Nagorno Karabakh -=- ARTSAKH

[Yervant1]

Dec 30 2023

‘RELIGIOUS CLEANSING’ THREATENS ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS’ EXISTENCE, HUMAN RIGHTS LEADERS WARN

Catholic News Agency

By Peter Pinedo

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 21, 2023 / 16:15 pm

The ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia threatens the existence of Christian communities in the near east, former ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Sam Brownback and other Christian leaders warned in a Tuesday press briefing.

Brownback’s statements were delivered just days after he returned from afact-finding trip to Armenia with the Christian human rights group Philos Project.

Brownback, who is a Catholic, called Islamic Azerbaijan’s invasion of Armenia and its ongoing blockade of the Nagorno-Karabakh region the latest attempt at “religious cleansing” of the Christian nation.

“Azerbaijan, with Turkey’s backing, is really slowly strangling Nagorno-Karabakh,” Brownback said. “They’re working to make it unlivable so that the region’s Armenian-Christian population is forced to leave, that’s what’s happening on the ground.”

The ambassador added that if the United States does not intervene, “we will see again another ancient Christian population forced out of its homeland.”

Brownback called for Congress to pass a “Nagorno-Karabakh Human Rights Act” to “establish basic security guarantees for the Nagorno-Karabakh population.”

He also called on the U.S. to reinstate previously used sanctions on Azerbaijan should it continue its blockade.

Christians in the near east have been subjected to similar attacks before, Brownback said. Yet according to the former ambassador, this time the religious cleansing is being “perpetrated with U.S.-supplied weaponry and backed by Turkey, a member of NATO.”

Sandwiched between the Muslim nations of Turkey and Azerbaijan in the southern Caucasus, Armenia has Christian roots that go back to ancient times. Today the population is over 90% Christian, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. State Department.

Conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been ongoing since Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet territories, claimed the land for themselves after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994, Armenia gained primary control of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Tensions between the two nations once again broke into outright military conflict in September 2020 when Azerbaijani troops moved to wrest control of the disputed region. The open conflict lasted only about two months, with Russia brokering a peace deal in November.

The conflict resulted in Azerbaijan gaining control of large swathes of the region. This left Armenia’s only access point to Nagorno-Karabakh a thin strip of land called the “Lachin corridor.”

A study published in the Population Research and Policy Review estimates that 3,822 Armenians and at least 2,906 Azerbaijanis were killed during the 2020 conflict.

Today, an Azerbaijani blockade of the Lachin corridor, in place since December, is crippling Armenian infrastructure in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The situation is extremely urgent and existential,” Philos Project President Robert Nicholson said. “This is the oldest Christian nation facing again for the second time in only about a century the possibility of a genocide.” He was referring to the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians more than a century ago in waning years of the Ottoman Empire that the U.S. now recognizes as a genocide, a characterization that Turkey has sharply denounced.

According to Nicholson, there are 500 tons of humanitarian equipment “unable to get into Nagorno-Karabakh because of the blockade that Azerbaijan has placed upon that region.”

“There has been no natural gas flowing since March and other energy supplies, [such as] electricity, are spotty at best,” Nicholson added. “Families have been separated. Surgeries have been canceled. The 120,000 people inside [Nagorno-Karabakh] are really desperate for help.”

Though much of the media coverage about the Armenian-Azerbaijani war has characterized it as simply a territorial dispute, according to both Brownback and Nicholson, the conflict is more one of ideology and religion.

“This is in fact not just a territorial dispute,” Nicholson said. “While there are territorial questions, I see this dispute absolutely as one of values.”

According to Nicholson, “the Armenians are not asking for much.”

“The Armenians we met, and we met a lot of them, were quite minimal in their demands,” he said. “They want to live in their homeland, and they want to do so securely.”

Despite the dangers, Nicholson said that the Armenian Christian communities’ plight “is not a lost cause.”

“Shockingly, despite all the threats that they are facing, Armenia is actually quite vibrant,” Nicholson said.

