Author: Manouk Vasilian

“The elections held in the territories of Karabakh region of Azerbaijan under the control of illegal Armenian forces is a new manifestation of efforts to unilaterally legitimize the current situation in the region, which is contrary to international law,” read a statement issued by the ministry over the weekend.

“This step is a flagrant violation of international law, including the U.N. Security Council resolutions and the [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] OSCE principles,” it added.

Armenians living in the Azerbaijani territories of Karabakh voted to elect a new parliament speaker, drawing condemnation from Azerbaijan, Türkiye, and the European Union.

“We condemn and consider this election, which is held in a period when Azerbaijan and Armenia strive to continue peace talks, as a move to undermine them,” Ankara said.

“Türkiye does not recognize this illegitimate election, which constitutes a violation of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. We call on the U.N. and international community not to recognize this election,” read the statement by the ministry.

It also reiterated Türkiye’s support for the peace negotiations process between Azerbaijan and Armenia, stressing that signing a lasting peace agreement soon will make a major contribution to peace and stability in the region.

Azerbaijan had freed its territories from Armenia’s three-decade occupation following the 44-day war.

Erdoğan to talk to Pashinyan

In the meantime, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he had a phone conversation with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and will talk to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan about the recent developments in Karabakh at a press conference he held following the G20 summit in India.

“We have no option other than calling for restraint in the region,” Erdoğan said, stressing that the elections in Karabakh are unacceptable. President Erdoğan said he will ask Pashinyan to urge those who conducted the elections in Karabakh to reconsider in his planned phone conversation on Sept. 11.

The binding issue for Armenians around the globe for the better part of a century has been genocide – gathering evidence to prove they suffered humanity’s greatest horror and leveraging their resulting campaign into a potent voice on the international stage. So it should now come as little surprise that as a sizable chunk of its people may face starvation, they have been quick to tell the world of the looming catastrophe.

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought two wars over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, with Azerbaijan gaining control of the territory in late 2020. Now recognised as part of Azerbaijan but patrolled by Russian troops, Nagorno-Karabakh and some nearby areas have since the 1990s been governed by a separatist ethnic Armenian entity, the Republic of Artsakh.

In the latest South Caucasus tussle, Azerbaijan has blocked the main road into the disputed region from the Armenian capital Yerevan, leaving the 120,000 overwhelmingly ethnic Armenians who live in Artsakh under siege. The trouble started last December when Azerbaijan enacted a soft blockade, allowing food, supplies and aid to pass through the Lachin Corridor, as the link is known.

Soon after a mid-June scuffle with Armenian troops, Baku completely closed the corridor, in violation of their 2020 arrangement. More than two months later, reports from the region are grim. Cafes and restaurants have closed. Supermarket shelves are empty.

Clinics are low on essential medicines, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Ambulances and public buses no longer run due to fuel shortages. Neighbours barter fruit and vegetables as children stand in bread lines for hours and mothers trudge arduous mountain paths for cooking oil. Many districts of the regional capital, Stepanakert, are without water and electricity.

Baku says that it acted to prevent an “ecocide” by the Artsakh government and that the Lachin blockade aims to halt Armenian smuggling into Nagorno-Karabakh. Azeri officials also blame the region’s Armenian leadership for locals suffering, pointing out that the Republic of Artsakh refused their offer to deliver goods via the Azeri town of Aghdam.

“An administration of occupation is blocking the Azerbaijani government’s provision of food and medicine to an Azerbaijani region,” Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign affairs adviser to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, wrote in National Interest this month.

Local Armenians dismiss this as propaganda and say the plan is to starve them into leaving. The western world, which tends to favour mostly Christian Armenia, has pricked up its ears. Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, argued in early August that the starvation inflicted on Armenians represented genocide.

Of course, no people should be deprived of food and medicines, or forced to face starvation. But considering the circumstances, this seems more like siege as a negotiating tactic rather than anything else.

Back in June, Baku and Yerevan were chest-deep in negotiations on a long-term settlement and had recently made significant progress. The main sticking point, after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan officially recognised Azerbaijan’s territorial control of the region, was the fate of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Yerevan insists they be granted special rights and security guarantees, while Baku is unwilling to resume talks on the enclave’s status and seeks mainly to secure complete control over the territory.

Facing a potential impasse, Azerbaijan may have sought to tip the scales in its favour by putting in place a blockade, which would probably end in one of two ways: either Yerevan would be forced to capitulate to avoid mass starvation; or so many Armenians would flee that the region’s demography would change, and the issue would cease to be a sticking point. On the weekend, Azerbaijani media reported that hundreds of Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh have been allowed to pass through Lachin into Armenia in recent days.

What Baku appears to have failed to account for is that the world tends to frown on even the suggestion of genocide. The outpouring of western support for Armenians and condemnation of Azerbaijan’s ploy both seem to grow by the day, as another major institution or top official highlights the harrowing humanitarian catastrophe.

The UN Security Council held an emergency session on the issue, the EU warned of “dire consequences” for locals, and the US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, urged Baku to “restore free movement through the corridor”.

