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President of the Senate of France accuses Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno- Karabakh

1121179.jpg 15:18, 4 October 2023

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 4, ARMENPRESS. President of the Senate of France Gérard Larcher has accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Regarding Armenia, I am expressing my solidarity and I am asking, are we going to sacrifice this country at the altar of the energy deal with Azerbaijan? We must display courage from time to time. All of us must stand with Armenia and the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. They were forced to leave a land which was theirs. If that’s not ethnic cleansing, then I don’t know what else it is,” Larcher said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper.

 

 

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FirstThings.com

THE PERSECUTION OF ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS IS NOT JUST A RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ISSUE

 

by Joel Veldkamp

10 . 3 . 23

 

This September, the end came for Nagorno-Karabakh.

 

The tiny mountain region was once home to 120,000 Armenian Christians

governing themselves in a de facto independent republic, the Republic of

Artsakh. Armenians have been living in this region for thousands of years,

and they have been Christians since the fourth century. The dozens of

ancient and medieval churches dotting the landscape bear witness to this

history.

 

But for nine months, the dictatorship of Azerbaijan had been blockading this

region. The siege led to a hunger crisis and created dire fuel and medicine

shortages. One horrifying indicator of the scale of the suffering: the

miscarriage rate in the territory reportedly quadrupled.

 

Then, on September 19, Azerbaijan attacked. The military assault drove half

of the region's population out of their homes, and swamped the capital's

hospital with wounded for whom there were no medical supplies. Widespread

atrocities were reported, including the apparently deliberate bombing of a

group of fleeing children. Five days after the attack began, the Karabakh

Armenians accepted Russia's offer to evacuate their population to the

neighboring Republic of Armenia.

 

In one fell swoop, one of the world's most brutal dictatorships destroyed

one of the world's oldest Christian communities. Not only that, but the

dictatorship in question receives U.S. military aid and is considered a

"valued partner" of the U.S.

 

How did conservative Christians in the United States-members of the world's

largest, freest, richest, and most influential Christian community-respond

to the ethnic cleansing of their coreligionists by a U.S. ally?

 

With almost complete silence.

 

Two facts make this shameful non-reaction particularly strange. First, since

the 1990s, the U.S. has been home to a robust and vocal movement on behalf

of persecuted Christians abroad. This movement has been especially strong

among conservative Christians. Second, during the Armenian Genocide of

1915-1923, American Christians mobilized to help the genocide's victims as

never before in history. They raised a phenomenal $100 million for relief,

aiding perhaps two million refugees in total. Herbert Hoover would later

remark that, "probably Armenia was known to the American school child in

1919 only a little less than England."

 

Contrast that with what one of my colleagues in the U.S. told me earlier

this year: "Joel, most people in my congregation don't even know what an

Armenian is."

 

How do we account for an abdication this massive?

 

From my perspective as a staff member at Christian Solidarity International,

one factor appears salient: the absorption of Christian organizing and

political energy into a movement for "international religious freedom."

 

Over the past three years, when I have talked about Karabakh with Christians

who work in organizations dedicated to helping the persecuted, I have

repeatedly gotten versions of this question: "But is this really about

religious freedom?"

 

There is a history to how this question became the overriding determinant

for organizations like mine. After the end of the Cold War, a large

coalition of Christian and Jewish activists and organizations began working

to get the U.S. government to address the persecution of Christians in the

Global South.

 

To do so, these activists chose to frame the problem within the discourse of

human rights. They settled on one human right in particular: the right to

"religious freedom" enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights.

 

Today, we have become used to thinking of religious persecution as, by

definition, an attack on religious freedom. Yet the twentieth century's

worst instance of anti-Christian persecution-the Armenian Genocide-did not

fit the "religious freedom" category so neatly. The architects of the

genocide were not, after all, trying to keep Armenians from worshipping

Jesus, building churches, or reading the Bible. Much like Azerbaijan today,

they were trying to exterminate a Christian people (whether practicing or

not) that they had long held in subservience but had come to see as a threat

to their power.

 

At the time, this fact posed no obstacle at all to American Christians

organizing for their suffering coreligionists. Later generations of

Christendom would not benefit from this clarity.

 

The anti-persecution movement achieved its greatest legislative victory in

1998, with the passage of the "International Religious Freedom Act."

