Author: Hovhannisian John

By Michael Rubin

More than 100,000 Armenian Christians are fleeing their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, desperate to escape the arrival of the Azerbaijani army. Publicly, Azerbaijani diplomats promise they will treat the Armenian community no differently than they treat Azerbaijanis, hardly a promise that wins confidence given how repressive the Aliyev dictatorship has become in Azerbaijan. Freedom House ranks Azerbaijan alongside China and the military junta in Burma, and below Russia, Iran, Cuba, and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in its freedom rankings. Privately, Azerbaijani officials bargain for favors from the State Department in order to allow refugees to flow unmolested. This is equivalent to 1930s Germany seeking favors to allow small numbers of Jews to leave. Then, there has been Azerbaijani Telegram channels that range the gambit from mocking Armenians to glorifying the desecration of Armenians bodies to offering to buy women and children as slaves in postings reminiscent of the Yezidi genocide. World leaders may say “Never Again” but it is clear, then, that they have a collective case of Alzheimer’s disease.

Those who carry water for the Azerbaijani regime may justify any action with the argument that the international community recognizes Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. The American positions dating to Secretary of State James Baker were more nuanced and conditional, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken has forgotten, waived, or ignored those conditions, first and foremost a negotiated agreement with Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents. It will be curious to see if my friends at the Hudson Institute like Michael Doran and Luke Coffey, for example, apply the same principles of “freedom-be-damned; listen to the United Nations!” to side with Palestinian rejectionists over Israel when adjudicating disputes over Jerusalem or the West Bank, or for that matter China’s equally ahistorical claims over Taiwan.

What really makes this moment as spectacular as it is tragic is that, Azerbaijan’s claims aside, Azerbaijan has never controlled Nagorno-Karabakh. Prior to rising to the Soviet premiership, Joseph Stalin had gerrymandered borders to rip Nagorno-Karabakh away from Armenia, but it remained an autonomous “oblast” within Azerbaijan, with its own parliament and administration. As the Soviet Union crumbled, the region was the first (even before Ukraine) to use the hitherto theoretical freedoms under the Soviet constitution to demand self-determination. This ultimately culminated to a referendum in which 99 percent of residents sought independence. A series of Azerbaijani pogroms and attempts to drive out Armenians or starve communities into submission failed, and the region governed itself since 1991.

Before Stalin, Turks—both from the Ottoman Empire and the newfound Azerbaijan Republic tried to wrest control of Nagorno-Karabakh from the Republic of Armenia. Indeed, the September 2020 Azerbaijan-Turkey surprise attack on Nagorno-Karabakh coincided with the centenary of that invasion. The 1920 invasion was unsuccessful, though, as neither side was able to consolidate full control over the region prior to the Soviet Union overrunning the Caucasus in their entirety.

Of course, before 1918, there was no Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh at the time fell under titular Russian and, before 1828, Persian control although in practice, it was autonomous at these times as well.

Make no mistake: Today, tens of thousands of Armenians flee an ancestral homeland in which they have lived for thousands of years. Their flight before Azerbaijani forces resembles the 2014 Yezidi flight from Sinjar under the Islamic State’s assault or the Kurds fleeing Saddam’s advancing armies in 1991.

The difference is in 1991 and 2014, the United States sided with freedom. In 2023, we betrayed it.

https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/why-are-armenians-fleeing-nagorno-karabakh/

Relations between Armenia and its traditional strategic partner Russia are deteriorating fast. 

In the past week, Yerevan has boldly criticized Russia’s “absolute indifference” to Azerbaijani “aggression” against Armenia and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has expressed regret over his country’s near-total dependence on Moscow for its security as a “strategic mistake.” 

And now Yerevan is sending a package of humanitarian aid to Ukraine for the first time since Russia’s invasion.  

RFE/RL’s Armenian service reported that the aid (whose precise nature and amount have not been announced) would be delivered by Anna Hakobyan, the prime minister’s wife, as she attends the Ukraine-initiated Third Summit of first ladies and gentlemen in Kyiv. 

Armenia-Russia relations have been steadily worsening since September 2022, when Azerbaijani forces attacked Armenian territory and seized several square kilometers of land in clashes that left about 400 dead on both sides. 

Armenia is a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and has a bilateral defense agreement with Russia. But both Moscow and the CSTO refused to intervene on Armenia’s behalf or condemn Azerbaijan’s incursion (only a small CSTO monitoring mission was sent). A few months later Armenia refused to host a CSTO exercise and further downgraded its participation in the bloc. 

More recently, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on September 2, Prime Minister Pashinyan criticized the “failure” of Russian peacekeepers to protect Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, where they were have been deployed since the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. He also lamented Yerevan’s “strategic mistake” of depending on Russia almost entirely for its security and mused about cooperating more extensively with the West. 

