Armenia-Azerbaijan Clashes

[Mets Hayk]

Pakistan supports Azerbaijan's aspiration for stability in South Caucasus - ambassador

Ah, yes...Pakistan.

---

Artsakh denies Azeri accusations on ceasefire breach

[Republic Of Transcaucasia]

Yerevan evacuated after widespread bomb threats.

What the hell is happening in armenia?

[Mets Hayk]

Yerevan evacuated after widespread bomb threats.

What the hell is happening in armenia?

I've got no fucking clue...

[The Huskar Social Union]

Yerevan evacuated after widespread bomb threats.

What the hell is happening in armenia?

Poorer country, just had a world wide pandemic, lost a war, lots of political upheaval, lingering political crisis due to said war. Nothing good is happening thats for sure.

[The Huskar Social Union]

But what do the region's inhabitants think.

Rhetorical, that's a yes. Artsakh's territories should be returned to it and its people should be allowed to decide its future - whether as an independent nation, as a part of Armenia or, fuck it, as an autonomous region within Azerbaijan. Full annexation will only mean another ethnic cleansing, as can be seen by Artsakh's territories that were recently conquered.

I agree with this.

[Mets Hayk]

All links are from news.am, as per usual:
Blast hits Yerevan shopping centre (13:51)
Yerevan blast: No reports over injured (14:31)
Yerevan blast: 1 person killed, 20 people injured (14:48)
14 more combat crews of fire and rescue teams sent to Surmalu shopping centre (15:03)
Yerevan blast: 14 injured hospitalized, including 3 children (15:10)
Yerevan blast: Warehouse caught on fire was fined days ago (15:28)
Blast in Yerevan: Number of injured rises to 30 (15:42)
Yerevan blast: Citizens are at scene looking for relatives (16:10)
Yerevan blast: Kid, 5, is in intensive care unit (16:12)
Yerevan blast: Building is in danger of collapse (16:20)
Yerevan blast: 11 minors taken to hospital (16:47)
At least 34 people injured in Yerevan blast (16:57)
Yerevan blast: 51 people hospitalized after explosion (17:27)
New bomb alerts in Yerevan (17:47)
Yerevan blast: Fire and rescue work continues in Surmalu shopping centre (18:22)
Yerevan blast: Rescuers remove 10 people from rubble (19:22)

[Republic Of Transcaucasia]

Damn… have they started an investigation on how the blast occurred? Or do they already know and I just dont read things?

[The Huskar Social Union]

All links are from news.am, as per usual:
Blast hits Yerevan shopping centre (13:51)
Yerevan blast: No reports over injured (14:31)
Yerevan blast: 1 person killed, 20 people injured (14:48)
14 more combat crews of fire and rescue teams sent to Surmalu shopping centre (15:03)
Yerevan blast: 14 injured hospitalized, including 3 children (15:10)
Yerevan blast: Warehouse caught on fire was fined days ago (15:28)
Blast in Yerevan: Number of injured rises to 30 (15:42)
Yerevan blast: Citizens are at scene looking for relatives (16:10)
Yerevan blast: Kid, 5, is in intensive care unit (16:12)
Yerevan blast: Building is in danger of collapse (16:20)
Yerevan blast: 11 minors taken to hospital (16:47)
At least 34 people injured in Yerevan blast (16:57)
Yerevan blast: 51 people hospitalized after explosion (17:27)
New bomb alerts in Yerevan (17:47)
Yerevan blast: Fire and rescue work continues in Surmalu shopping centre (18:22)
Yerevan blast: Rescuers remove 10 people from rubble (19:22)

Christ.

[Hispida]

All links are from news.am, as per usual:
Blast hits Yerevan shopping centre (13:51)
Yerevan blast: No reports over injured (14:31)
Yerevan blast: 1 person killed, 20 people injured (14:48)
14 more combat crews of fire and rescue teams sent to Surmalu shopping centre (15:03)
Yerevan blast: 14 injured hospitalized, including 3 children (15:10)
Yerevan blast: Warehouse caught on fire was fined days ago (15:28)
Blast in Yerevan: Number of injured rises to 30 (15:42)
Yerevan blast: Citizens are at scene looking for relatives (16:10)
Yerevan blast: Kid, 5, is in intensive care unit (16:12)
Yerevan blast: Building is in danger of collapse (16:20)
Yerevan blast: 11 minors taken to hospital (16:47)
At least 34 people injured in Yerevan blast (16:57)
Yerevan blast: 51 people hospitalized after explosion (17:27)
New bomb alerts in Yerevan (17:47)
Yerevan blast: Fire and rescue work continues in Surmalu shopping centre (18:22)
Yerevan blast: Rescuers remove 10 people from rubble (19:22)

good Lord

[Mets Hayk]

