An Armenian specialist on Iran says the outcome of the latest parliamentary election in the Islamic Republic cannot in any way affect its relations with neighboring Armenia or its general foreign policy.

The results emerging from last Friday’s vote show President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffering a political setback, while the hard-line supporters of Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei gaining a solid victory.

Policy Forum Armenia (PFA) co-founder David Grigorian, who holds a PhD in economics, believes many Armenians who currently live abroad would be willing to repatriate if Armenia’s government system changed and real reforms were carried out.

On day 16 of my stay in Istanbul as part of a journalism exchange program I tried to bring together my scattered thoughts about this huge city only to realize that one feeling I had about it particularly stood out of the inexplicable entanglement of feelings – the most hated one for me and that was envy, or rather its more “innocent” form born out of powerlessness.

This week Georgia suspended the Russian-Georgian agreement on transit of military cargo and personnel to Russian bases through its territory.

Initiated by Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and unanimously approved by the parliament, the decree provides for the annulment of the agreement according to which Russia was supplying military equipment and personnel to the military base N102 deployed in the Armenian city of Gyumri.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official says the rapprochement between Ankara and Yerevan has stalled because “the issue is very delicate to both countries.”

Still, assistant adviser to the Minister Selim Yener expressed hope that improvement in relations between the two neighboring states would be achieved as he met with a group of visiting Armenian journalists in Ankara on Friday.

An opinion article on America’s CBS News outlines the noted rise of Turkey’s profile as a world leader, in wake of recent events that have included its nuclear-energy negotiations with Iran, and its involvement in the Israel-Gaza standoff last week.

“Turkey has stepped out of the shadows and now threatens to settle into the prominent place on the world stage once held by its predecessor,” writes foreign policy expert John Feffer.

Yerevan—Today’s Turkey is the denialist bearer of the Ottoman execution of the great genocide and national dispossession of the Armenian people nearly a century ago.

Israel, the carrier-state of the Shoah which followed a generation later, has long been unconscionably complicit in the realpolitik relegation of the Armenian loss of life and homeland to the footnotes of inconvenient, expendable crimes against humanity.

Armenia’s former foreign minister has published an opinion piece in which he commented on the latest developments in the Armenian-Turkish process and voiced criticism over the current administration’s handling of it.

Vartan Oskanian, who currently heads Civilitas Foundation, a Yerevan-based think tank, said in his article published on Monday that “it was clear from the beginning that a prolonged presentation of the desirable as real is not sustainable, and that the government would have to finally acknowledge reality.”

Eminent Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand wrote recently that Azerbaijan is on the sidelines of the processes in which Turkey is an active player.

Yerevan—We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now.

Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership.