. It's playful, ceaseless, whimsical and doesn't care to exceed its own aesthetic momentum. On the short drive back to Ajman — just 15 minutes, though it often feels like crossing into another world — we tried to recall what stayed with us. The smallest of the seven emirates, Ajman hasn't caught up with the global integration spree that animates the UAE's vision. It's a rougher edged, laid-back space, where labor is visible and contemporary art is absent. In a reading group on Aesthetic Theory, we learned that art must turn against itself. That line returned to us as we revised the show into memory. We imagined fugitive artworks following us into Ajman. This is probably the art that turns against itself.
Sky News AU
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Armenian voter frustration with major parties could shift Bennelong outcome
The Armenian-Australian community's frustration with major parties could influence the outcome in the key seat of Bennelong, according to Armenian National Committee executive director Michael Kolokossian. Mr Kolokossian said Armenian voters in the electorate are increasingly frustrated with both major parties' supposed failure to recognise the Armenian genocide. "When you have a swing seat like Benalong and a large Armenian-Australian community where even a few hundred votes could tip the balance, there is an expectation at an election time that on the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, that the prime minister, or for that matter the opposition leader, would use the words Armenian Genocide in their statement, which was delivered to our community only a week ago on the 24th of April," Mr Kolokossian told Sky News Australia. "The community is rightly frustrated after years of silence, and that frustration is risking the Armenian-Australian community's vote being spread to minor parties. "So Armenian Australians are rightly quite angry about the decision from both the prime minister and the opposition leader."
Forbes
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
We Need Serious Leadership On Genocide Prevention
A picture taken on April 29, 2018, shows a visitor looking at victims' portraits at the Kigali ... More Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. (Photo credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images) In the United States, April is designated as Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month and is aimed at commemorating and raising awareness about genocides that occurred in the past, including the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan Genocide. April was the obvious choice for this commemoration, as past decades have seen significant atrocities being perpetrated in this month. This is also why several genocides are being further commemorated during the month of April. April 7 marks the UN International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It was established to remember members of the Tutsi community, an African ethnic group, who were killed or injured in the atrocities. In 1994, as many as one million people – overwhelmingly Tutsi, but also Hutu and others who opposed the genocide – were systematically killed in 100 days of the atrocities, and thousands more were injured. Among those, it is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were subjected to systematic sexual violence. These statistics send a strong message. The speed of the killings confirms that the atrocities were planned. The implication is that the destruction of the Tutsi people, an ethnic minority group, was the intention. April 24 marks the Armenian Genocide Memorial Day, a day to remember the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, some over 1.5 million Armenians were deported and subjected to horrific atrocities. The main atrocities occurred between 1915 and 1916 and 1920 and 1923, when the Ottoman Empire invaded parts of Armenia, subjecting Armenians to further mass killings. The day is marked only by a handful of states globally. This may, April 24 also mark the Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest armed Jewish uprising during the Second World War. On April 19, 1943, a group of young men led by Mordechai Anielewicz fought back Nazi troops who entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its inhabitants to concentration camps. Over the years, the Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month has also been used to shine a light on ongoing atrocities globally and the serious risk of atrocities. Despite the legal obligation to prevent genocide enshrined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) and the political commitment of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), atrocity crimes are too common and are rarely addressed with comprehensive responses. The duty to prevent genocide is never triggered, as states continue to shy away from identifying the serious risk of genocide and acting upon it. The R2P has not delivered palpable change either. Commenting on the 20th anniversary of the R2P, Professor the Hon. Gareth Evans and Dr. Jennifer Welsh, Co-Chairs of the International Advisory Board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, stated that: '20 years later – with all too obvious horrors and civilian suffering still occurring in Gaza, Sudan, the DRC, Myanmar and elsewhere – it is clear that R2P is still at best a work in progress. It is time to reflect on what we have learned about preventing and responding to the atrocity crimes outlined in the World Summit Outcome Document, and to focus on how we can do better.' With every situation of atrocity crimes perpetrated globally, it is clear that we urgently need serious leadership on genocide prevention. In recent years, the US played a crucial role here, especially with the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, an act aimed at improving the US response to mass atrocities. It is yet unclear what President Trump's plans are on the issue. As it stands, it appears that genocide and atrocity crimes prevention do not appear to be a priority for the Trump Administration. Reportedly, with the planned major overhaul of the US State Department, the Office of Global Criminal Justice, which works on the US response to international crimes, is to be subjected to cuts. Further changes have not been confirmed, nor how this is going to affect the US's ability to play its important role in atrocity prevention. Genocide and atrocity prevention are a matter of national security. Such work requires resources, capacity building and long-term commitment. It is key that genocide and atrocity prevention become a priority for this new administration and help to deliver the change that is urgently needed.
