Deinstitutionalisation, Kutaisi, Georgia
Photographs © Onnik James Krikorian 2007.
ARTICLES ABOUT DEINSTITUTIONALISATION
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.
First published 2003
CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.
First published 2014
LATEST BLOG POSTS
U.S. urges Armenia and Azerbaijan to maintain momentum in peace negotiations
Less than a month and a half before the end of the year, hopes remain high for the normalisation of relations between Yerevan and Baku, and especially since the last round of negotiations held the United States. “I urged Prime Minister Pashinyan to sustain momentum on peace negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia following the foreign ministers’ talks in Washington on 7 November,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted on 16 November in a follow up call to the Armenian leader. Hours later he tweeted the same message, but this time addressed to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
EU Monitoring Capacity deploys on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border
The European Union has deployed around 40 unarmed civilian monitors on the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan following serious military escalation on 12-13 September, that saw the latter strike and capture territory within the former, leaving nearly 300 dead on both sides. Though requested in September by Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, the decision to deploy the monitors came on 6 October at the meeting in Prague between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, European Council President Charles Michel, and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers Meet in Washington D.C. for Bilateral Talks – and also with U.S. Secretary of State Blinken
For many, the significance of yesterday’s bilateral meeting between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers, Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov, appears to have been overlooked. Instead, all attention was focused on the later meeting of the two state officials with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Though important, the preparation of a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan has actually been assigned to the Foreign Ministers in a bilateral format and not to one with the direct involvement of any external actors.