Author: Chakhmakhchian Vatche

Xana Capital, the company owned by Israeli settler Danny Rubenstein, also known as Danny Rothman, has made further attempts in the last twenty-four hours to seize a sizeable tract of land in the Armenian Quarter in occupied East Jerusalem.

On two separate occasions, Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, private security guards and Israeli settlers stormed the Armenian Quarter in a move to assert control of the land in dispute. Two bulldozers accompanied them. 

Earlier in the month, armed Israeli settlers made a similar move, but community members repelled them. 
 
Hagop Djernazian told The New Arab that members of the Armenian community stopped the work from progressing.  

"The community prevented them from advancing. Then the police came at 11:00 pm in big numbers and demanded the community to leave, but we stood in front of the police and prevented them from entering". 

According to Djernazian, lawyers representing the Patriarchate have explained to the Israeli police that the matter is in the courts and, in the meantime, the settlers cannot change facts on the ground. 

Xana Capital is laying claim on the land following signing a deal with the Armenian Patriarch Nourhan Manougian several years ago. The Armenian Patriarchate has since withdrew from the agreement. The details of the agreement are not entirely apparent. 

The property deal reportedly pertains to 11.5 dunams in the Armenian Quarter, which amounts to 25 per cent of the total size of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City. It includes a vast tract of land currently used as a parking lot, a seminary, and five residential homes. 

Omar Haramy, a Palestinian Christian activist who came to show solidarity with Armenian activists, told TNA that "Jerusalem is under attack, especially the Armenian Quarter; there is no justice in Jerusalem, no justice under occupation". 

Members of the various Churches in Jerusalem, including the Latin Patriarchate and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, are expected to pay solidarity to the Armenian Patriarchate on Friday. 

https://www.newarab.com/news/armenians-confront-israeli-settlers-jerusalems-old-city

The United States has tended to think about this crucial region too little and too late. But a strategic opportunity still exists.

The Azerbaijanis seized back control of this region from a self-styled independent state, closely tied to Armenia itself, in a series of military campaigns beginning in 2020 and culminating in a lightning strike on September 19-20. The triumphant mood was palpable in Baku when I visited just prior to the latest attack—from huge electronic displays of patriotic flag waving on the skyscrapers that had been built with oil and gas riches to a carpet woven with a map of Nagorno-Karabakh, which a museum guide breathlessly described as “our land.”

Back in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, the mood was considerably darker. On the first day of the beginning of the latest attack, a senior Armenian foreign ministry official was anticipating the collapse of resistance. “It’s a series of actions that can lead to only one thing—the complete ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh,” he told me.

This humanitarian disaster is taking place as the world watches, issuing ritual statements of condemnation but apparently unable to intervene. Armenia is left largely on its own to cope with a massive influx of people who have been forced to leave possessions and homes, some lived in for centuries, with no hope of return. Azerbaijani forces are arresting Karabakh Armenian leaders, preparing to hold show trials for their “crimes” of resistance. Any acts of resistance are likely to justify brutal and violent repression of those who remain.

Armenians are haunted by the historical memory of the Turkish genocide of 1915, when a million or more Armenians were murdered by the Ottomans amidst the chaos of World War I. U.S. Agency for International Development director Samantha Power, a witness to similar scenes of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the author of a hallmark study of the failure to respond to genocide, came to Armenia immediately after the attack, offering condolences and a mere $11.5 million in refugee aid.

This war in what seems like a distant and peripheral corner of the world deserves our attention. It is a test of the willingness to tolerate acts of violation of fundamental human rights, at a time when these values are on the line in the nearby war in Ukraine. As in that war, the Russian state is asserting its imperial heritage and is determined to punish those whom it sees as disloyal and turning to the West.

The Azerbaijani offensive is possible only because of a de facto alliance of autocrat Ilham Aliyev with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Armenia and its democratically elected government led by Nikol Pashinyan are being punished by Putin for the crime of seeking to broaden ties to the United States and the European Union. Weakened by war in Ukraine, and worried about losing control of its former imperial backyard in the South Caucasus, Putin decided to greenlight the return of Azerbaijani rule over Nagorno-Karabakh and abandon Russia’s traditional role as a protector of Armenia.

Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno Karabakh have become nothing more than doormen for the ethnic cleansing operation.

 “The Russian peacekeeping operation is a sham,” a veteran Armenian political leader told me. “Without the agreement of Putin, neither Azerbaijan nor Turkey could have pursued this war.”

Meanwhile, the conflict is hardly over. An emboldened Azerbaijan, handed a virtual blank check by Turkey and Russia, demands, and prepares to seize, a land bridge across Armenian territory that will connect it to the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhichevan and through that to Turkey. Azerbaijan dictator Aliyev now talks of recovering “western Azerbaijan,” referring to claims on Armenia itself, a claim manifested in attacks along the border, including in recent days.

The immediate origins of this war lie in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a moment I witnessed first-hand as the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor. A mass movement of Armenians rose up to demand independence and the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to their territory. The region had been placed in the 1920s by Joseph Stalin under the authority of the ethnically Turkish Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, an act that Armenians had long seen as unjust.

As Soviet authority waned, both Armenia and Azerbaijan claimed independence, leading to a fierce war that ended in a 1994 ceasefire. The war left a legacy of mutual acts of ethnic violence and deepened hatred. The fighting left the Armenians in control of a vast swath of Azerbaijani territory, including establishing a land corridor between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. They avoided the sovereignty issue by establishing an independent Nagorno-Karabakh.

The plan was to trade most of the captured Azerbaijani land for a permanent peace, but compromise proved elusive. Conflicting claims of sovereignty could not be resolved, despite the efforts of a group formed by Russia, the United States, and France. Intransigence on both sides grew as time went by. Eventually, the Azerbaijanis regained military strength, using oil and gas revenues to buy advanced arms from Turkey, Israel, and Russia (which supplied both sides), along with Turkish training and officers, to try to resolve the conflict by armed means.

In a weeks-long offensive in 2020, coming when the world was distracted by Covid-19 and the United States was under the isolationist rule of Donald Trump, the Azerbaijanis restored control of all of their occupied territory and much of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. The Russians only intervened at the end to negotiate a ceasefire that ceded much to Azerbaijan and implanted Russian troops on the ground as “peacekeepers.”

Armenian officials believe relations with Moscow had already started to fray after a civic movement brought the reformist government of Pashinyan to power in 2018, removing more pro-Russian leadership. “It started when Russia didn’t like a more open, democratic Armenia,” the senior foreign ministry official said.

“The Russians are much more comfortable working with Azerbaijan than with the current Armenian government,” says Tigran Grigoryan, the head of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, an Armenian-based think tank. “Aliyev and Putin speak the same language. That is not true for Putin and Pashinyan.”

Still, the Armenian government has been very careful not to upset its traditional allies in Russia, joining the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) organized by Moscow along with Belarus and a handful of other former Soviet republics. The reality is that the Russians retain huge leverage in this small nation—a Russian army unit remains based in northwestern Armenia near the Turkish border and patrols that border. Armenia remains dependent on Russia for most of its energy needs, including the operation of a dangerously aging nuclear power plant. Furthermore, millions of Armenians work in Russia, with their remittances key to the economy back home.

“We never wanted to provoke Russia,” the senior official said. “Why should we? We always wanted more room to maneuver.”

Russia has traditionally opposed the expansion of Turkish influence in the region, but amid the Ukraine war, the situation has completely changed, and Russia is clearly far weaker than before. “The Russians needed a new status quo in the South Caucasus,” explained Grigoryan. “They could tolerate the Turks, but their main concern is the West.”

Armenian analysts compare this to the bargain that the Bolshevik leaders struck in 1921 with the Turks to oust a British-led intervention into the South Caucasus. That deal included the decision to give Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

In broader historical terms, this is the delayed resumption of “a protracted process of imperial disintegration,” says Ukrainian historian Igor Torbakov, a prolific writer on the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires. That created “imperial shatter zones” from the Middle East and the Balkans to the Caucasus, leading to forced “unmixing of peoples.” The Bolshevik deal with Kemalist Turkey restored the empire and created a relative peace for seventy years but “the Soviet implosion opened up the nationalist Pandora’s box for the second time in the 20th century,” Torbakov says.

