The Armenian parliament on Tuesday voted to join the International Criminal Court, which earlier this year indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes connected to the deportation of children from Ukraine.

The move is likely to further strain Armenia’s deteriorating relation with its ally Russia, which last month called Yerevan’s push to join the ICC an “unfriendly step.”

The Armenian parliament on Tuesday voted to join the International Criminal Court, which earlier this year indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes connected to the deportation of children from Ukraine.

The move is likely to further strain Armenia’s deteriorating relation with its ally Russia, which last month called Yerevan’s push to join the ICC an “unfriendly step.”

LONDON — Virtually the entire ethnic Armenian population of the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has fled, with the last buses carrying refugees having left on Monday, according to Russia’s peacekeeping force deployed there.

More than 100,000 ethnic Armenians left the enclave in the last week, according to local officials, abandoning their homes after Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, recaptured the region with a military offensive just over a week ago.

The exodus has emptied the enclave in what Armenia has condemned as “ethnic cleansing.”

A television news crew from Al Jazeera showed the region’s capital, known to Armenians as Stepanakert, completely deserted. The city, which had a population estimated at more than 50,000, appeared now to be a ghost town. The Al Jazeera crew showed the city’s central square abandoned and strewn with empty chairs, used by people waiting for evacuation.

Before Azerbaijan’s offensive, the enclave’s population was estimated at 120,000. But a spokesperson for the Karabakh Armenians’ unrecognized state’s emergency services ministry on Sunday said only a tiny handful of people now remained in the enclave.

Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev, announced plans for Nagorno-Karabakh’s reintegration into his country, signaling he intended to quickly restore strong control over it.

The region will now be overseen by special representative offices to Azerbaijan’s president and security will be handled by Azerbaijan’s interior ministry, Aliyev said. Azerbaijan’s currency, the manat, would be reintroduced.

Aliyev said the equality of rights and freedoms, including security, would be guaranteed for all residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, and it would be permitted to use Armenian there. He also pledged that religious freedoms would be guaranteed, and cultural and religious monuments protected.

The pledges appeared to ignore the fact that the enclave’s Armenian population had already fled. The Armenians fleeing have said they don’t believe Azerbaijan’s guarantees of their rights and fear they would face persecution.

A United Nations mission also arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh Sunday to assess humanitarian needs, but it faced heavy criticism from local ethnic Armenian authorities who said they were far too late, given the civilian population was no longer there.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been at the center of a bloody conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan for decades. Internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, it had been home to an ethnic Armenian population for centuries. As the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s into the early 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians tried to break away from Azerbaijan, declaring independence.

A bloody war, in which Armenia aided the separatists, saw hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani civilians also driven out of the region and ended with ethnic Armenians controlling most of Nagorno-Karabakh with their own unrecognized state.

But Azerbaijan reopened the conflict in 2020, starting a full-scale war that decisively defeated Armenia and ended with a truce deal brokered by Russia, which deployed peacekeepers to enforce it.

Two weeks ago, after blockading the enclave for nine months, Azerbaijan launched a new offensive, swiftly defeating the ethnic Armenian authorities in two days. The enclave’s population started fleeing shortly afterward to Armenia.

There has been little international response to the crisis. Western countries, including the U.S. and France, have expressed concern and called for Azerbaijan to protect the rights of the Armenians. The Biden administration announced $11.5 million in humanitarian aid and dispatched the high-profile head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, to the region last week.

Richard Giragosian, the director of the Regional Studies Center based in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, said the international response was “too little too late” and had set a “dangerous precedent.”

“[This was] a seeming vindication of the use of force over diplomacy,” Giragosian told ABC News by phone. “A military victory of authoritarian power over a struggling democracy.”

But he said it had also shown the West has little influence over Azerbaijan. “What we see is Azerbaijan simply does not care about Western threats, pronouncements, and at the same time, the West has little leverage over Azerbaijan,” Giragosian said.

Armenia’s defense ministry on Monday also accused Azerbaijani forces of opening fire on a car carrying food to an Armenian border post near the village of Kut.

Azerbaijani forces are likely to move into Nagorno-Karabakh’s now-empty capital, which it calls Khankhendi, in the next few days.

Russia’s peacekeeping contingent said a joint Russian-Azerbaijani patrol came under sniper fire inside Nagorno-Karabakh on Monday, but that there were no casualties.

A meeting of representatives from Azerbaijan and the Karabakh Armenian leadership will take place for the first time in the capital in the “near future,” the news agency of the enclave’s unrecognized Armenian state reported Monday.

Moscow said Russian and Azerbaijani forces on Monday came under sniper fire in Nagorno-Karabakh, days after Baku secured the surrender of Armenian separatists in an offensive to regain control of the mountainous territory.

The report came as Armenia said one serviceman was killed along its shared border with Azerbaijan, underscoring the volatility of the region even after Karabakh’s capitulation last week.

“In the city of Stepanakert (Khankendi) a joint Russian-Azerbaijani patrol was shot at by an unknown person using a sniper weapon. There were no casualties,” the Russian defence ministry said.

Russia deployed its peacekeepers to the mountainous region in 2020 as part of a ceasefire deal it had brokered between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

But mired in its war in Ukraine, Moscow refused to intervene when Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive at the end of September.

Separatists capitulated and said 220 were killed in the fighting, while Azerbaijan reported 199 dead.

Another Armenian serviceman was killed when Azerbaijani forces opened fire near the eastern village of Kut on Monday, Armenia’s defence ministry said.

It also announced two were wounded. Azerbaijan had rejected the claim.

