Category: 2023

The State Department said it was “deeply concerned about deteriorating humanitarian conditions” in Nagorno-Karabakh, months after Azerbaijan allegedly blocked the only road link into the enclave.

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“We reiterate our call to immediately reopen the Lachin corridor to humanitarian, commercial and passenger traffic,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.

He called on Azerbaijani officials and representatives in the breakaway region to enter talks “without delay to agree on the means of transporting critical provisions” to civilians.

“Basic humanitarian assistance should never be held hostage to political disagreements,” he said.

Self-described environmental protesters in December began blocking the Lachin corridor, the only way into Nagorno-Karabakh, which remains internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and has triggered two wars between the former Soviet republics.

Azerbaijan, which made significant territorial gains in the second war in 2020, insists that the road remains open.

Criticism led by members of the Armenian diaspora has been mounting.

Azerbaijan on Thursday summoned France’s ambassador to protest after French politicians including the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tried unsuccessfully to escort a 10-truck humanitarian convoy into the enclave.

KORNIDZOR, Armenia — Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s motorcade tore through the Armenian countryside on Wednesday, escorted by a dozen or so beaten-up cars blaring their horns and flying the French tricolor in appreciation, leaving bemused street dogs and the occasional military outpost in their dust.

Her visit, along with a group of French regional leaders, was part of an improbable gambit to draw attention to a burgeoning humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, bringing together politicians more accustomed to dealing with planning permissions and bin collectors’ pensions than tense foreign policy on Europe’s far-flung fringe.

Behind the black diplomatic SUVs and the minibuses full of foreign and local press were 10 white trucks filled with humanitarian aid donated from France, each emblazoned with the names of the regions taking part — including Ville de Paris, Île-de-France, Occitanie, Pays de la Loire and Strasbourg.

The unusual decision for mayors to wade into an international quagmire comes amid growing criticism of the EU’s role in the region. While Brussels has deployed a civilian monitoring mission in an effort to deter incursions across the border of Armenia proper, it has done little to assuage concerns an imminent catastrophe could be unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh.

It’s also a sign of France’s strengthening ties with Armenia. As many as 750,000 members of the Armenian diaspora live in the country, with sizeable communities in both Paris and Marseille. The Elysée has emerged as a major supporter of the Karabakh Armenians in recent months, backing calls for international guarantees for their safety. Now, Hidalgo is calling for President Emmanuel Macron to push forward a U.N. Security Council resolution on the situation.

For more than seven weeks, the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh — an unrecognized state inside Azerbaijan’s borders — has been cut off from deliveries of food and fuel according to aid organizations, and the risk of famine is growing.

In the village of Kornidzor, a stone’s throw from Armenia’s tense frontier with Azerbaijan, a small crowd of locals came out to greet the delegation.

“No, I don’t know who she is, but I hear Paris is a very pretty city,” said 66-year-old Ararat, a refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh who upped sticks and moved to the village inside Armenia’s borders after a brutal war over the breakaway region three years ago. With tensions rising, those living near the demarcation line report hearing near-daily firefights that have claimed the lives of soldiers on both sides in recent months.

As reporters sweltered in a humanitarian aid point converted to serve as a press tent, the French contingent, which also included Strasbourg Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, Marseille Deputy Mayor Michèle Rubirola and Xavier Bertrand, president of the regional council of Hauts-de-France, was waylaid. Over the hill in the nearby city of Goris, visitors were treated to a traditional meal of vine leaves, salads and fruit pilaf at a barbecue restaurant while delegates met with Armenian officials.

Once the trucks caught up, Hidalgo — who used the trip to warn of the risk of “genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of an authoritarian state” in the region — marched alongside the stationary convoy, surrounded by dozens of flashing cameras.

On the hillside, they paused to inspect the Azerbaijani checkpoint installed on what was once the only road in or out of Nagorno-Karabakh and beyond it, the Armenian-held territory tens of miles into the interior of the mountainous country. But the trucks didn’t attempt to cross the bridge onto Azerbaijani soil. Instead, they joined a backed-up queue of Armenian aid vehicles that has been waiting for weeks for permission to move ahead.

According to one delegation member, Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Les Républicains grouping in the Senate, that’s because European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has looked to Azerbaijan for natural gas in a bid to help replace lost supplies from Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine. That decision, he claims, has emboldened Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, “the persecutor of Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

The intervention has left Azerbaijan incandescent. In an open letter, the country’s ambassador in Paris, Leyla Abdullayeva, has accused Hidalgo and others of “demonizing” her government “under pressure from the Armenian community in France.”

