President of the Anna Astvatsaturian Foundation, philanthropist, US-based writer and lawyer Anna Astavtsaturian Turcotte has been elected president of Westbrook City Council, the Portland Press Herald reports, presenting Astvatsaturian as a person who made history in becoming the first refugee and by all accounts the first woman to fill the role of president.
The city council elected Anna Astvatsaturian through a secret ballot.
Turcotte explained her election with the fact that the growing population of refugees needs representation and it’s important for them to see a fellow refugee in a leadership position.
“I look forward to being the facilitator of the discussions,” she said. “One of my major goals is to work more closely with the schools on budgets, so we aren’t surprised when we see it.”
A lawyer specializing in international law, Turcotte has long been involved in advocacy work around her birth city of Baku, Azerbaijan. She wants to do more for Westbrook.
The Portland Press Herald also presented Turcotte’s background, particularly the following:
“Turcotte’s Armenian family fled Azerbaijan when she was a child because of attacks on Armenians there. The family spent three years in Armenia before moving to the United States. After graduating from the University of Maine School of Law in 2003, Turcotte worked as a clerk at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. In 2012, she published “Nowhere, the Story of Exile,” a collection of her diary entries as a child fleeing from her homes.
Her political career in Maine began to take shape in 2013 when she successfully worked to get the Legislature to officially recognize the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, an autonomous state home to many Armenians in Azerbaijan.”
Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte is known for the major role that she played in the international recognition of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). After the 44-day war, she and the Association of Social Workers of Armenia started conducting a study to assess the needs of families that settled in Artsakh after the war in order to help developed a targeted policy in the future.