“There’s room,” he added, “for the United States to play a very constructive role in helping these different parties, both of which are our allies, to reach a peaceful and just solution to end the conflict.”

https://www.thecatholictelegraph.com/religious-cleansing-threatens-armenian-christians-existence-human-rights-leaders-warn/94643

[Yervant1]

TASS, Russia

Jan 1 2024

Decree dissolving unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh enters into force

The document was signed on September 28, nine days after tensions had flared up again in the region

MOSCOW, January 1. /TASS/. A decree issued by President of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh Samvel Shahramanyan, which dissolves the unrecognized state, entered into force on January 1.

The document was signed on September 28, nine days after tensions had flared up again in the region. The decree particularly urged the Karabakh population to consider the terms of reintegration in Azerbaijan offered by Baku or stay put if they choose to do so.

Tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh rose again on September 19, 2023, but a ceasefire agreement was reached the next day. Azerbaijani officials and representatives of Karabakh Armenians met in the Azerbaijani city of Yevlakh on September 21 to discuss reintegration issues. On October 15, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev raised the country’s flag in Khankendi (Stepanakert), Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to the Armenian government, over 100,000 internally displaced persons have relocated to Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, whose population stood at about 120,000 until recently.

https://tass.com/world/1728573

[Yervant1]

truthout

Jan 6 2024

Armenians Suffering in Nagorno-Karabakh Are Going Largely Ignored in US Media

One key reason is Israel, which maintains close ties with the dictatorship in Azerbaijan, trading weapons for cheap oil.

By Daniel Falcone , TRUTHOUT Published January 6, 2024

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, sociologist Artyom Tonoyan discusses the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In this under-reported case of cultural genocide involving political persecution, strains on due process rights, torture, lack of healthcare and food supplies, tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled from Nagorno-Karabakh region after surrendering to Azerbaijan on September 20. Azerbaijan is currently seeking reassurances from the United States to continue peace talks with Armenia.

Tonoyan lays out the conflict’s historical background, its geopolitical ramifications, as well as the ways in which it is discussed in the agenda-setting U.S. press. He argues that not only is the issue overshadowed by larger conflicts relevant to U.S. interests but that a lack of social, economic and political power renders thoughtful and knowledgeable Armenians and Azerbaijanis silent. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Daniel Falcone: Can you provide a brief historical background regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict? How did we get to where we are now?

Artyom Tonoyan: Armenians first appeared on the scene in history as a coherent ethnic group in the seventh century BCE. Nagorno-Karabakh has been pretty much populated by Armenians and the Armenians are Indigenous to the region. This is a place of continual habitation. At the tail end of the Russian empire at the beginning of the 20th century, Armenians and Azeris fought brief wars over the control of the territory.

When the Russian empire finally collapsed in 1917 because of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians retreated from the South Caucasus. They had only a small presence in Georgia and so Azerbaijan and Armenia were no longer in the Russian empire, and they proclaimed independence. In 1918 Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia proclaimed independence and brief wars again ensued over Nagorno-Karabakh in South Armenia. As a result, in 1920, the Armenians, Azeris and Georgians lost independence, and Soviet rule was established over the region. The Azerbaijani government, an early Soviet government, recognized Armenian sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Within a day of Azerbaijan’s recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Armenia, Joseph Stalin was adopted commissar of nationalities. He was basically Vladimir Lenin’s point man to deal with the issues of borders and nationality — in general, questions in the South Caucasus as Stalin himself was from Georgia.

Stalin reversed the decision of the Azerbaijan government. We don’t know why. Historians have spent countless hours of research and writing trying to figure out why Stalin reached this decision. … We just know about the fact of the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia to Azerbaijan.

when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, U.S. journalists are almost always

So, this union was established, and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia became part of the Soviet Union. As you can imagine, a lot of these questions became barred as the Soviet Union tried to consolidate its rule. They tried to keep all these issues under wraps but also, as you can imagine, the population of Nagorno-Karabakh, mostly Armenians, never agreed to this.

These grievances, in the beginning, were quite simply suppressed. As we got closer to the 1960s, Armenians were increasingly more vocal about their fate and about the culture of discrimination in Azerbaijan. You saw a revival of Armenian nationalist thinking in the 1960s. In 1964, Armenians wrote a letter to the Kremlin saying that Armenians were discriminated against and that churches were being destroyed. The letter was, of course, ignored. Brief repression followed as Armenians were chastised, marginalized, and so forth. At the time of the incorporation of Nagorno-Karabakh, about 89 to 90 percent of the population was Armenian.