It’s not the first war of words in the sometimes-surreal politics of the conflict. In October, Azerbaijani state television employed a group of children to sing along to a song mocking Macron, while Aliyev has personally backed French overseas territories in their apparent struggle against Paris’ “neocolonialism.”

Azerbaijan denies a humanitarian crisis is unfolding and the country’s Red Crescent has dispatched a rival aid convoy from the other direction. However, the Karabakh Armenians say accepting it would be tantamount to surrendering their self-declared independence — a point Azerbaijan says shows the blockade is self-imposed. For the time being, that leaves them at an impasse.

A humanitarian crisis in the long-disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is exposing both the weakness of Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and the failure of the Biden administration to deliver on promises to defend Armenians from the risk of another genocide.

Generally ignored by the rest of the world, Nagorno-Karabakh is a sliver of land in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian seas. Its people have been tormented for 35 years by on-and-off fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Until recently, both countries claimed sovereignty over the territory, but recently Pashinyan unilaterally gave up Armenia’s claim to the home of some 120,000 ethnic Armenians, a move that is seen as treasonous by most of his constituents.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev has grabbed the upper hand in this conflict by imposing a blockade on the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The blockade has choked off supplies of food, medicine, and fuel to Armenians in the region.

Russia is nominally Armenia’s ally and responsible for peacekeeping in Nagorno-Karabakh but has allowed Azerbaijan to carry out this aggression. The Biden administration so far has done nothing for the besieged Armenians.

Ethnic Armenians have lived in Nagorno-Karabakh (or Artsakh in Armenian) for millennia. It was recognized as part of Armenia in 1920 by the League of Nations—the precursor of the United Nations—only to be transferred to Azerbaijan on the orders of Joseph Stalin a year later, in 1921, after the independent Armenian Republic was occupied by the Red Army.

The most recent war ended on November 9, 2020, with Armenia’s defeat. Azerbaijan used Turkish special forces and Syrian jihadist mercenaries to force Pashinyan to sign a ceasefire on highly unfavorable terms.

Armenia’s parliament appointed Pashinyan, a former newspaper editor, as prime minister in June 2018 after he led a protest movement in the streets of Yerevan and promised to crack down on corruption and pursue stronger ties with the West. Instead, he has allowed corruption to fester, cuddled up with Russia’s Putin regime and let Aliyev call the shots in Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia’s military has been left to languish without adequate funding, equipment, or leadership.

Washington shares some of the blame. The U.S., France, and Russia were co-chairs of the Minsk Group, part of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in trying to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. After Azerbaijan thwarted the process by attacking Nagorno- Karabakh, Russia sent in troops with the ostensible assignment of “peacekeeping.”

Last November, two years after signing the ceasefire, Pashinyan handed control of the Lachin corridor to the Russians. When he followed up by giving up claims to sovereignty in the territory, Russia had a convenient excuse for allowing Aliyev to put up his blockade.

Now the Pashinyan government is blaming the West—rather than Armenia’s duplicitous and treacherous ally, Russia—for not doing enough to save Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Some prominent members of the Armenian diaspora and ethnic Armenian lobbying groups have joined the chorus, turning this situation into a public relations problem for the Biden administration. Having promised, in a statement issued on the Armenian Remembrance Day of April 24, 2021, to prevent a second Armenian genocide, Biden is now being put on the spot.

Pashinyan’s unwillingness to protect Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh should come as no surprise to Washington. In July 2019, barely a year after he came to power, officials at the U.S. embassy in Armenia confided to me that he was uninterested in any serious reform and had no plans to embrace the West.

The State Department’s 2022 Armenia Country Report found that no corruption cases against current and former high-ranking government officials had resulted in convictions. A survey conducted by the International Republican Institute in March found Pashinyan’s popularity rating at home approaching single digits.

Meanwhile, Pashinyan has pursued a cozy relationship with Russia, as displayed by his trip to Moscow to attend the May 9 victory parade, Armenia’s membership in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, and Armenia’s role as a major conduit for goods bypassing Russia sanctions.