All links are from news.am, as per usual:
Blast hits Yerevan shopping centre (13:51)
Yerevan blast: No reports over injured (14:31)
Yerevan blast: 1 person killed, 20 people injured (14:48)
14 more combat crews of fire and rescue teams sent to Surmalu shopping centre (15:03)
Yerevan blast: 14 injured hospitalized, including 3 children (15:10)
Yerevan blast: Warehouse caught on fire was fined days ago (15:28)
Blast in Yerevan: Number of injured rises to 30 (15:42)
Yerevan blast: Citizens are at scene looking for relatives (16:10)
Yerevan blast: Kid, 5, is in intensive care unit (16:12)
Yerevan blast: Building is in danger of collapse (16:20)
Yerevan blast: 11 minors taken to hospital (16:47)
At least 34 people injured in Yerevan blast (16:57)
Yerevan blast: 51 people hospitalized after explosion (17:27)
New bomb alerts in Yerevan (17:47)
Yerevan blast: Fire and rescue work continues in Surmalu shopping centre (18:22)
Yerevan blast: Rescuers remove 10 people from rubble (19:22)

good Lord

I also live in Yerevan, so...yeah. It's a big tragedy in a decade full of tragedies, eh?

[Hispida]

good Lord

I also live in Yerevan, so...yeah. It's a big tragedy in a decade full of tragedies, eh?

glad to hear you're alright. from what i've heard it's a fireworks accident, right?

[Mets Hayk]

I also live in Yerevan, so...yeah. It's a big tragedy in a decade full of tragedies, eh?

glad to hear you're alright. from what i've heard it's a fireworks accident, right?

I think so...

[Beyaz Toros]

Neo-Ottomanism and pan-Turkism go hand in hand...

Neo-Ottomanism isn't even an ideology. It's an epithet for Ahmet Davutoğlu's foreign policy of expanding Turkish soft power over the Middle East, through efforts to introduce conservative liberalism (idealised as a Muslim edition of Germany's Christian Democrats), soap operas, and emphasis on Turkey's Western, high standards of living (relatively speaking—and back in 2011-2013, Turkey did have a pretty decent standard of living), coupled with the "Zero Problems with Neighbours Policy". The man actually despised the description himself (I know this for a fact, and actually have a somewhat amusing anecdote regarding this one), and never used it himself.

Of course, starting mostly with the Arab Spring and particularly the Syrian Civil War, much of that foreign policy collapsed in pretty much every single way you can think of. "Zero Problems with Neighbours" wasn't working out perfectly, but prior to the disaster that was the Arab Spring, it was...okay-ish. Anyway, what was referred to as "neo-Ottomanism" by foreign pundits was, in reality, a rejection of the old Kemalist principle of avoiding involvement in the Middle East at all costs. Prior to 2007, Turkey's involvement in the Middle East had always been overly cautious, tentative, and distanced, ideally involving itself only as much as it needed to, then leaving things alone. The AKP sought to change this established foreign policy outlook, and largely succeeded at it by bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and utilising or establishing alternative institutions, such as the Directorate for Religious Affairs, or the less well-known Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA).

On the other hand, pan-Turkism is an ideology that has always, always been at the fringes of modern Turkish politics. Pan-Turkists have almost always been opposed to the Kemalist state apparatus and its organisation; they've generally rejected the National Pact, and the ideology itself is not a monolithic worldview. Its earliest iteration was staunchly anti-Islam, borderline Nazi in its approach towards citizenship; while the Atsızcılar, named after the ultranationalist philosopher Nihal Atsız, did not directly advocate for concentration camps, they probably would have constructed such camps if they had a chance. Many of these folks were purged during the Second World War as Nazi sympathisers in order to improve standing with the Soviet Union.

