Category: 2023

On Tuesday, Oct. 3, the Armenian Student Association at UC San Diego held a candlelight vigil in front of Geisel Library. This event sought to honor both the soldiers and civilians impacted by the Artsakh conflict and to underline the broader ramifications of global indifference.

While rooted in the regions of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Artsakh conflict resonates on a global scale, notably in Armenian diaspora communities familiar with the impactful history of the Armenian genocide. This sentiment is clearly reflected among Armenian-American students at UCSD. Discussing how the conflict influences the Armenian identity and memory, senior and ASA President Levon Babyan highlighted the narratives tied to the Armenian genocide of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire.

“The Armenian genocide was a monumental event that affected 1.5 million of our ancestors,” Babyan said. “I became acquainted with this history while attending an Armenian school in Los Angeles. We impart these narratives to the younger generation, aiming to foster awareness and prevent history’s recurrence. It’s reminiscent, in sentiment, of the harrowing events our forebears endured over a century ago.”

The UCSD Armenian community further faced stark reminders of this conflict in 2020 during the resurgence of the 44-Day War as a result of Azerbaijan’s aggression against the Armenians. 

“I joined UCSD right when the war began,” Babyan said. “There wasn’t much we could do here because the student population was minimal during 2020. Since then, there has been a continuous decline in the situation, culminating in the current blockade. It’s been agonizing for our people in Armenia. Here at UCSD, we’re mobilizing resources, fundraising, and spreading awareness. Yet, it feels like our pleas fall on deaf ears.”

“While the broader UCSD community might not be able to provide direct help, their solidarity would mean a lot,” Babyan said. “We aim to show the cost of inaction.”

On misconceptions about the conflict, Babyan was unequivocal. 

“All the information is out there for everyone to see,” he said. “There should be no misconceptions. We’ve lost significant parts of our homeland. The reality is clear: it was genocide.”

Babyan also provided insight into ways the UCSD community can stand in solidarity with Armenians.

“Educate yourself. Dive deep into what transpired, understand its historical roots, and look for ways to prevent such events in the future,” he said. “If you encounter Armenians, engage in conversations, and ask how you can help. Donations, outreach, and genuine empathy go a long way.”

Addressing the student body, Babyan’s words encapsulated the silent sacrifices of the UCSD Armenian community. 

“Our strength is our unity,” he declared. Babyan went on to detail the disturbing figures of the conflict, noting that over “120,000 Armenians” are currently enduring immense suffering due to the ongoing hostilities.

As the event progressed, many attendees were given a platform to share their personal experiences, each testimony adding another layer to the collective narrative. The aim was to illuminate the human side of geopolitical disputes by personalizing the often abstract statistics and figures that one may easily detach themselves from.

For many Armenians at UCSD, the Artsakh conflict is more than just a historical or political topic. It reflects their ongoing commitment to awareness and understanding. As Babyan said, they come together to honor the history of the Armenian people. Sharing these stories across different platforms, from universities to international arenas, plays a role in fostering broader discussions about peace and recognition.

By the time the last bus carrying ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in Goris, an Armenian city on the border with Azerbaijan, the scale of the tragedy had become clear.

The 19 September lightning offensive by Azerbaijan ended thirty years of self-rule in the breakaway region, located within its borders but – historically and as a result of the long-running conflict – inhabited almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians.

Over 100,000 people, almost the entirety of the region’s population, streamed through the border and sought shelter in Armenia, whose government – just like the rest of the world – never recognised what the refugees call the Republic of Artsakh, despite being its closest ally.

As a result of the offensive and under pressure from a stifling blockade in place for nearly a year, the government of Artsakh announced it would disband all its institutions by January next year.

"While Azerbaijan has stated it would 'guarantee the rights' of Armenians who want to return to their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenians accuse it of ethnic cleansing"

The territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh fought a war to secede from Azerbaijan, supported by Armenian forces.

The events of those years saw atrocities on both sides and resulted in the expulsion of more than 700,000 Azeris from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the surrounding territories. An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians were displaced from Azerbaijan.

