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Candlelight Vigil [July 3, 2006] On Wednesday 28 June, over 100 Armenians from the Diaspora as well as the Republic assembled at 10pm in Yerevan's Republic Square to stage a candlelight vigil in support of the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans. The event was timed to coincide with the Senate confirmation hearing for Evans' replacement being held in Washington DC. According to the organizers of the vigil, images of the event were emailed to other demonstrators standing outside the hearings with yellow tape covering their mouths. A flyer in Armenian and English handed out in Yerevan stated that vigil was specifically staged to protest what many Armenians consider to be the main reason for Evans' replacement. "Ambassador Evans was punished for speaking out and for speaking the truth about the Armenian Genocide," the statement read, alluding to February 2005 when Evans departed from the official U.S. line by calling the 1915-18 massacre of Armenians in the then Ottoman Empire a Genocide. The vigil was also used to condemn recent remarks from a senior U.S. State Department Official recently appointed as the new American Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group who many believe showed bias in terms of U.S. policy towards Armenia and Azerbaijan. In a recent interview Matthew Bryza surprised many analysts by calling for Armenia to follow Azerbaijan's example of pursuing a faster pace of democratization and reform. Considering that most analysts consider Armenia to be ahead of Azerbaijan in this regard, many suspect that U.S. economic and strategic interests were behind Bryza's remarks. "Just because Azerbaijan hasn't gone as far as we would like on democracy doesn't mean we're going to ignore our energy interests or military interest," he said.
Text and Photos by Onnik Krikorian |
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