Significantly, as the scholar Elizabeth Castelli notes, the final

legislation does not use the word "persecution" even once in its definitions

of terms. It speaks only of "violations of religious freedom." These

violations might include "forced mass resettlement," "rape," "enslavement,"

"murder," and so forth-but only "if committed on account of an individual's

religious belief or practice."

 

This framing suits the priorities of the U.S. foreign policy establishment

rather well. If persecution is primarily a problem of individual liberty,

rather than a question involving ethnic identity, peoples, or even nations

and nation-states, then it becomes an issue between governments and their

citizens. U.S. diplomats can grade the performance of foreign governments

and otherwise address the issue at their leisure, without calling into

question broader U.S. foreign policy.

 

In order to pass key legislation and gain a foothold in the U.S. government,

Christian anti-persecution activists accommodated themselves to the

government's preferences. This came at a cost. Soon, the institutions the

U.S. and its allies set up to promote religious freedom began to shape the

way Christians did advocacy. Eventually, it shaped the very way we thought

about persecution.

 

This category shift has been so debilitating that, as the bombs were falling

on Armenian Christians in September 2023, Christianity Today saw fit to

publish just one piece about the attack-an article that interviews six

"religious freedom experts" about whether or not specifically Christian

advocacy for the Armenians would be appropriate.

 

An urgent task is now before Christian leaders and activists: to free our

imaginations from the constraints of "international religious freedom" and

its definitions, and to rediscover our biblical calling to solidarity with

the body of Christ (I Cor. 12:25-26).

 

The next Karabakh will most likely be Syunik, the southernmost province of

the Republic of Armenia, which Turkey and Azerbaijan are now eyeing

greedily. And there will be other Karabakhs. Christian communities around

the world are facing oppression, military attack, and ethnic cleansing in

ways that are not easy to define as violations of individual religious

freedom. This is the case today in the Nuba Mountains, West Papua, Benue,

Southern Kaduna, Manipur, and Karen state.

 

But you likely haven't heard of most of these places.

 

Joel Veldkamp is the head of international communications at Christian

Solidarity International.

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Open Democracy

Oct 5 2023
Humiliation fuels my fellow Azerbaijanis’ hate of Armenia. We must oppose it

I grew up in wartime Karabakh – I know the pain Armenians face. But I was attacked online for empathising with them

When I posted a recent Twitter thread about Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, nothing could prepare me for the ruthless attacks I received from my fellow Azerbaijanis.

I am an Azerbaijani survivor of the same conflict. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), I told of my tragic childhood growing up in Karabakh in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the 1990s, and how my earliest memories are of fighting and devastation. How my 18-year-old uncle died after stepping on a landmine. How I slept to the sounds of gunshots and once choked on my food when a nearby bomb exploded as my mom was feeding me.

I also empathized with the Armenians in Karabakh who are now going through similar experiences. And I spoke of my exasperation at the endless cycle of hatred and violence and the repeated reliving of my early trauma, having barely healed from the retraumatization I lived through in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War just three years ago.

With only a handful of followers, mostly friends and colleagues, I did not expect many people to read what I wrote. Suddenly I found myself thrust into the spotlight, with my post getting hundreds of thousands of views. I was deeply touched by the empathy and acclaim I received from complete strangers, almost all of them Armenians and Westerners.

But the response from Azerbaijanis devastated me.

Obscene homophobic slurs were hurled at me and violent misogynistic ones at my mother. My real ethnicity was questioned. With a few notable exceptions, Azerbaijanis did not believe in my sincerity. They seemed to not care at all about my lived experiences as a victim of war. I was ridiculed and accused of only pretending to care about the Armenians to one or another cynical end.

On X, I wrote that I wished someone would have acknowledged all the pain my family went through at the time, affirmed it. Instead, our tragedy was laughed at, justified, ignored. The response showed me that nothing has changed.

After reflecting on this extreme reaction, I have come to the conclusion that Azerbaijani nationalists are not motivated by pain, but humiliation.

A victim empathizes with another victim. But macho humiliation is not a place where empathy and self-reflection can ever be found

Azerbaijan has a macho patriarchal culture. For many, when Armenia so overwhelmingly won the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, it meant that Azerbaijan, and more specifically Azerbaijani men, were not ‘strong’ or ‘man’ enough to protect the motherland and that they had been proven ‘weak’.

