For two years angry crowds gathered at the Baku Lenin Square chanting “Death to Armenians” and slaughtering civilians sporadically as they rioted and looted. In January 1990 the final organized mass ethnic cleansing campaign against Armenians in Baku began this week 35 years ago. Few months prior to that in September of 1989 my family and I, thankfully, escaped to Armenia. We lived just a couple blocks away from the Lenin Square, sometimes hiding as the million protesters passed by for hours. In my book “Nowhere A story of Exile” based on my childhood diaries I describe the marches toward the Square on our street and the eerie screaming to kill us that reached my young Armenian ears across several city blocks.
We don’t forget, we will forever remind them. #BakuPogroms
For two years angry crowds gathered at the Baku Lenin Square chanting “Death to Armenians” and slaughtering civilians sporadically as they rioted and looted. In January 1990 the final organized mass ethnic cleansing campaign against Armenians in Baku began this week 35 years ago. Few months prior to that in September of 1989 my family and I, thankfully, escaped to Armenia. We lived just a couple blocks away from the Lenin Square, sometimes hiding as the million protesters passed by for hours. In my book “Nowhere A story of Exile” based on my childhood diaries I describe the marches toward the Square on our street and the eerie screaming to kill us that reached my young Armenian ears across several city blocks.
We don’t forget, we will forever remind them. #BakuPogroms
The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. Oh no. There’s a certain degree of myth-making around what exactly went on, so take everything that follows lightly. Telegram was originally launched as a side project by the Durov brothers, with Nikolai handling the coding and Pavel as CEO, while both were at VK. "Like the bombing of the maternity ward in Mariupol," he said, "Even before it hits the news, you see the videos on the Telegram channels." At its heart, Telegram is little more than a messaging app like WhatsApp or Signal. But it also offers open channels that enable a single user, or a group of users, to communicate with large numbers in a method similar to a Twitter account. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse for Telegram and its users, since these channels can be used for both good and ill. Right now, as Wired reports, the app is a key way for Ukrainians to receive updates from the government during the invasion.
from ar
