VICKEN CHETERIAN

For now, Ankara failed to ensure its place on the negotiations table: the humanitarian cease-fire deal reached on the early hours of Saturday October 10, between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers mediated by Lavrov in Moscow, the four short points did not mention Turkey, and insisted on preserving the current OSCE format of negotiations.

The majority of Turks in Turkey have no idea about Azerbaijan, they do not know its people, history or culture. They hear about them from their TV screens only when war erupts. Still, they are certain about their deep friendship and strong ethnic solidarity with Azerbaijan, and their antagonism towards everything Armenian.

In fact, Turkish policy in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean is conditioned by the collapse of the regional security architecture, and power vacuum left behind.

Even at the height of the Karabakh war (1991-1994), there were no acts of violence among diaspora communities. Moreover, the scale, and the fact that it happened in numerous sites in a short time, shows there is a pattern developing

The Nile is not the only source of “water conflicts” in the Middle East. On social networks videos circulate of a near dry riverbed of Euphrates.

Today, the city is being conquered again. But from whom? There are no more Orthodox left – although the few remaining are still persecuted and victimized by the state...

To understand the dynamics of the Libyan conflict, it is important to consider the local belligerents as well as the logic of external interventions.

Midhat Pasha played a key role in bringing Abdul Hamid II to power, in the hope of establishing a constitutional monarchy. This was a pyrrhic victory: the sultan first declared the constitution only to suspend it soon after, and send Midhat once again away to the provinces, and later arrest him, exile him to Taif, and have him assassinated in prison.

At the end of the war, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated and the Ittihadist leaders escaped to Germany, Siruni came out of his hiding, and with few surviving intellectuals tried to re-establish a community that was mortally wounded.

The centre of global humanitarianism is Geneva, a small town in Switzerland. There you can find WHO headquarters, as well as UN’s OCHA, UNHCR, and the international Red Cross movement and many other international bureaucracies. Yet, Geneva is not the place where multilateral political decisions are taken.