Any agreement reached now between the two countries will have been clearly coerced, and its approval by the international community might greenlight the future use of blockades and other strong-arm tactics. At this point, the likeliest outcome may be Azerbaijan lifting the blockade to enable renewed talks, with reduced leverage.

More than a century ago, amid the chaos of the First World War, Ottoman forces drove hundreds of thousands of Armenians from their homes. Many ended up in the Syrian desert and died of starvation. As another mass starvation event looms, Yerevan has been gaining global sympathy.

Even in Turkey, the staunchest ally of Azerbaijan, public figures are speaking out in support of Armenians. “Just as the Berlin blockade was broken,” dozens of well-known Turkish writers and journalists urged in an open letter this week, “we call for breaking the blockade of Karabakh through airlift and thus putting an end to this human tragedy.”

Sieges are relatively common in war. But during peace talks, publicly starving a sizable population – particularly one that has effectively highlighted its suffering for decades – seems unwise.

School starts up again this week in Stepanakert. Expect the buses to return to the roads soon.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/08/31/how-should-we-view-the-latest-stand-off-in-the-south-caucasus/

The war in Ukraine has dominated headlines in Western media since it began. But the world has largely ignored another humanitarian crisis not far away—one that is reaching a boiling point and finally is starting to get a bit of the attention it merits.

Over the past few weeks, two international legal experts, the first UN special advisor on the prevention of genocide and the founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, issued separate reports warning of the genocidal implications of the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh caused by Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the key access road for the enclave of 120,000 ethnic Armenians.

But for many in the region—like a young survivor who, for security reasons, I will refer to only by his first name of Mels—ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and on its border has been ongoing for several years.

Azerbaijani forces kidnapped Mels in Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2020 and for 10 months tortured him with bats and chains, starved him, and forced him to chant “Karabakh is Azerbaijan” and “Glory to the president of Azerbaijan.”

Mels’ grandmother prayed for him to be alive, offering her life to God to bring him home. The Red Cross eventually facilitated this, but the day he returned, 30 pounds lighter and unrecognizable, she died.

Mels is one of the roughly 100 Armenian victims of atrocities that we at the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) interviewed in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh over the past two years.

Western media is just beginning to report on the crisis within Nagorno-Karabakh caused by the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting this Armenian-populated territory within the borders to Azerbaijan to Armenia proper.

The area, which ended up in Azerbaijan due to the vagaries of internal Soviet borders, has operated as a self-governing entity for three decades after the fall of communism. Azerbaijan seized control of much of it in a 2020 war which cost thousands of Armenian lives.

Now, Azerbaijan has restricted movement of people, goods, and aid into and out of Nagorno-Karabakh for 258 days, strangling the residents’ access to basic services, emptying grocery stores, causing hours-long bread lines, and depriving hospitals of life-saving medicines and supplies.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken have denounced the blockade. Last week, in an emergency UN Security Council meeting about the crisis, Azerbaijan ignored calls by the United States, Britain, France, and Russia to allow the free flow of aid into the territory, responding with the claim that “people are happy. They are dancing at their wedding party. This is a celebration. Very tasty cookies!”

While the world is largely focusing on Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor, Azerbaijan’s activities there are hardly isolated acts of aggression.

The reality is that Azerbaijani forces have been continuously violating the human rights and sovereignty of Armenians within and along the border of Nagorno-Karabakh since the 44-Day war in 2020. Azerbaijani forces have continued to torture, displace, extrajudicially kill, and forcibly “disappear” ethnic Armenian soldiers and civilians, both inside of Nagorno-Karabakh and in sovereign Armenia, in violation of the ceasefire agreement and international law.

Our team at UNHR, including lawyers, academics, and students from Harvard, UCLA, Wesleyan, and Yale, have witnessed such violations firsthand. We spent hundreds of hours collecting the stories of victims and their families, some of which we present in a summary briefing paper released last week entitled “Tip of the Iceberg: Understanding Azerbaijan’s Blockade of the Lachin Corridor as Part of a Wider Genocidal Campaign against Ethnic Armenians.”

Most victims we interviewed believe that the international community has simply forgotten them. “It feels like I don’t even exist in the world,” a woman named Ani told us after soldiers beheaded her elder brother Yuri and circulated a video of the crime on social media.

The former ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, said in a report a few weeks ago that Azerbaijan’s actions can be classified as genocide under Article 2 c) of the Genocide convention.

And this is no exaggeration. Azerbaijani officials at the highest levels openly advocate for ethnic cleansing and have normalized hatred against ethnic Armenians.

Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev has called ethnic Armenians “barbarians and vandals” who are infected by a “virus” for which they “need to be treated,” and he has flaunted his territorial aspirations: “Present-day Armenia is our land…Now that the Karabakh conflict has been resolved, this is the issue on our agenda.” Other officials have referred to Armenia as a “cancerous tumor” and Armenians as a “disease,” calling for “complete elimination of Armenians.”

His government celebrated this genocidal sentiment in a commemorative stamp it issued following the 2020 war depicting a man in a biohazard suit fumigating the area of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The warning signs of ethnic cleansing are crystal clear. The question now becomes: Will the world respond, or will Armenians face another genocide alone?

Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights. He teaches human rights at Columbia Law School and Wesleyan University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.