And that followed a statement by the Foreign Ministry three days earlier criticizing Russia’s “absolute indifference” to what the ministry called Azerbaijan’s acts of aggression, including the September 2022 incursion and the June 15, 2023 incident in which Azerbaijani troops advanced towards Armenia from the border checkpoint on the Lachin road, which connects Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

On September 5, Armenia’s Defense Ministry announced that Armenian and U.S. troops would hold a 9-day drill later this month. The exercise will focus on “stabilization operations between conflicting parties during peacekeeping missions,” the ministry said. 

Russia “cannot leave Armenia”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded on September 7 by saying, “In this situation, it is certain that holding such exercises will not facilitate the stabilization of the situation – in any case, it will not facilitate the strengthening of an atmosphere of mutual trust in the region.” 

Two days earlier Peskov rebuffed Pashinyan’s remark in his La Repubblica interview that Russia was “leaving” the South Caucasus region. 

“Russia is an integral part of this region, so it can never go anywhere. Russia cannot leave Armenia,” he said. 

Armenia currently hosts around 10,000 Russian troops, 5,000 of which are stationed at Gyumri’s 102nd Russian military base. Others are stationed in Yerevan, including at Zvartnots International Airport. 

Russian border troops have long overseen the Armenia-Turkey and Armenia-Iran borders and have been deployed more recently to sections of the Azerbaijan border in response to tensions there.

An additional 2,000 Russian peacekeepers are stationed in the ethnic Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh region for a 5-year term set to expire in 2025. 

(Russia is also Armenia’s biggest trade partner by far, and Yerevan’s economic dependence on Moscow has only grown since the start of the Ukraine war.)

The Rome Statute 

On top of everything else, Prime Minister Pashinyan this week sent the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court to parliament for ratification, despite the objections that Russia has been expressing for months. 

Armenia’s motivation is to be able to sue Azerbaijan in the ICC for its alleged abuses of Armenians. But ratifying the statute would mean, theoretically at least, that Armenia will be obliged to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he visits, as the court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March over the abduction of Ukrainian children. 

Russia expressed “dissatisfaction” over Armenia’s decision, demanding explanations for the move.

Tigran Grigoryan, the head of the Yerevan-based Regional Center for Democracy and Security think tank, says that Russia has levers to pressure Armenia into not ratifying the statute.

Grigoryan told Eurasianet that Russia may take action to “punish” Armenia as it did in April, banning dairy imports from Armenia after the latter’s Constitutional Court approved the treaty. 

The analyst added that he doesn’t expect any drastic changes in Armenia’s foreign policy in the near future, nor any dramatic Russian moves against Armenia. 

At the same time, he said, Russia is unlikely to help Armenia in case of military escalation with Azerbaijan, in particular since Moscow is now directly speaking of Karabakhi Armenians’ need to accept Baku’s rule over the disputed territory.

“Armenia has sharpened its rhetoric a bit regarding Russia because it seems that Russia has accepted Azerbaijan’s position over the issues concerning Nagorno-Karabakh, which means that Armenia does not have anything to lose,” Grigoryan said. “Russia’s proposals are currently identical to Azerbaijan’s proposals.”

Since the end of the Second Karabakh War in autumn 2020, the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh – also known as the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh – has been struggling on a daily basis, suffering under an increasingly tighter siege by Azerbaijan’s Aliyev regime. The territory has seen the abduction of civilians, skirmishes at the border in violation of the ceasefire agreement, the arbitrary disruption of natural gas, electricity, and water supply, and ultimately the closing of the sole road to Armenia. The last issue is not merely about the right to visit religiously significant sites, but literally a question of life and death as the territory faces challenges in the supply of food and medicine.

This strategy amounts to a modern form of siege, aimed at exhausting the population of Nagorno-Karabakh physically, economically, and psychologically. The cumulative effect of harassment, violence, and isolation has dire humanitarian consequences for the remaining 120,000 residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. Some analysts speculate that Baku is about to launch a new large-scale offensive, following the departure of the Russian peacekeeping mission in 2025. However, the Azerbaijani government is aware that the international community is not ready to accept such a development, mainly because a new war could lead to thousands of civilian deaths in Stepanakert (Az: Khankendi), the capital and largest city of Nagorno-Karabakh. That is why Baku’s regime sealed off the Lachin corridor, the only road linking the Armenian enclave with the Republic of Armenia.

This unofficial blockade started in December 12, 2022. In the beginning, so-called eco-activists blocked the Goris – Stepanakert Road. These ‘environmentalists’ called for the ceasing of illegal mining activities in the unrecognised Nagorno Karabakh Republic. Several members of the Azerbaijani Armed and Special Forces were identified among the protesters, while many of them were showing the sign of the ultranationalist Turkish organisation known as the Grey Wolves, a group designated by the European Parliament as a terrorist organisation. Evidently, this was not a spontaneous protest and these crowds were proxies of the Aliyev regime. The Caucasus expert Thomas De Waal refers to these “activists” as “Azerbaijan’s version of ‘Little Green Men.”