This thinking delivered us from the misery of the 1990s to the current ethnofascist strongman regime led by Ilham Aliyev. Hence symbols like ‘the iron fist’, the upside-down ‘A’ akin to the Russian ‘Z’, the heinous war crimes, and the renaming of the streets of Stepanakert, Karabakh’s capital, after people like Enver *****, the Turkish military leader who oversaw the Armenian Genocide.

A victim empathizes with another victim. But macho humiliation is not a place where empathy and self-reflection can ever be found. That is a place of only rage and violence with a single goal – revenge. One almost feels sorry for the Azerbaijani propagandists who work so hard and look so ridiculous trying to conceal this.

With the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan has doomed itself as a viable democratic and prosperous nation. That breaks my heart. How could anyone seriously believe Armenians can be integrated into Azerbaijan?

As I wrote on X, I watch in horror at what’s happening to them – the months of starvation in an inhumane blockade followed by fierce shelling. For decades, Armenians have been painted as the enemy, used as villains responsible for all our failures. Their history has been systemically erased and their tragedies denied, along with Azerbaijanis’ responsibility for them.

Any Azerbaijani who witnessed war and suffered ethnic cleansing must speak up against it, even if all our base instincts tell us otherwise. Or history will not forgive us.

To Armenians: I see your suffering and I'm sorry. You deserve to be free and you have a right to your identity. The response to your desire for self-determination should never have been pogroms and war.

I have no power to affect anything. But one day an Armenian child from Karabakh will wonder if any Azerbaijani spoke up for them or empathised with them when they lived through the unimaginable. Let them know that not all is lost.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/nagorno-karabakh-armenia-azerbaijan-hate-fuelled-humiliation-online-attack/

 

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Armenpress.am
UN sends second mission to depopulated Nagorno-Karabakh

1121517.jpg 12:40, 9 October 2023

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 9, ARMENPRESS. The UN has sent another mission to Nagorno-Karabakh, where the entire population has been forcibly displaced after the September 19-20 Azeri attack.

Various UN agencies are included in the mission, according to Azeri media reports.

After most of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh had fled the region following the September 19-20 Azerbaijani attack, a UN team reportedly consisting of representatives of Turkey, Pakistan, Albania, Hungary and Russia – all traditional allies and partners of Azerbaijan - visited Nagorno-Karabakh and claimed that they were ‘struck by the sudden manner in which the local population left their homes’, and that they did not see any damage to civilian infrastructure.

However, civilian infrastructures were extensively targeted by the Azeri military during the attack.

On October 3, a senior Armenian diplomat strongly criticized the UN team, saying that it was “discrediting the UN as an institution.”

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1121517.html?fbclid=IwAR3CA4Az9nKwbJt0I1ApKHsmituAcvlfbqlofVmcrXr8--JO99tgQ3Sgga8

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PACE to hold urgent hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh humanitarian situation

1121548.jpg 17:34, 9 October 2023

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 9, ARMENPRESS. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) will hold an urgent debate on the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia’s delegate to PACE, MP Vladimir Vardanyan said the discussion will take place on October 12.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1121548.html?fbclid=IwAR0eGo8ERoLZytS9WbmW5xtrjA_GI_SGh6c1SVevolkfHKxyUG_tiBOA9mg

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34 countries issue joint statement on Nagorno-Karabakh at UN Human Rights Council session
1121753.jpg 18:41, 11 October 2023

GENEVA, OCTOBER 11, ARMENPRESS. 34 countries issued a joint statement on October 11 during the 54th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, expressing extreme concern on the dire humanitarian and human rights crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Below is the full statement.

“We are extremely concerned by the dire humanitarian and human rights crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh and the situation of the population who have fled from there in the past weeks.

“According to the report of the UN Mission to the region, nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh has fled to Armenia – more than 100,000 people. Their report rightly notes the suffering this experience must have caused.

“This massive displacement of ethnic Armenians from their homes stems from Azerbaijan’s military operation launched on September 19th and a nine-month long

“We appreciate that High Commissioner Turk’s statement of September 26 urged safeguarding the rights of ethnic Armenians, protection of civilians, and observance of international law. We wholly agree that “reported violations of human rights or international humanitarian law require follow-up, including prompt, independent and transparent investigations.”