And in 1969, Azerbaijan KGB General and later President Heydar Aliyev, the father of the current president of Azerbaijan, was elected as the head of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan. Aliyev implemented policies aimed at reducing Armenian demographics in Nagorno-Karabakh. By the time he was elected to become a member of the Politburo, the central committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party, he managed to reduce the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh from 90 percent in 1920 to 75 percent. So, you can see the trend.

Aliyev instilled and implemented economic discriminatory policies; he failed to invest in the region. … Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh compared their economic mobility and economic performance not to the Azerbaijanis but to their Armenian brethren in Armenia.

Fast forward to the 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He implemented the two-pronged reform program. One was Perestroika, or the re-structurization of the economy; the other was Glasnost, or freedom of speech. Armenians voiced grievances, mostly economic, cultural and religious. In the 1980s, these issues were debated, and Armenian intellectuals started discussing this in public. In 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went boom, it created an enormous strain on the Soviet government. The Chernobyl power plant had been built not far from the Armenian capital of Yerevan, so in 1987, a year after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, Armenian environmentalists and a green nationalist movement sprang up and called for the closure of the nuclear power plant just outside of Yerevan. In other words, a sort of nationalist awakening movement commenced.

It [got] an additional impetus by calling the attention of the Soviet government to the plight of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. In 1988, the population in Nagorno-Karabakh started a letter-writing campaign to Moscow and asked for the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Soviet Army. They again ignored the popular demand of the population in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh, on February 20, 1988, did something quite unprecedented — they passed a resolution that called for the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. It was a popular movement that became institutionalized within seven or eight months.

It was not only the intellectuals in Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh that called for the reunification of the territory, it also had taken an institutional shape. Within 10 days of the leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh calling for reunification with Armenia, Azerbaijan, in an Azerbaijan city called Sumgait, broke out in mass violence against the Armenians. A pogrom ensued where 32 people were killed. Unofficially, it’s speculated that around 200 people perished.

Is the geopolitical history and reality of Nagorno-Karabakh just as complicated and messy?

Yes, geopolitically it’s an absolute mess, I’ll try to disentangle it. Azerbaijan started buying military equipment and offensive weapons from Israel as far back as 2009. So that’s one thing. But the main supplier of weapons to the region was Russia. Russia would sell most weapons to Azerbaijan and some defensive weapons to Armenia. This was to keep a balance of power in the region so no party could have the military edge. Russia had two treaties with Armenia, meant to protect Armenia from external attack. One was within the Collective Security Treaty Organization framework, the other was a bilateral treaty that basically obligated Russia to come to Armenia’s aid. Then, there was the U.S. involvement in the region, especially in the post-9/11 world and after the 2008 Russia-Georgia War. The U.S. was completely on the side of Georgia. Russians see the region as their backyard and don’t like U.S. presence in any shape or form.

The two other actors involved in the geopolitical dance were Iran and Turkey. Turkey had been pushed out of the region since the establishment of the Soviet Union. This was essentially their chance to enter the region by helping Azerbaijan. It also allowed them to reduce Russia’s presence in the region.

Israel has extensive intelligence networks in Azerbaijan. They pilfer a lot of Iranian intelligence in the direction of Iran, and they confer a lot of information through Azerbaijan as far as I know. On top of selling weapons to Azerbaijan and buying cheap oil from them, Israel also has an interest because of Iran.

Whatever Israel is doing, the U.S. is supporting and vice versa. Thereby the geopolitical weight of Armenia is reduced, and the geopolitical weight of Azerbaijan has risen. Overall, it’s a quite complex situation and quite a tangled web, if you will.

What do you say about how the Western media or the U.S. covers the conflict?

When it comes to domestic politics, the U.S. media functions as this check on power in theory. Less so with the mainstream media, but you will still have, even within the mainstream media, some adversarial journalism. When a government official does something wrong, the media tries to keep their feet over the fire. They often try to pursue the story to its logical end and to see that there is a resolution to any number of issues that they raise, that they think is contributing to the decline of civility.