This state-sponsored activism resulted in the blockade of Goris-Stepanakert highway and the disruption of natural gas infrastructure transiting through territory captured from Azerbaijan after the Second Karabakh War.  Four months later, the Azerbaijani forces installed a checkpoint on the Lachin corridor in violation of the Trilateral Statement signed back on November 9, 2020. The Trilateral Statement, signed by Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, ended the Second Karabakh War. According to article 6 of that agreement, the Lachin corridor would remain under the control of the Russian peacekeeping forces. Month by month, the blockade tightens further. In July, Azerbaijan decided to block entry to aid transported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). At present, there are severe food shortages and the local populations faces starvation. It appears that the Aliyev regime is orchestrating an ethnic cleansing campaign with the intention of permanently resolving the Karabakh Question by ensuring there are no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The post-war reality in the region indicates that, without an agreement on the status and the rights of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenians will evacuate the region en masse, because they legitimately believe that if the whole of Nagorno Karabakh comes under Azerbaijani control they are likely to face discrimination by a severely Armenophobic regime, violence by nationalist paramilitary groups, economic stagnation, demographic decline, restrictions of movement from an to Armenia, mass arrests, the destruction of their cultural heritage (Albanisation, Russification), and the overall deterioration of their rights and freedoms.

In fact, analysts doubt that the Aliyev regime is ready to explore any agreement with Armenia, the United Nations, or the de-facto authorities in Stepanakert over the region’s status and the Armenian minority. The Baku regime seems to be employing a strategy aimed at compelling the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to leave “voluntarily” by triggering a famine and preventing the arrival of humanitarian aid convoys. After the defeat in the 44-day war back in 2020, the Armenian government’s ability to ensure the security of Nagorno-Karabakh has diminished significantly. Russia’s can no longer guarantee Artsakh’s security, as envisaged by the 2020 Trilateral Statement. Worse yet, Russia, the European Union, and the United States have offered parallel mediation frameworks but have not consolidated their diplomatic resolve towards a common stance vis-à-vis Azerbaijan. At a UN level, there is a request to open the Lachin Corridor, but little else.

The West has the moral obligation to intervene.

The US is not ready to impose sanctions on the Azerbaijani regime, for several reasons: Baku’s bittersweet relationship with Russia, its position on the Ukraine war, its role in confronting Iran, as well as its strategic location prevents Washington’s resolute stance.

The European Union is desperately seeking new energy partners following the invasion of Ukraine, and Azerbaijan is one of the most readily available partners. Azerbaijan is also important for Europe’s increasing presence in Central Asia. In addition, the European Union lacks a unified foreign policy, and certain member states, notably Orban’s Hungary, maintain close ties with the Aliyev regime.

Nevertheless, the Western nations have the capability and a moral obligation to deliver humanitarian airlifts to Nagorno-Karabakh. Firstly, there is an airport in close proximity to Stepanakert that can facilitate this effort. Secondly, the Azerbaijani regime is unlikely to risk harassing American or European aircrafts carrying essential humanitarian aid for the starving population of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Preventing a Holodomor-style genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh should be a priority for the European Union, the United States, and notably the United Nations Security Council, which should promptly pass a resolution for airlifting humanitarian aid to Artsakh. At the moment, this is the only solution for the food crisis in Karabakh. If the international community fails to implement direct measures, the approaching winter will be the last one for the Armenians of Mountainous Karabakh; thousands of people, including many children, will probably die from starvation, and those who will survive may be forced to evacuate Nagorno-Karabakh permanently.

George Meneshian is an Area Studies analyst specialising on the Caucasus and MENA regions. He is the head of the Middle East Research Group at the Institute of International Relations (IDIS, Athens).

https://www.europeaninterest.eu/article/the-west-has-a-moral-obligation-to-nagorno-karabakh/

Kim Kardashian is now facing a new call to action on the global stage. 

On a recent Saturday, a gathering of Armenian-American protesters made their presence felt at the entrance to the exclusive Hidden Hills community in Calabasas, California, where the 42-year-old reality star resides with her children. 

This gated community also houses several other members of the celebrity family, including sisters Kourtney, Khloe, Kylie Jenner, and their mother Kris Jenner.

During this impactful demonstration, protesters prominently displayed Armenian flags and brandished signs with powerful messages, such as ‘Kim, Speak up for Artsakh’ and ‘Kim, Your People Need You.’ 

The choice to target the Kardashian clan was not arbitrary but rather due to their strong familial ties to the community. Kim’s late father, Robert Kardashian, was a third-generation Armenian-American, thus grounding their connection to the Armenian heritage.