Peace negotiations led by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group over the years failed to result in a settlement, and a low-intensity conflict continued.

All-out war flared up again in 2020, which saw Azerbaijan – backed by Turkey and strong from its oil boom – recover 80 percent of the territories previously lost, including one-third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.

The rest of the territory was patrolled by a Russian 'peacekeeping' force following a Moscow-brokered ceasefire. Traditionally a close ally of Armenia, ties between the two countries have become strained over the last year.

Armenia's prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, a former journalist who came to power in 2018 after leading a protest movement against corrupt post-soviet elites, has made several moves, mostly symbolic, distancing his country from Russia.

That tension, as well as Russia's engagement in its war in Ukraine, could be the reason Russian forces on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh failed to prevent the closure of the Lachin corridor connecting the enclave to Armenia in December 2022.

For months, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh had been queueing in breadlines and struggling to procure medicine and other essential items. Malnutrition and exhaustion clearly marked many of the faces of the thousands that crossed into Goris every day.

While Azerbaijan has stated it would “guarantee the rights” of Armenians who want to return to their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenians accuse it of ethnic cleansing.

“It was the latest in a larger escalation,” Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre in Yerevan, told The New Arab.

“So the fear in Armenia is Azerbaijan will not stop, will not be satisfied,” he added, explaining that the country is concerned about Russian “either complicity or incapacity”.

In the latest signal of its distancing from Russia, the Armenian parliament has voted to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), which binds the country to arrest Putin over war crimes in Ukraine should the Russian president set foot on its territory.

Yet Armenia remains a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). It also imports over 80 percent of its gas from Russia.

“I think the Armenian government is cutting its losses in terms of Nagorno-Karabakh and challenging the relationship with Russia,” Giragosian said. “But we're smart enough here in Armenia not to see NATO membership as the answer to all of our problems.”

"'It's less about Armenia looking to the West, as the West looking to Armenia'"

Filling the void

After the Azerbaijani offensive, hundreds of opposition protesters rallied in Yerevan. They called on Armenian president Pashinyan to resign over the crisis, calling him a “traitor.”

“This government was actually re-elected despite losing the war in 2020,” Giragosian explained. He believes that frustration over the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh will not topple the government. “I expect much of the frustration to shift away from the government and to target Russia for its inability to defend the Armenians."

Washington and Brussels have been moving to fill the void left by Russia. In January 2023, the EU launched a civilian monitoring mission in Armenia. “It's less about Armenia looking to the West, as the West looking to Armenia,” Giragosian said.

During a visit to Yerevan on 3 October, French foreign minister Catherine Colonna promised to supply military equipment to Armenia.

In response, Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev said that France would be to blame for any new war in Armenia. Aliyev also boycotted a long-planned meeting with Pashinyan in Granada, Spain, in early October, which was attended by EU Council President Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Olaf Scholz.

While some EU politicians have called for sanctions on Azerbaijan, Michel invited both Pashinyan and Aliyev to meet in Brussels by the end of October. On a visit to Tbilisi on 8 October, president Aliyev said Azerbaijan is ready to hold talks with Armenia, indicating Georgia as the preferred host for negotiations.

“This is the most promising moment there has ever been to get to a lasting peace,” said Matthew Bryza, an American diplomat and former co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, which included the US, France and Russia.

The Armenian side has also been signalling its willingness to sit down at the negotiating table. "Endless war is not beneficial for anyone," parliament speaker Alen Simonian told Armenian public television on 25 September.

“Armenia does not have any capacity to wage another war against Azerbaijan. Its military has been decimated in the last war,” said Bryza.

“If there were to be another flare-up of armed conflict, it wouldn't provide any hope to the Armenian side unless the Armenian military completely rebuilt itself. And that's not really something anyone's talking about,” he added.

Still, some analysts warn that disputes over border areas and trade routes could further prolong the conflict.

“The Azerbaijani strategy in this campaign is largely driven by domestic politics,” explained Giragosian.

“I see a father and son dynasty, authoritarian. A family ruling the country for over a quarter of a century, and needing conflict to distract the population from the lack of democracy and corruption.”