“We believe the appropriate next step is for the OHCHR to closely monitor the situation of human rights in Nagorno-Karabakh, meet refugees and displaced persons and those who remain, and to keep this Council informed. We therefore urge Armenia and Azerbaijan to invite the OHCHR to provide them with such technical assistance as soon as possible.

“At this time, we urge Azerbaijan to ensure the rights and security of those Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians who remain and to promptly create conditions for the voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable return of those who wish to go home. Their cultural and religious heritage should also be guaranteed and protected.

“We further urge Azerbaijan to comply with the interim measures issued by the European Court of Human Rights on 22 September and the provisional measures of the ICJ adopted on 7 December 2021, 22 February 2023 and 6 July 2023.

“We urge Armenia, with the support of the international community, to continue to provide humanitarian assistance to those displaced by the crisis.

“International access to Nagorno-Karabakh is crucial to provide assistance and independent monitoring, including to report on the human rights situation.

“Furthermore, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan should be fully respected. We strongly support dialogue among all parties to secure a comprehensive and lasting peace.

“We will continue to follow the situation closely and consider any and all appropriate further steps by the Council.

 

1 Armenia

2 Australia

3 Austria

4 Belgium

5 Bulgaria

6 Canada

7 Croatia

8 Cyprus

9 Denmark

10 Estonia

11 Finland

12 France

13 Germany

14 Greece

15 Iceland

16 Ireland

17 Japan

18 Latvia

19 Liechtenstein

20 Lithuania

21 Luxembourg

22 Malta

23 Netherlands

24 New Zealand

25 Norway

26 Portugal

27 Spain

28 Slovakia

29 Slovenia

30 Sweden

31 Switzerland

32 United Kingdom

33 Uruguay

34 United States

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France initiates UNSC discussion on Nagorno-Karabakh for resolution ensuring return of forcibly displaced population

1121779.jpg 10:31, 12 October 2023

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 12, ARMENPRESS. France has initiated a new discussion in the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution to create the conditions for the return of the forcibly displaced population of Nagorno-Karabakh, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna has said in the Senate.

Colonna said that the conditions must include strong guarantees for the rights of the Armenians of NK, including for the preservation of historical-cultural rights, which requires a permanent international presence on the ground.

“Azerbaijan planned and organized the displacement of more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. This is an extremely grave crime that cannot remain unanswered,” Colonna said.

 

 

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French MP calls for documenting crimes committed by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh to ensure accountability

1121784.jpg 11:21, 12 October 2023

GORIS, OCTOBER 12, ARMENPRESS. French Member of Parliament Anne-Laurence Petel has said that the crimes committed by the Azerbaijani authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh should be documented in order to have strong evidence. This would allow them to raise the issue and take effective measures.

“Of course, many French-Armenians have been presenting videos showing what they describe as crimes committed by the Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh against the peaceful population, but nevertheless it is highly important for these episodes to be documented, to mention where and when exactly these crimes were committed, in order to have a strong evidence basis to help us raise this and take effective countermeasures,” the MP said in Goris during a meeting with forcibly displaced persons from Nagorno-Karabakh.

She highlighted the fact that Armenia has joined the Rome Statute of the ICC. This will facilitate independent investigations into Azeri war crimes. “If all episodes are properly documented, the criminals will sooner or later be held to account and face justice,” she said.

Petel-MXO_8371.jpg

The security of Armenia’s borders and protection of its territorial integrity is now a priority for France and many EU countries, thus French lawmakers are calling on their European partners to provide more support to Armenia, Anne-Laurence Petel said.

Speaking about the repatriation of Armenian POWs and the arbitrary arrests of the Nagorno-Karabakh leadership by Azerbaijan, Anne-Laurence Petel said that a discussion has taken place in the French parliament in this regard.

A meeting with the participation of the European Commission President has also taken place on this matter and the latter has asked the list of all arrested officials and POWs.

Wider Europe programme Director Marie Dumoulin, who also visited Goris as part of the European delegation, said that they seek to understand whether or not there’s an opportunity to start dialogue between Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijanis, and deploy international peacekeepers on the ground.

Dyumulen-MXO_8292.jpg

“It’s certainly too early to speak about peacekeepers, Armenia’s security is our primary concern. The international community is trying to do everything to ensure the security of Armenia and the Karabakhis who are now in Armenia, in order to be able to ensure the safe return of the displaced persons to Nagorno-Karabakh,” Dumoulin said.

 

 

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