Kim, along with her sisters Kourtney and Khloe, embarked on a journey to Armenia in 2015 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

Now, the world watches as they are called upon to use their platform for advocacy once again, this time in the face of an international humanitarian crisis.

For several weeks now, protesters have been causing traffic disruptions across the greater Los Angeles area, all in a bid to draw attention to what they describe as a persistent crisis in the Republic of Artsakh, a region home to approximately 120,000 ethnic Armenians. 

Their claims revolve around an alleged crisis sparked when the Azerbaijani government initiated a blockade on the sole road connecting Artsakh with Armenia in December. 

https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1104320-kim-kardashians-community-cordoned-off-by-armenian-protesters-pleading-for-humanitarian-aid

Armenia became the world’s first Christian state around 300 AD when St. Gregory converted the king at the time to Christianity. A core province of the kingdom was Artsakh, now better known as Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region home to a millennia-old Armenian Christian community.

Almost 1,700 years after Gregory’s death, Artsakh’s Armenian community now faces extinction.

With his own economy in trouble, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has turned to the usual toolkit of failing dictators, first fanning the flames of nationalism and racism, followed by military adventurism. In September 2020, this came to a head when Azerbaijan, with direct Turkish military support, attacked the self-governing but unrecognized Republic of Artsakh. Thousands died and Artsakh lost half its territory. Azerbaijan, which says Nagorno-Karabakh belongs solely to it despite the wishes of the territory’s population for self-determination, demands the remaining portion of Artsakh submits to its rule.

Nevertheless, Aliyev agreed to a ceasefire brokered by Russia that guaranteed safe, unimpeded transit between Armenia and Artsakh’s 120,000-person Armenian community through the so-called Lachin corridor.

In December 2022, Aliyev began a series of stunts to squeeze Artsakh into submission. “Environmental activists” blocked the road to protest Armenian mining effluent. This was hypocritical, given Azerbaijan’s hydrocarbon pollution. The charges were nonsense. Heightening the irony was the fact that Azerbaijan lacks independent civil society; analysts later identified the protesters as known Azeri secret service officers.

Azerbaijan next constructed an illicit checkpoint and refused most traffic, even turning away the International Committee of the Red Cross. While Azerbaijan claims Armenia was smuggling weapons and landmines into Artsakh, neither the peacekeepers nor international observers confirm this. The noose now tightens. Azerbaijan has cut its gas pipelines and even internet. Artsakh cannot access food or medicine. Azerbaijani snipers shoot at farmers in Artsakh to prevent cultivation. Artsakh’s Christian community starves.

Aliyev wants the territory, but he wants it empty. While Azerbaijan says it is religiously tolerant, this is an exaggeration: It wants minorities, but only as museum exhibits. This is the case with the Jewish community, three-quarters of whom have fled since Azerbaijan’s independence. Aliyev trots out those who remain to recite his talking points. Armenia’s Jewish community, in contrast, is free and now growing.

In order to shift blame from looming starvation, the Azerbaijani government now says it will allow food shipments to Nagorno-Karabakh through Aghdam, an Azeri town with no links to Armenia proper.

If President Joe Biden’s team sees this as a productive compromise, it is foolish. To trust Azerbaijan to feed a population it deliberately starves is akin to trusting World War II-era Germans to feed the Warsaw ghetto.

Aliyev treats food and supplies as weapons of subjugation. Rather than negotiate diplomatically over Nagorno-Karabakh’s fate, Aliyev seeks to use deliberate starvation to compel acceptance of his demands. Christians know that if they compromise today, Aliyev will only repeat the process tomorrow, perhaps demanding the closure of Armenian churches, monasteries, or schools as in Turkey.

Also at issue is the sanctity of agreements. Aliyev signed an agreement to a free corridor between Armenia and Artsakh through Lachin. Should Biden let him revise that unilaterally, he kills rather than encourages diplomacy by demonstrating to that Aliyev’s signature is meaningless.

Nor is there any practical reason to accept Aliyev’s redirection of aid. Prior to Azerbaijan’s blockade, Artsakh was functional economically. The answer to its problems, therefore, is to end the embargo. If Aliyev then wants to open other trade routes into Artsakh and Armenia, even better. After all, the decades-long Azerbaijani and Turkish blockade of Armenia is an impediment to peace.

Rather than compromise with Aliyev’s new proposals, Biden should stand firm, deploying sanctions. He can stop military sales to Azerbaijan by imposing Section 907 sanctions. Nor is there any waiver to the Humanitarian Aid Corridors Act, which penalizes any country interfering with the provision of U.S. assistance. USAID convoys should be at Lachin now, ready to roll, American diplomats and congressional staff there to witness it.

With the latest genocide finding, Biden might even support an international indictment for Aliyev. “Never Again” must mean something.

Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.