Days after the lightning offensive, fighting has nevertheless subsided.

Almost all ethnic Armenians — over 100,000 people — have fled the breakaway territory over fears of ethnic cleansing.

After nine days of fear and panic, the exodus of Armenians is over with the Lachin corridor that links Karabakh to Armenia mostly deserted.

AFP journalists on a tour organised by Azerbaijani forces in the rebel stronghold of Stepanakert saw an eerily empty city.

Buildings, restaurants, hotels and supermarkets laid deserted in a city that once had 55,000 inhabitants.

Many were smashed up with empty shelves — signs of looting or hasty departures.

After three decades of Armenian control, the separatist authorities have agreed to disarm, dissolve their government and reintegrate with Azerbaijan.

The separatist government however said some officials would stay to oversee rescue operations.

President Samvel Shahramanyan “will stay in (Karabakh’s main city of) Stepanakert with a group of officials until the search and rescue operations for the remainder of those killed and those missing… are completed,” the separatist government said.

In addition to the toll from the fighting itself, another 170 people died when a fuel depot exploded during the massive exodus.

Separatist official Artak Beglaryan said “a few hundred” Armenian representatives remained in Karabakh.

He said they included “officials, emergency service, volunteers, some persons with special needs.”

Yerevan has accused Azerbaijan of conducting a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to clear Karabakh of its Armenian population.

Baku has denied the claim and called on Armenian residents of the territory to stay and “re-integrate” into Azerbaijan, saying their rights would be guaranteed.

AFP journalists on Monday saw a convoy carrying water and communications workers that was allowed to enter Stepanakert.

The convoy was escorted by the Azerbaijani army.

They also saw a bus carrying officials who planned to open a “re-integration” office in the city for any ethnic Armenians wishing to register with Azerbaijani authorities.

Azerbaijan is holding “re-integration” talks with separatist leaders.

Several senior representatives of its former government and military command have been detained, including Ruben Vardanyan — a reported billionaire who headed the Nagorno-Karabakh government between November 2022 and February.

His four children released a statement on social media demanding his release “from the illegal imprisonment on the territory of Azerbaijan”, saying they “feared for his life and health”.

Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev said criminal investigations had been initiated into war crimes committed by 300 separatist officials.

“I urge those persons to surrender voluntarily,” he told journalists on Sunday.

(AFP)

https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20231002-azerbaijan-cross-border-fire-kills-one-injures-two-armenia-says

On opposite ends of the geopolitical playing field

OPINION:

Many American Christians have probably never heard of the small nation of Armenia, but this country of 3 million people holds tremendous spiritual significance for the global church.

In A.D. 301, Armenia became the first nation to embrace Christianity (even before the Roman Empire). The gospel was originally brought to the Armenian people by the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew in the first century. In addition, Mount Ararat, the focal point of Armenian culture and spirituality, is the place where Noah’s Ark landed after the flood in Genesis.

Apart from Israel, it is probably the most biblically significant nation in the world.

The similarities between Armenia and Israel do not stop there. For one, they are both Judeo-Christian democracies in a sea of Muslim authoritarian states. Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and has made a concerted effort in recent years to align itself more closely with the Western world despite Russia’s best efforts to stop it from doing so.

Like Israel, the central defining characteristic of Armenia is its faith. Through centuries of war and hardship, the Armenian Church is the glue that has held Armenian society together.

Sadly, like Israelis, Armenians are no strangers to mass murder. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey) waged a campaign against the empire’s Christians in which 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered. The events, which are widely seen by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century, are often referred to as “the forgotten genocide” (Turkey disputes the characterization of these events as a genocide).

Hitler, while devising his Final Solution for the Jewish people, invoked those mass murders, stating, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

While both the Armenian and Israeli people were eventually able to establish modern nation-states, the historic centers of their civilizations lie outside their current borders. The biblical heart of Israel, Judea, falls within the Palestinian West Bank. Artsakh, in many ways considered the cultural capital of Armenia, is being religiously cleansed of its Armenian Christians by Azerbaijan.

And while both nations look longingly on their ancient lands, they are also preoccupied with defending their immediate borders from hostile neighbors.

Israel is forced to contend with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hezbollah to the north, and Bashar Assad’s Syria. Armenia, on the other hand, is sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Both countries deny that Armenians were subject to genocide and refuse to open their borders to Armenian transit. This means that the vast majority of the landlocked Armenian border is also under a blockade.

Despite their similarities, Armenia and Israel find themselves on opposite ends of the geopolitical playing field. Israel, in order to balance against Iranian influence in the region, has developed close ties with Azerbaijan, the country committing ethnic and religious cleansing against the Armenians of Artsakh. Similarly, Armenia has developed ties with Iran, a nation openly committed to Israel’s destruction, in an attempt to balance against its own existential threats, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The sad reality is that the region’s only two Judeo-Christian nations have developed a horrible relationship, driven by the need to survive in a region dominated by hostile Muslim states.

But there is hope. Because of the two nations’ shared values and history, the gap can be overcome given the proper security structure in the region.

If Armenia had the security backing of the region’s greatest power, the United States, it could begin to wean itself off its dependence on Iran. Similarly, the United States is the only nation influential enough to convince Israel to lessen its dependence on Azerbaijan.

It is a tragedy to see these two nations, sister nations, divided and torn apart by the existential threats of the region. The United States is the only nation capable of uniting the Middle East’s last two democratic Judeo-Christian nations.

• Former Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican, is a former U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom and co-chair of the IRF Summit.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/2/armenia-and-israel-middle-easts-last-judeo-christi/