Pashinyan also has managed to exasperate one of Armenia’s major allies, France. In an apparent frustration with Pashinyan’s defeatist approach to Nagorno-Karabakh, President Macron recently responded to a question raised by a French lawmaker by promising to take a tougher stand than that of Pashinyan in defending Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. “I am the only one who has a clear position and message on the issue of Artsakh,” Macron declared.

The only thing working for Armenia and the people of Nagorno-Karabakh is that Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev may be running out of time. He knows he is unlikely to receive much more help from Russia if Putin is toppled because of his botched invasion of Ukraine. As a result, Aliyev has switched from the “caviar diplomacy” of negotiations to “barbwire diplomacy” of effectively creating a concentration camp for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The international community is beginning to take note of this strategy. A high-level UN panel of experts recently urged Azerbaijan to lift the Lachin corridor blockade. A former International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, issued a report this month describing the blockade as genocide. In a statement delivered before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress on June 21, former U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback said Washington “cannot allow another Armenian Christian genocide or crimes against humanity to unfold in Nagorno-Karabakh. Let us take our stand now like our American forefathers who stood with the persecuted Armenians during their holocaust.”

U.S. State Department officials realize that peace with Aliyev is not possible on honorable and humane terms, though they do not publicly acknowledge that. Forcing Armenia to give away Nagorno-Karabakh and sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan has been Russia’s plan. Russia needs peace in the South Caucasus on its own terms as soon as possible, and certain elements of the U.S. bureaucracy are willing to let that happen. The result would be an even stronger alliance among Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkey, and Iran.

To avert a catastrophe, the Biden administration should join France in the United Nations Security Council in calling for UN-mandated peacekeepers to be sent to Nagorno-Karabakh immediately. If Russia blocks such a resolution, the U.S. should consider bilateral action, perhaps in collaboration with France and Greece, Armenia’s historic partner.

Washington can also help boost pro-Western political parties in Armenia. The largest of them, the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, had a high-level visit to Washington in April. The NDA leader received a warm welcome from several congressional offices and through their lobbyist, The Livingston Group, helped organize the Congressional hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh on June 21. The administration can do much more to build stronger ties with the NDA and signal that it will not tolerate police brutality against the party’s members as they are about to embark on a nationwide protest movement against Pashinyan.

To make a meaningful pivot toward the West, Armenia needs genuine pro-Western leadership. Pashinyan has neither the intention nor the capacity to make such a move and to undertake much needed reforms, including in national security and defense. Pashinyan has managed to alienate almost everyone. He has to go.

Dr. David A. Grigorian is a Senior Fellow at Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a 27-year veteran of the IMF and the World Bank, where he spent much of his career working on the Middle East, Caucasus, and Central Asia, and was the editor-in-chief of “Corruption in Armenia” report. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.

By Mike Aquilina ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 30, 2023 | In Way of the Fathers (Podcast)

This is a listener-supported podcast! Thanks for your help! 

As if an interest in patristics isn’t strange enough, in this episode we’re getting still more exotic. We’re entering the world of Armenian patristics. We’re visiting the ancient city of Ejmiatsin—leaping over the barriers of language (and even alphabet) to encounter the heroes too often neglected in the histories. This is the story of St. Gregory the Illuminator and his contemporaries, and the Church they founded. Armenia also became a great center of learning and so houses translations of many Greek and Syriac works that would otherwise be lost.

LINKS

Mike Aquilina, “Ancient Christian capital rises again in stunning New York exhibit” https://angelusnews.com/voices/ancient-christian-capital-rises-again-in-stunning-new-york-exhibit/

Helen C. Evans, ed., Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Armenia_Art_Religion_and_Trade_in_the_Middle_Ages

Society for Armenian Studies, Digital Resources https://societyforarmenianstudies.com/2018/02/12/armenian-studies-digital-resources/

Robert W. Thomson, Five Studies in Armenian Patristics https://archive.org/details/thomson-studies-1964-1982

Mike Aquilina’s website https://fathersofthechurch.com/

Mike Aquilina’s books https://catholicbooksdirect.com/writer/mike-aquilina/

Theme music: Gaudeamus (Introit for the Feast of All Saints), sung by Jeff Ostrowski. Courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed http://www.ccwatershed.org/

On July 11th, 2023 the Azerbaijani guards issued a communiqué, declaring the temporary closure of the Lachin corridor, which serves as the sole road connecting Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The stated reason behind this closure was the alleged “involvement of Armenian Red Cross units in smuggling attempts” and they further announced that the closure would be lifted upon the conclusion of their ongoing criminal inquiry. However, it is worth noting that this situation is not new, as the corridor has been closed multiple times since December 2022. Initially, the closure happened because of ecologist activists blocking mines on the road, and later it was extended in April due to security concerns according to the Azerbaijani forces.