Ylenia Gostoli is a reporter currently based in Istanbul, Turkey. She has covered politics, social change, and conflict across the Middle East and Europe. Her work on refugees, migration and human trafficking has won awards and grants

https://www.newarab.com/analysis/how-nagorno-karabakh-shifted-regional-balance-power

Parakar (Armenia) (AFP) – Each day at her school, headteacher Anush Hakobyan passes by the photo of her son killed three years ago in a war with Azerbaijan for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The 48-year-old said she faces a difficult balancing act — educating children while preparing them for the possibility of another war with Armenia's arch-foe neighbour in the Caucasus.

The task has become even more complicated since September, when Azerbaijan recaptured the long-disputed breakaway region of Karabakh, which had been under Armenian separatists' control for three decades.

Hakobyan's son died in autumn 2020, aged 27, during the 44 days of fighting for control of the mountainous enclave within Azerbaijan, populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians who see it as their ancestral land.

In the school's entrance hall, his photo is displayed alongside about a dozen other faces of men killed during the hostilities that have claimed thousands of lives on both sides.

The three decades of the simmering conflict have deepened the rift between the two countries, especially among young people, fuelling streams of hatred on social networks.

It is in this toxic atmosphere that Hakobyan launched at her school of some 600 pupils a course called "Educating students to become civilised individuals".

"We've been through so many trials and wars, we know how to talk to children," she said.

Educating the students "does not prevent us from telling them that we will win the war, that what is happening in Karabakh is not logical", she added.

"We also educate them so that they know how to defend themselves. It's a balance to find. If Europe prefers (energy-rich Azerbaijan's) gas over helping us, we have no choice."

Armenia didn't intervene militarily when Azerbaijan launched an offensive last month to retake Karabakh from separatist forces, who surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting and agreed to return the region under the control of the central government in Baku.

Over the next few days, the majority of Karabakh's Armenians — more than 100,000 people — fled their homes to Armenia, sparking a major refugee crisis.

At Hakobyan's school in the village of Parakar, west of the Armenian capital Yerevan — as in all public schools in the country — military courses are taught from the age of 13, often by veterans of the two wars which Armenians and Azerbaijanis had fought over the last three decades.

The courses include instruction on military ranks and different types of weaponry. Young boys learn how to handle weapons as they prepare for the two years of military service they will have to complete when they come of age.

"I am preparing them to defend themselves, teaching them military art and history," said Sonbat Gasparyan, who teaches this course in Parakar.

He also has to address questions such as: "What have we done? Why are they attacking us?" without adding fuel to the fire of the deeply entrenched ethnic hatred.

"Of course there is hatred but we teach them that we cannot hate our neighbours," Gasparyan said with little optimism.

"We tell them that it's better to live in peace but they already have firm ideas."

In the teachers' staffroom, animosity also surfaces among adults towards the "Turks", a pejorative term widely used in Armenia to refer to Turkic-speaking Azerbaijanis.

"We don't see them as a real nation. They've only existed for a hundred years and don't have their own culture," said headteacher Hakobyan.

Her colleague, Eranahi Grigoryan, a biology teacher, advocates reconciliation.

"They are our neighbours. I have nothing against them because they also lose their children. It's just the government in Baku that wants to expand its territory," she said.

Azerbaijan has declared the Karabakh conflict resolved for good after the region returned under Baku's control.

But few in Armenia accept the loss and many do not rule out a fresh conflict.

Hakobyan quoted a proverb that tells a tale about Armenians' resolve to reclaim this piece of land: "When you mix blood and soil, you give birth to the motherland."

France could join India to arm Armenia against Azerbaijan after Russia’s failure to come through on the defense deals it signed with Yerevan.

A rattled Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev has scolded France and said its decision to send military aid to Armenia could renew violent hostilities in the South Caucasus that ceased after Azerbaijan’s swift military operation ended in September.

The strong words from the Azerbaijan President have come in the face of France promising military aid to Armenia in early October 2023. France’s show of support has been preceded by Azerbaijan declaring victory after a swiftly executed military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, the main bone of contention and a “frozen conflict” between the two Caucasian neighbors.