For the Armenian government, the clearest signal of Moscow’s abandonment came a year ago when Azerbaijani attacks along the border with Armenia itself—beyond the Karabakh region—failed to trigger a Russian response. This was a violation of commitments that should have been the result of Armenia’s participation in CSTO.

Pashinyan began to speak out more openly about Russia’s failure to live up to its expected role. Both the European Union and the United States stepped up efforts to mediate the conflict, leading to two rounds of talks convened by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May and July of this year which seemed to be leading toward some agreement. But Putin stepped in and called his own meeting in Moscow, a move meant “to remind people who is the master of the house,” the senior Armenian official recounted.

Moscow has been openly carrying out a verbal war with the Pashinyan government—responding angrily to even small gestures of independence such as the dispatch of a humanitarian aid mission to Ukraine led by the prime minister’s wife and the holding of a small-scale joint military exercise with the U.S. 101st Airborne carried out just days before the Azerbaijani attack. Former Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev warned Yerevan against “flirting with NATO.”

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/tragedy-and-opportunity-nagorno-karabakh-206870

Armenian security forces have announced the successful arrest of five individuals linked to an attempted "terrorist attack" on government institutions. The operation, dubbed "Northern Leaffall," was intended to disrupt the functioning of key government bodies. The suspects had reportedly prepared explosive devices and other hazardous materials for their nefarious plan.

During searches of the detainees' residences, authorities uncovered weapons and ammunition, shedding light on the severity of the threat. It is worth noting that the criminal group's scheme was foiled "due to circumstances beyond its control," according to Armenian law enforcement.

One of the group's strategies involved creating Telegram channels resembling "Uprising of National Salvation" in Ukraine and Moldova. These channels were intended to rally support for their cause, which involved the relocation of their families to Georgia.

These events unfold amidst mounting public pressure on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign, particularly in the wake of Azerbaijan's recent takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh. This military offensive led to the displacement of a significant portion of the Armenian population.

Pashinyan, while under pressure to respond, maintains a commitment to not involve Armenia in another war, emphasizing his focus on achieving a peace agreement by year's end. However, recent statements by the prime minister expressing skepticism about the benefits of Russian military bases in Armenia have created tensions with Moscow.

On Thursday, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan said he hoped to sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan soon.

The development comes two months after Azerbaijan recaptured the Nagorno-Karabakh region in a swift offensive.

“We are currently working on the draft agreement with Azerbaijan on peace and the normalisation of relations, and I hope this process will successfully conclude in the coming months,” Pashinyan added.

On Wednesday, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy condemned Azerbaijan over its actions in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Nagorno-Karabakh been ethnically and religiously Armenian Christian for a long time, and has largely been viewed as an autonomous region governed separately,” Ramaswamy said.

But what is Nagorno-Karabakh? And what do we know about Armenia’s actions in the region?

Let’s take a closer look

What happened in Nagorno-Karabakh?

Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory.

It became a breakaway state under the control of ethnic Armenian forces in 1994 following a six-year conflict.

After a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of the region in the South Caucasus Mountains – along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had captured earlier.

Then, last month, Azerbaijan launched an offensive that forced separatists to relinquish the rest of the region and brought the entire ethnic Armenian enclave back under its control.

The 24-hour campaign which began on 19 September witnessed Azerbaijani army routing the region’s undermanned and outgunned Armenian forces, forcing them to capitulate.

Though Azerbaijan had vowed to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian community, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians – more than 80 per cent of the region’s residents – have since fled the region and sparked a refugee crisis.

The ethnic Armenians fear reprisals or losing the freedom to practice their religion and customs.

Armenia has now accused Azerbaijan of “ethnic cleansing”.

Ethnic Armenians had faced months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military.

As per the Washington Post, ethnic Armenians witnessed the shelves of their grocery stores grow bare and hospitals go without medical supplies during the blockade.

French-Armenian journalist Astrig Agopian told NBC News, “Many of them are from villages which were taken by the Azerbaijani army, so they really lost their homes already.”

“There is really this feeling that this time is different. It’s another war, but it’s a war that is definitely lost this time,” Agopian reporting from the Armenian border added.

Narine Shakaryan, a grandmother of four, told Reuters, “My husband died in the first war. He was 30, I was 26. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. It is the fourth war that I went through.”