That set off a conflict within the movement that is referred to in Turkish scholarship as the "Crescent-Wolf" dispute; essentially, the former group advocated that Islam was a fundamental aspect of Turkish identity ("The soul of a Turk is Islam; the body cannot live without the soul") whereas the latter group was anti-Islam (to an extreme point: they were often neo-Shamanists harkening back to pre-Islamic Turkic faiths), rejecting Islam has having "Arabised" Turks and led them into decadence. The former group, under Alparslan Türkeş, won the battle of ideals, and from there the modern Nationalist Action Party (MHP) was born. They still advocated for uniting all Turkic lands under the Turkish flag, but considering the Soviet Union really was leagues above Turkey, and that the MHP was never really a substantial force in determining foreign policy, it was all bluster with no substance.

Come 1991, when the Soviet Union is no longer a threat, you'd expect that these folks to realise their hopes. Not so. The 12 September 1980 coup d'etat had thoroughly emasculated the ultranationalist movement in Turkey, along with the radical left and the centre-left. Lacking organisation, and having their ultranationalist programme co-opted, diluted to 1%, and wrapped under the veneer of neoliberal investment by the centre-right Turgut Özal and his Motherland Party (ANAP), they spent the period between 1990-1999 largely trying to figure their shit out. In 1999, the MHP did manage to get into government as a junior partner in a triple coalition, but by that point, its leadership had changed (Alparslan Türkeş, leader since 1969, died in 1997 and was replaced with Devlet Bahçeli) and was far less radical compared to the Cold War years. To add onto that, they had to share power as the weakest coalition power with the centre-left and the centre-right. In laymen's terms, that amounted to "squat" in terms of proper political influence, at least over foreign policy. They didn't get the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the centre-left did), they didn't get the Ministry of Tourism (the centre-right did) but they got the Ministry of National Security—at a time when the post was basically restricted to nodding along to what the generals down at the Chief of General Staff said was a threat.

Fast-forwarding to today, the MHP is basically brain-dead as a party. It hasn't got any proper policies of pan-Turkism; it probably maintains some references to it in its party programme but not in a policy-oriented way. It has become a party that is entirely based around propping up the AKP and Erdoğan as long as it continues to pursue nominally nationalist policies. Even that stance is half-assed because they're also the ones nodding along as the AKP intensifies its open-borders policy towards Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans; the far-right (incidentally, the not-very-pan-Turkic but still nationalist right) is practically leeching votes from them precisely because of this. So, basically, the pan-Turkic movement in Turkey is dead. The party representing it still exists, but it has moved on from advocating literal pan-Turkism a long, long time ago, either due to circumstances, or the change in politics over time.

Tl;dr: Neo-Ottomanism and pan-Turkism don't go hand-in-hand. They're very different things, and the very tradition that both of them draw upon are basically always at logger-heads with each other. Islamists and ultranationalists in Turkey don't get along. They almost never have. They have co-operated, but those instances were very reluctantly so, and oftentimes, collapsed very quickly. This is because while the ultranationalist wing may have sympathies for Islam and its place in Turkish identity, the Islamists have almost zero tolerance for any sort of nationalism. An "Islamist ultranationalist" in the context of Turkish politics is essentially an oxymoron: the person is either not an Islamist, or isn't an ultranationalist.

Neo-Ottomanism isn't nearly as prominent in Turkey as one may assume and is honestly quite a bit distinct from Pan-Turanism. It isn't the only form of Turkish nationalism (Kemalism is mainstream ffs) so it has to compete with these other branches of Turkish nationalism on the reg, and as it stands more people simp for Kemal than any Sultan.

I've done my best put in some effort to explain why neo-Ottomanism isn't even a proper "ideology" the way we conceptualise it above, but I'll use this as a jumping point to underline that insofar as it is an ideology, it's decidedly a non-nationalist one. There wasn't an "Ottoman nation" (despite efforts to cultivate one). That's the whole point of whatever it is we're calling "neo-Ottomanism". Ahmet Davutoğlu and the AKP foreign policy sought to "transcend" the boundary of Kemalist foreign policy by instrumentalising Turkey's identity as a Muslim-majority country, which had previously been rejected completely by the old Kemalists. That also meant expanding Turkey's influence over the nearby Arab states, also the Balkans, also the Caucasuses, by changing Turkey's face from the old, Cold War-era security state to a new, modern state which sought to mend ties with countries and regions it had historical connections to. Erdoğan, Prime Minister at the time, would hold speeches about how the AKP was not nationalist, an oft-quoted soundbite of his is "we have trampled nationalism beneath our feet", and it's exactly what it sounds like.