The conflict has forced the exodus of around 100,000 ethnic Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. At the beginning of October 2023, Baku officially dissolved Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The provision of weapons by France to Armenia was an approach that was not serving peace, but one intended to inflate a new conflict, and if any new conflict occurs in the region, France would be responsible for causing it,” according to the Azerbaijani readout of a call between Aliyev and European Council President Charles Michel.

Aliyev also blamed France for his absence at a summit of the European Political Community last week in Granada, Spain, where an EU-brokered meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was arranged to boost the peace process between the two countries. The meeting aimed at preventing further escalation of conflict between the two countries.

Azerbaijan’s state-run APA news agency, citing unnamed sources, said Aliyev had decided not to go after its request to have its ally Turkey represented at the meeting was turned down. Following France and Germany’s objection, Baku felt “an anti-Azerbaijani atmosphere” had developed among the meeting’s potential participants.

The French statement about military aid to Armenia comes as Yerevan has, for some time now, sought to diversify its arms imports and find new allies after Russia failed to provide the country with ordered weapons worth around US $400 million (it has not yet returned the money).

The failed arms deal came as an additional trigger in the worsening Russia-Armenia relations, which made Armenia seek to diversify the sources of its arms imports, looking at the West and India.

France and Armenia have shared strong diplomatic ties, as the former is home to a large Armenian diaspora. In 2001, Paris was among the first Western capitals to recognize the Armenian genocide, two decades before the United States did.

So far, France has backed Armenia only politically, but there is a shift in its policy in the conflict. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, during her visit to Armenia’s capital Yerevan, on October 3, said: “France has given its consent to sign a future contract with Armenia, which will enable the provision of military equipment to Armenia so that Armenia can ensure its defense, it is clear that I cannot elaborate on this issue for now.”

Colonna declined to give details about the proposed aid but added that she had asked the European Union’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, to expand the EU mission in the region and proposed including Armenia in an EU peace mechanism similar to that implemented by the bloc in Moldova.

The European country is stepping up as Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and the peace brokered by it has been shattered by Azerbaijan as it launched a military campaign in 2020.

In the latest conflict that erupted on September 19, Azerbaijan launched an offensive and, within 24 hours, declared victory over the separatist province of Nagorno-Karabakh. Authorities of the province have now said the ethnic Armenian enclave would dissolve on January 1, 2024.

France has also been fostering closer defense ties with India, as the latter opted to induct Rafale fighter jets both in its Air Force and Navy. Dassault Chairman and CEO Eric Trappier is in Delhi for two days to visit the details of the proposed purchase of 26 naval variants of the Rafale fighter jet for the Indian Navy.

The Indian defense minister will be concurrently on a four-day visit to Italy and France beginning October 9 to further the bilateral strategic ties with the European countries and explore joint development of military hardware.

India has diplomatic ties with both Azerbaijan and Armenia, which are geographically important for New Delhi’s connectivity with Russia and Europe through Central Asia and Iran.

In 2022, when India inked the deal to supply PINAKA multi-barrel rocket launchers (MBRL), anti-tank munitions, and ammunition worth US $250 million to Armenia, it was seen as New Delhi taking a position in the conflict. It was the first export of PINAKA by India.

Armenia opted for Pinaka MBRLs, considered at par with the American HIMARs, for its shoot and scoot capability. The mobility is an advantage as adversary Azerbaijan has been deploying drones, including suicide drones.

Armenia’s endorsement of the Indian position on Kashmir and support for New Delhi’s ambition to join the permanent seat in the expanded UN Security Council and Azerbaijan’s proximity to Pakistan has tilted the scales in favor of Armenia.

Armenia has been vocal about diversifying its defense suppliers following Russia’s recanting on its defense orders. It has also made public the negotiations with India for possible delivery of military equipment. Yerevan has shown interest in Indian drones and loitering munitions, besides mid-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems like the Akash.

While India has not confirmed publicly that it is supplying the Akash SAM system to Armenia, Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) did announce it has received export orders from a friendly country.

• Ritu Sharma has been a journalist for over a decade, writing on defense, foreign affairs, and nuclear technology.