The closure of the Latchin corridor has had far-reaching consequences for human rights in the secessionist region. Access to vital necessities such as medicines, electricity, and food has been abruptly cut off for the 120 000 inhabitants, creating a dire situation. Dr. Vardan Lalayan, a cardiologist at the Stepanakert/Khankendi hospital, laments the shortage of stents and other medical equipment. He and his colleagues are only able to perform a mere 10% of the necessary procedures, which led to the heartbreaking loss of patients due to cardiac attacks. Moreover, this blockade has caused a food shortage, which led the de facto authorities to implement a rationing system since the beginning of January 2023. With rationing restricting to one kilo/litre of food products per person per month, health professionals have noted a significant increase in cases of immunodeficiency, anaemia, thyroid disease and worsening diabetes among women and children. In fact, as Nara Karapetyan, a mother of two children explained for Amnesty International: “We haven’t had any fruit or vegetables for over a month now. As soon as I can get hold of any food, I make sure my children eat it first, and I make do with what’s left.”. Finally, the blockade’s severe shortage of electricity and heating systems has also had a profound impact on children’s right to education: approximately 27,000 children can only access their schools for a few hours a day.

However, the tensions are not new. The Nagorno-Karabakh region has been integrated into the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist in 1923 despite being populated ethnically at 95% by Armenians. When Armenia and Azerbaijan both achieved statehood at the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, they began a war that resulted in 30 000 casualties. A ceasefire was brokered by Russia in 1994 under the name of the Bishkek Protocol, in which the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been proclaimed as independent but reliant on economic, political and military ties with Armenia. Despite attempts at peace, the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has rarely known a lasting ceasefire. For years, each side has accused the other of violating ceasefires, leading to renewed heavy fighting. In late September 2020, tensions erupted into the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war, which was eventually resolved by a peace deal proposed by Russia on November 9, 2020. The agreement saw Azerbaijan reclaim most of the territory, leaving Armenia with only a small portion of Karabakh. The deal also established the Lachin corridor, under the hands of Russian peacekeepers.

The peace deal has not provided definitive barriers to prevent Azerbaijan from taking control of the secessionist region. Despite ambitious international efforts to mitigate the risk of another full-blown war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, such as the dispatch of an unarmed EU mission to the Armenian side or the ruling of the International Court of Justice, diplomatic negotiations led by the EU, Russia, and the United States have faced significant challenges due to tensions in the region. Continuing mediation talks seem to be the only available option to ensure peace and ensure the fulfilment of human rights in the region, and both Baku and Yerevan appear to agree with this approach, recognizing the high costs of not reaching a negotiated peace deal.

https://theowp.org/the-lachin-corridor-in-nagorno-karabakh-unveiling-an-ongoing-humanitarian-crisis/

Bishop Mouradian of California-based Armenian Catholic Eparchy urges prayer and action for 120,000 ethnic Armenians

An Armenian Catholic bishop is calling for prayer and action as some 120,000 ethnic Armenians face what he and other experts call "genocide by starvation."

"It is a violation of every kind of law," Bishop Mikael A. Mouradian of the California-based Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Nareg told OSV News. The eparchy is part of the Armenian Catholic Church, one of the 24 self-governing churches in communion with Pope Francis, head of the Latin Church, that together constitute the worldwide Catholic Church.

For the past nine months, Azerbaijani forces have blocked the only road leading from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh (known in Armenian by its ancient name, Artsakh), an historic Armenian enclave located in southwestern Azerbaijan and internationally recognized as part of that nation.

The blockade of the three-mile (five-kilometer) Lachin Corridor, which connects the roughly 1,970 square mile enclave to Armenia, has deprived residents of food, baby formula, oil, medication, hygienic products and fuel — even as a convoy of trucks with an estimated 400 tons of aid is stalled at the single Azerbaijani checkpoint.

According to BBC News, local journalist Irina Hayrapetyan has reported that some residents have fainted from hunger while waiting in line for subsistence rations.

In February, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to ensure "unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions."

However, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in July that "despite persistent efforts" the Red Cross was "not currently able to bring humanitarian assistance to the civilian population through the Lachin corridor or through any other routes."