In domestic politics you have a multiplicity of voices but when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, U.S. journalists are almost always — unless you are a maverick like Seymour Hersh — reverting to basically becoming stenographers for the State Department, or the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any number of government agencies. They, in a sense, reflect the position of the government.

Imagine if there is a scoop that comes from the CIA or from the State Department, and imagine if the scoop is going to challenge the position of these institutions. Think if you were a journalist. Do you want to keep your access to these people that give you the scoop, or do you want to become adversaries to them? What happens in this relationship, be it CNN or The New York Times — they will always favor keeping their channels with these institutions and with these organizations open rather than undergo a foreign policy story and have no access. This is not just on the Armenian/Azerbaijani issue. In general, not many journalists are interested in small countries like Armenia or in small geopolitical regions like the Caucasus. These stories end up becoming just footnotes in a larger story. If you compare what’s happening in Gaza, Israel and Ukraine to what’s happening in the Caucasus, that region is not high up in the priority list.

That allows petro-dictatorships like Azerbaijan to have their way with small countries like Armenia. They know that the State Department is not going to hold them accountable.

How about places to go for information for a beginner or intermediate reader of foreign policy regarding Nagorno-Karabakh? Why is it difficult to have certain stories told?

That’s very difficult, especially given the fact that you have quite a sophisticated sort of point guards in think tanks within the U.S. and in Europe — in essence, a garden variety of white guys who don’t have a dog in the fight, and they’re presented as objective and appear neutral about these issues.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis often get labeled as nationalists. Recently, this famous British analyst came out and labeled an Armenian-American poet Susan Barba, an editor at New York Review of Books who had written an article about what happened to Nagorno-Karabakh and the ethnic cleansing, a nationalist. Further, The New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul, Carlotta Gall, at the height of the 2020 war, wrote extremely [negative] articles against the Armenians. Armenians don’t have nearly the presence in this country, in terms of academia or journalism, to voice what is happening.

So the genocide in Tigray is completely being marginalized; you will not read about it in the U.S. press unless something horrible happens, like a massacre of 2,000 people in one day, then they may write about it. But even if that happened, the context would get lost.

The New York Times is not going to pursue investigating the problem of the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. You’re not going to see 30 stories in 30 days come out, as they’re not interested or responsible in creating the story. They are merely interested in reflecting the State Department or selling news to constituents. But believe me, if Armenians lived in battleground states, instead of just California, which has been blue forever, you would have more coverage, and you would have more pronouncements from both the White House and the State Department.

https://truthout.org/articles/armenians-suffering-in-nagorno-karabakh-are-going-largely-ignored-in-us-media/

[Yervant1]

Jan 7 2024

The Failures of International Law: What Nagorno-Karabakh Taught Us About Ethnic Cleansing

In a matter of days, homes were vacated, shops closed down, and churches heard their last prayers. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians from their ancestral homelands planned by the Azeri government came to fruition.

BYSARINE MEGUERDITCHIAN

BYSARINE MEGUERDITCHIAN

JANUARY 7, 2024

In a matter of days, homes were vacated, shops closed down, and churches heard their last prayers. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians from their ancestral homelands planned by the Azeri government came to fruition. On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched full scale military attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh (“Artsakh”), an ethnic enclave previously home to 120,000 Armenians. Overnight, they were able to seize the region by force, ending centuries of Armenian existence on the land and a 30-year contention over the region. While many international organizations were shocked by the swiftness of this ethnic cleansing to be carried out in such a methodical manner, members of the Armenian diaspora, like myself, who had been calling for attention in the region, were not. We lamented the fact that our year-long urging for humanitarian aid for the Armenian population in Artsakh fell on deaf ears to which the international community never responded. More disturbing was the aggression from the Azeri government that transpired unchecked due to the failure of international institutions to properly address ethnic cleansing.

International law is intended to be above the status of states’ interests and be abided by all participating actors on the international stage. More specifically, international humanitarian law has been developed by the international community to protect the lives of noncombatants and set clear definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Surprisingly, under international law, ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime and lacks a formal definition. The absence of clear and concise definitions provides far too much wiggle room for interpretation and abuse when it comes to acts of ethnic cleansing. The UN Commission of Experts that was tasked to look into violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia stated that ethnic cleansing could be contextualized with specific war crimes or could fall under the Geneva Conventions, without using strong conclusive wording. In so doing, when acts of ethnic cleansing are carried out, obstruction of the law is unable to be enforced for a crime that is not officially recognized.