“My husband died back then, he was 30 in 1994. That’s the cursed life that we live.”

“I gave my whole life to my homeland,” one man told BBC. “It would be better if they killed me than this.”

A woman, Veronica, added this was the second time she had become a refugee – after the 2020 conflict.

“Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters.

“The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilized world.”

“Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins.”

Pashinyan on Sunday said, “If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity.”

But Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev’s office has claimed that the country has presented a plan for the “reintegration” of ethnic Armenians in the region, noting that “the equality of rights and freedoms, including security, is guaranteed to everyone regardless of their ethnic, religious or linguistic affiliation.”

Aliyev blamed the Armenians’ exodus from the region on separatist authorities that encouraged them to leave.

The Azerbaijani leader said that Azerbaijani authorities had provided humanitarian assistance to the Armenian residents of Karabakh and “the process of their registration had started.”

What do experts say?

A piece in CFR stated that it has been reported that more than 400 ethnic Armenians including civilians were killed in clashes with the Azerbaijan army.

The piece noted that the Untied Nations terms ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”

Luis Moreno Ocampo, an ex-prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, has accused Azerbaijan of imposing  “genocide” conditions on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Ocampo in a Washington Post op-ed wrote that Azerbaijan’s ambitions “extend beyond” the region.

“Azerbaijan is an ally with the West against Iran; it provides energy to Europe and it spends millions on sophisticated Israeli weapons,” he wrote. “But such exigencies must not get in the way of the world’s responsibility to stop what is happening before its very eyes: the Armenian genocide of 2023.”

A piece in The Conversation noted, “It was always highly unlikely that any Armenians would “choose” to stay under Azeri control of Nagorno-Karabakh. The regime of President Ilham Aliyev does not tolerate criticism or plurality of voice among its own citizens.”

The article, noting how the think-tank Freedom House designated Azerbaijan a “consolidated authoritarian regime”, stated that Baku’s vow ‘to protect the rights and safety of ethnic Armenians’ rings hollow.

“For decades, the Aliyev regime has promoted ethnic hatred of Armenians. Azerbaijan has actively worked for the eradication and appropriation of its Armenian religious and cultural heritage. This was referred to in a recent report as “the worst cultural genocide of the 21st Century”.

The piece also noted that the crimes committed by Azerbaijan’s troops during the 2020 conflict were extremely well documented.

“The so-called “Military Trophies Park” in the Azeri capital of Baku, built as a memorial of the war, is filled with grotesque mannequins representing Armenians.”

Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with the London-based Carnegie Europe think-tank told NBC News, “Azerbaijan has won a comprehensive military victory and what we’re looking at now is the prospect of Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians or with very few Armenians remaining.”

“So in that sense, Azerbaijan has won.”

Skepticism over Western intervention

Pashinyan said Armenia was ready “to open, reopen, rebuild, build all regional communications” if its sovereignty over the area is not questioned.

Baku has vowed to ensure the rights of Karabakh’s Armenians are protected.

It has denied having any territorial claims to Armenia, saying it could set up a land link with Nakhichevan via Iran instead of Armenia.

Pashinyan also said Thursday that he hoped the border between Armenia and Turkey could be opened for citizens of third countries and diplomats “in the near future”.

Ankara closed its border with Armenia in the 1990s in solidarity with ally Azerbaijan.

With the traditional regional power broker Russia bogged down in its Ukraine war, the European Union and United States have taken a lead role in brokering an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.

Aliyev has recently expressed scepticism about Western mediation efforts.

Citing France’s “biased position,” he refused to attend another round of peace talks with Pashinyan in Spain earlier in October.

They had been due to take place under the mediation of the EU chief Charles Michel, French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Aliyev said peace talks with Yerevan could be held in Georgia “if Yerevan agrees”, but Pashinyan – who is keen on Western mediation – rejected the idea.

On Monday, Iran and Russia denounced Western “interference” in tensions between Yerevan and Baku at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Tehran that also included top diplomats from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

Armenians stunned, say ‘historic blow’

While the separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh then announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year’s end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de-facto independence – but Azerbaijani authorities are already in charge of the region.

The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world.