That same month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev to ensure transit through the corridor and to pursue peace negotiations.

The U.S. is "deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh," Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said during an Aug. 16 U.N. Security Council briefing on Armenia and Azerbaijan. "Access to food, medicine, baby formula, and energy should never be held hostage."

Her remarks echoed those made earlier in August by four special rapporteurs for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Luis Moreno Ocampo, founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said the blockade amounts to a direct violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which prohibits "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."

"It is time for the United States and other world powers to act," he said in an online Aug. 11 statement.

With the area surrounded by Muslim-majority Azerbaijan, the blockade amounts to an "ethnic cleansing of Christians," since "the sole Christian people in the Caucasus are now the Armenians," who are "not new in the region," said Bishop Mouradian.

"Armenians have been living on that land for more than 3,000 years," he said, "There are a lot of churches there from the fourth, eighth, 10th centuries. It's not a new thing for Armenians."

Armenia was the first nation to officially adopt Christianity in 301, having been evangelized by the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew between A.D. 40 and 60.

Both Christian Armenians and Turkic Azeris lived for centuries in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which became part of the Russian Empire during the 19th century. After World War I, the region became an autonomous part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh declared itself independent in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, and quickly became the focus of a 1992-1994 struggle between Armenia and Azerbaijan for control of the region, with some 30,000 killed and more than 1 million displaced. Russia brokered a 1994 ceasefire, and in a 2017 referendum, voters approved a new constitution and a change in name to the Republic of Artsakh (although "Nagorno Karabakh Republic" also remains an official name).

A second war broke out in 2020 when Azerbaijan launched an offensive to reclaim territory, with 3,000 Azerbaijani soldiers and 4,000 Armenian soldiers killed. Russian peacekeepers were stationed to monitor a renewed ceasefire and to guard the Lachin Corridor, but fighting erupted again in 2022.

Bishop Mouradain said the current blockade revives the specter of the 1915-1916 Armenian genocide, when up to 1.2 million Armenians were slaughtered and starved under the Ottoman Empire. The atrocities were the basis for lawyer Raphael Lemkin's development of the term "genocide."

Bishop Mouradain's own grandparents fled the Ottoman attacks, resettling in Lebanon, where the bishop as a child witnessed that nation's civil war.

"I know very well war is a bad thing," he told OSV News. "War and armaments are not the solution. Dialogue is the resolution."

However, he warned against "dialogue that becomes a monologue where the powerful control everything," and stressed the need for "dialogue where respect for each other is very clear, especially where the right to live freely on ancestral lands is accepted by both sides."

Bishop Mouradain also urged the U.S. government to uphold section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which broadly prohibits aid to Azerbaijan's government with some exceptions. The restriction can be annually waived by the President, who did so most recently in January, claiming the move was necessary for counterterrorism and security efforts.

But the waiver is enabling Azerbaijan to violate human rights, said Bishop Mouradain.

"Azerbaijan is using U.S. military aid to attack Armenian cities in Artsakh," he said, noting that human rights abuses, in addition to those incurred by the blockade, have been reported.

Last year, the European Parliament acknowledged and condemned a "systematic, state-level policy of 'Armenophobia,' historical revisionism and hatred toward Armenians promoted by Azerbaijani authorities."

Azerbaijani border guards in the region have been accused of kidnappings and illegal detentions.

"Armenia is the sole democratic country in the region," said Bishop Mouradain, adding that "the values that made human history (worthwhile) are being lost nowadays."

"It is a God-given freedom … to live on the land of our ancestors and to make our own laws according to the beliefs that we have, be it (as) Armenians, Turks, Ukrainians, Russians," he said. "As human beings, we have the right to live freely on this earth."

https://www.ucanews.com/news/ancient-christian-enclave-faces-genocide-by-starvation/102450

An Armenian Catholic bishop is calling for prayer and action as some 120,000 ethnic Armenians face what he and other experts call "genocide by starvation."

"It is a violation of every kind of law," Bishop Mikael A. Mouradian of the California-based Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Nareg told OSV News. The eparchy is part of the Armenian Catholic Church, one of the 24 self-governing churches in communion with Pope Francis, head of the Latin Church, that together constitute the worldwide Catholic Church.

For the past nine months, Azerbaijani forces have blocked the only road leading from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh (known in Armenian by its ancient name, Artsakh), an historic Armenian enclave located in southwestern Azerbaijan and internationally recognized as part of that nation.