The current policies and orientation of the AKP really shouldn't be taken as an insight as to what their past looked like. This is a party with a relatively long history within the context of a multiparty democracy that was, up until 2018, parliamentary; parties are born and die very quickly in such systems, at least in countries where politics are not very stable. The only such party that has a similarly long history (well, definitely more so, but you get the point), the CHP, has also changed, transformed, and morphed throughout its century-long existence.

This post was an excellent summary of Turkish thought re the Pan-Turkishness.

[Concejos Unidos]

Is the firework explosion and the bomb threats related?

[Mets Hayk]

Yerevan blast: rescuers find another body (22:23)
Explosion in Yerevan: Rescue work will continue all night (22:55)

[Hakinda Herseyi Duymak istiyorum]

The European Union will win, Turkey will win, Ukraine will win, Azerbaijan will win, but Fascist Putin and her supporter Armenia will lose ! because fascists are always doomed to lose, regardless of language, religion, race or sexual orientation.

[Mets Hayk]

The European Union will win, Turkey will win, Ukraine will win, Azerbaijan will win, but Fascist Putin and her supporter Armenia will lose ! because fascists are always doomed to lose, regardless of language, religion, race or sexual orientation.

You've somehow demonstrated that you know even less about fascism than I initially believed.

[Mets Hayk]

Catholicos of All Armenians on Yerevan explosion. We pray for the peace, tranquility of the casualties’ souls (00:07)
Yerevan explosion: Six considered missing are found (00:16)
Armenia emergency ministry: Information about explosive devices was false (00:47)
Yerevan explosion: Identity of 3rd casualty is announced (01:01)
Yerevan explosion: Death toll reaches 4 (03:10)
Yerevan explosion: Emergency ministry reports about 5th casualty (03:27)
Yerevan explosion: 4 of 5 causalities’ identities are known (07:35)
Yerevan explosion: Ensuing fire not put out yet (07:44)
Yerevan explosion: PM Pashinyan arrives on scene (07:51)
Yerevan explosion: Death toll climbs to 6 (08:31)
Yerevan explosion: 15 people found as result of search (08:42)
Yerevan explosion: 2 of 6 casualties not identified yet (09:54)
Yerevan explosion: 21 injured continue to be treated at hospital (10:19)
Yerevan explosion: We are dealing with highly flammable materials, Armenian official says (11:22)
Yerevan explosion: All 6 casualties identified (11:24)
Yerevan explosion: Firefighting continues since sunday (11:58)
Yerevan explosion: There is real danger building collapsing, says emergency minister (12:30)

[Mets Hayk]

Yerevan market explosion: Emergency minister dismisses terrorism claims (13:14)
Yerevan explosion: Search-and-rescue dogs found certain track, emergency ministry spokesman says (14:18)
Yerevan market explosion: 56 injured, 18 others considered missing (14:44)
Yerevan explosion: One of the missing is Iran citizen (14:55)

[The House of Hamid]

Armenians setting fire to forests in Azerbaijan's Lachin

[Mets Hayk]

Artsakh president on Yerevan market explosion: Armenian people must arm themselves with fortitude
Karabakh President: Protection of new corridor will be carried out by Russian peacekeepers
Artsakh Internal Affairs Minister expresses readiness to assist colleagues from Armenia

[The House of Hamid]

Azerbaijan Commemorates Mass Killing of Servicemen by Armenian Troops in Karabakh Region

[Mets Hayk]

Putin: Russia will ensure its national interests, protection of allies

[Perikuresu]

Putin: Russia will ensure its national interests, protection of allies

Russia took 6 months to conquer the size of Estonia in a nation where it's geography makes it prime time for conquering, I doubt Putin could defend Armenia and even has the interest to

[Duvniask]

Putin: Russia will ensure its national interests, protection of allies

Russia took 6 months to conquer the size of Estonia in a nation where it's geography makes it prime time for conquering, I doubt Putin could defend Armenia and even has the interest to

Side note, but Ukrainian geography is not "prime" for conquering in either the spring or the autumn because of the rasputitsa mud season.

As for Armenia, keep in mind the country is very mountainous, especially on the border with Azerbaijan.