Traumatized by genocide a century ago, they now fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

Many in Armenia and the diaspora fear a centuries-long community in the territory they call Artsakh will disappear in what they call a new wave of ethnic cleansing.

They accuse European countries, Russia and the United States – and the government of Armenia itself – of failing to protect ethnic Armenians during months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s military.

Outside the modern country of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of the only surviving parts of a heartland that centuries ago stretched across what is now eastern Turkey, into the Caucasus region and western Iran.

Many in the diaspora had pinned dreams on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history,” Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian university instructor in Beirut, said Thursday.

“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours … For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”

Ethnic Armenians have communities around Europe and West Asia and in the United States.

Lebanon is home to one of the largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, four per cent of the population.

Most are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches.

The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide.

Turkey rejects the description of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest during World War I.

In Bourj Hammoud, the main Armenian district in the capital Beirut, memories are still raw, with anti-Turkey graffiti common on the walls. The red-blue-and-orange Armenian flag flies from many buildings.

“This is the last migration for Armenians,” said Harout Bshidikian, 55, sitting in front of an Armenian flag in a Bourj Hamoud cafe. “There is no other place left for us to migrate from.”

Azerbaijan says it is reuniting its territory, pointing out that even Armenia’s prime minister recognized that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.

Though its population has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris also have communities and cultural ties to the territory as well, particularly the city of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azeri poetry.

Wall said Nagorno-Karabakh had become “a kind of new cause” for an Armenian diaspora whose forebearers had suffered the genocide.

“It was a kind of new Armenian state, new Armenian land being born, which they projected lots of hopes on. Very unrealistic hopes, I would say,” he said, adding that it encouraged Karabakh Armenians to hold out against Azerbaijan despite the lack of international recognition for their separatist government.

Armenians see the territory as a cradle of their culture, with monasteries dating back more than a millennium.

“Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years,” said Lebanese legislator Hagop Pakradounian, head of Lebanon’s largest Armenian group, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. “The people of Artsakh are being subjected to a new genocide, the first genocide in the 21st Century.”

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is not just a reminder of the genocide, “it’s reliving it,” said Diran Guiliguian, an Armenian activist who is based in Madrid but holds Armenian, Lebanese and French citizenship.

He said his grandmother used to tell him stories of how she fled in 1915. The genocide “is actually not a thing of the past. It’s not a thing that is a century old. It’s actually still the case,” he said.

Seroujian, the instructor in Beirut, said her great-grandparents were genocide survivors, and that stories of the atrocities and dispersal were talked about at home, school and in the community as she grew up, as was the cause of Nagorno-Karabakh.

She visited the territory several times, most recently in 2017. “We’ve grown with these ideas, whether they were romantic or not, of the country. We’ve grown to love it even when we didn’t see it,” she said. “I never thought about it as something separate” from Armenia the country.

In the United States, the Armenian community in the Los Angeles area – one of the world’s largest – has staged several protests trying to draw attention to the situation. On Sept. 19, they used a trailer truck to block a major freeway for several hours, causing major traffic jams.

Kim Kardashian, perhaps the most well-known Armenian-American today, went on social media to urge President Joe Biden “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide.”

Several groups in the diaspora are collecting money for Karabakh Armenians fleeing their home. But Seroujian said many feel helpless.

“There are moments where personally, the family, or among friends we just feel hopeless,” she said. “And when we talk to each other we sort of lose our minds.

With inputs from agencies

AMPTV has revealed Yan Girls will represent Armenia at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2023. The girlband will perform the song “Do it my way”, composed by Tokionine and written by JESC 2021 winner Maléna and Vahram Petrosyan.

Once again, the Armenian broadcaster has opted for an internal selection to choose their entry for Junior Eurovision. This time, however, they haven’t followed the path of sending a soloist to the EBU’s show for kids as they have gone for something different and unusual, a band. Yan Girls is made up of Nane, Nensi, Kamilla, Syuzana and Aida, who are between 9 and 11 years of age. Both their style and song are influenced by K-Pop artists.

“Do it my way” was premiered along with the official music video, directed by Artur Manukyan, and talks about the importance of staying true to yourself, being confident and doing things the best way – their way. Listen to it below:

https://escbubble.com/2023/10/listen-to-the-armenian-song-for-junior-eurovision-2023/