The blockade of the three-mile (five-kilometer) Lachin Corridor, which connects the roughly 1,970 square mile enclave to Armenia, has deprived residents of food, baby formula, oil, medication, hygienic products and fuel — even as a convoy of trucks with an estimated 400 tons of aid is stalled at the single Azerbaijani checkpoint.

According to BBC News, local journalist Irina Hayrapetyan has reported that some residents have fainted from hunger while waiting in line for subsistence rations.

In February, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to ensure "unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions."

However, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in July that "despite persistent efforts" the Red Cross was "not currently able to bring humanitarian assistance to the civilian population through the Lachin corridor or through any other routes."

That same month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev to ensure transit through the corridor and to pursue peace negotiations.

The U.S. is "deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh," Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said during an Aug. 16 U.N. Security Council briefing on Armenia and Azerbaijan. "Access to food, medicine, baby formula, and energy should never be held hostage."

Her remarks echoed those made earlier in August by four special rapporteurs for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Luis Moreno Ocampo, founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said the blockade amounts to a direct violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which prohibits "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."

"It is time for the United States and other world powers to act," he said in an online Aug. 11 statement.

With the area surrounded by Muslim-majority Azerbaijan, the blockade amounts to an "ethnic cleansing of Christians," since "the sole Christian people in the Caucasus are now the Armenians," who are "not new in the region," said Bishop Mouradian.

"Armenians have been living on that land for more than 3,000 years," he said, "There are a lot of churches there from the fourth, eighth, 10th centuries. It's not a new thing for Armenians."

Armenia was the first nation to officially adopt Christianity in 301, having been evangelized by the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew between A.D. 40 and 60.

Both Christian Armenians and Turkic Azeris lived for centuries in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which became part of the Russian Empire during the 19th century. After World War I, the region became an autonomous part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh declared itself independent in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, and quickly became the focus of a 1992-1994 struggle between Armenia and Azerbaijan for control of the region, with some 30,000 killed and more than 1 million displaced. Russia brokered a 1994 ceasefire, and in a 2017 referendum, voters approved a new constitution and a change in name to the Republic of Artsakh (although "Nagorno Karabakh Republic" also remains an official name).

A second war broke out in 2020 when Azerbaijan launched an offensive to reclaim territory, with 3,000 Azerbaijani soldiers and 4,000 Armenian soldiers killed. Russian peacekeepers were stationed to monitor a renewed ceasefire and to guard the Lachin Corridor, but fighting erupted again in 2022.

Bishop Mouradain said the current blockade revives the specter of the 1915-1916 Armenian genocide, when up to 1.2 million Armenians were slaughtered and starved under the Ottoman Empire. The atrocities were the basis for lawyer Raphael Lemkin's development of the term "genocide."

Bishop Mouradain's own grandparents fled the Ottoman attacks, resettling in Lebanon, where the bishop as a child witnessed that nation's civil war.

"I know very well war is a bad thing," he told OSV News. "War and armaments are not the solution. Dialogue is the resolution."

However, he warned against "dialogue that becomes a monologue where the powerful control everything," and stressed the need for "dialogue where respect for each other is very clear, especially where the right to live freely on ancestral lands is accepted by both sides."

Bishop Mouradain also urged the U.S. government to uphold section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which broadly prohibits aid to Azerbaijan's government with some exceptions. The restriction can be annually waived by the President, who did so most recently in January, claiming the move was necessary for counterterrorism and security efforts.

But the waiver is enabling Azerbaijan to violate human rights, said Bishop Mouradain.

"Azerbaijan is using U.S. military aid to attack Armenian cities in Artsakh," he said, noting that human rights abuses, in addition to those incurred by the blockade, have been reported.

Last year, the European Parliament acknowledged and condemned a "systematic, state-level policy of 'Armenophobia,' historical revisionism and hatred toward Armenians promoted by Azerbaijani authorities."

Azerbaijani border guards in the region have been accused of kidnappings and illegal detentions.

"Armenia is the sole democratic country in the region," said Bishop Mouradain, adding that "the values that made human history (worthwhile) are being lost nowadays."

"It is a God-given freedom … to live on the land of our ancestors and to make our own laws according to the beliefs that we have, be it (as) Armenians, Turks, Ukrainians, Russians," he said. "As human beings, we have the right to live freely on this earth."

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.