What distinguishes ethnic cleansing from other war crimes is the intention of removing a specific ethnic group from a given territory through force. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the reincarnation of pre-Stalinist state ideals amongst many of the former republics. In the case of Azerbaijan, it found itself in contest with the awakened autonomous region Artsakh – a 95% Christian Armenian enclave – within its borders, which had quickly sought to reclaim its independence and rejoin with Armenia. Azerbaijan’s preference was to gain control over the land and to eliminate the Armenian presence from within its borders. Armenian history is deeply rooted in the region, with its presence there dating back to 1st century BC – 20 centuries before the founding of Azerbaijan – establishing Armenians indigenous to the land that they continued to live in right to the present. On the surface the battles may have seemed an issue over territorial conquest, but had underlying intentions of ridding Azerbaijan of its Armenian presence entirely and wiping away centuries of an entrenched identity. These actions are linked to the pan-Turkism movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, which had goals to unify the Turkic speaking nations. In the South Caucasus region, Armenia stands as the sole Christian entity between Azerbaijan and Turkey, providing a barrier between the unification of the two Turkic nations. Armenia is consequently a very vulnerable country in the South Caucasus, with very little allyship and defense from its direct neighbors.

The situation in Artsakh can be distinguished as ethnic cleansing due to the actions Azerbaijan took leading up to the September 2023 attacks. Starting on December 12, 2022, Azerbaijani protesters began blockading the Lachin corridor, a long narrow passage as well as the sole connection between Artsakh and mainland Armenia, leaving residents without essentials such as food and medication. Russian peacekeepers, who had been assigned to monitor the region, did not fulfill their obligation of protecting the integrity of the road, leading to massive food and fuel shortages, closures of institutions and critical services, and even depravity of medical care that caused upticks in miscarriages for pregnant women. Azeri authorities in the region did not heed pleas from the limited number of international humanitarian organizations to open the routes. Without their necessary support from mainland Armenia, citizens in Artsakh were unable to sustain livelihood. Human rights watch groups such as Amnesty International and the Council on Foreign Relations called for attention to end the blockade, as “severe deprivation of liberty” is a crime against humanity as outlined by the Rome Statute; but democratic states, who in spirit promote recognition of international law, did not step in. Though ethnic cleansing falls into the umbrella of a crime against humanity, it has no legal definition in international criminal law. Azerbaijan openly performed the violent acts of September 2023, as well as the preceding blockade, leaving the region devoid of 120,000 Armenians in the span of less than a week.

Since agreeing to the dissolution of Artsakh, Armenia has taken steps to protect its sovereignty and prevent further encroachment. In October 2023, Armenia ratified the Rome Statute and agreed to join the International Criminal Court (ICC). The implications are varied, as Armenia should now have further protection from an international institution that is committed to multilateral peace and security; however, this solidifies the strain in the relationship between Armenia and Russia. Members of the ICC are committed to the arrest warrant of President Vladimir Putin for his abduction of Ukrainian children, meaning that Putin will no longer be allowed to visit Armenia. Ultimately, joining the ICC strengthens Armenia’s chances of having a law case against Azerbaijan, who is not a member of the ICC. Perhaps this will also shift the procedural norms in the region, to believing that decisions should be made through international institutions such as the ICC instead of direct dealings with Russia or Turkey – two third-party countries with influence and other motives. For us as diasporan Armenians, we can only hope that this will also lead to a shift in regulative norms for Armenia and Azerbaijan that leads to peace and stability in the region.

International law does matter and is a necessary tool to protect weaker states from abuses deployed by more powerful states. In a world dictated by anarchy, the institution of international law maintains order and prevents discourse. It is imperative for stronger states to comply with international law and uphold it in order to encourage smaller states to do the same. The problems arise when crimes are not clearly defined and not formally ratified into law. With vagueness comes the ability for crimes to be committed and swept under the rug. Believing in the power of international law is important, but it can only be sustained when we see international law truly working to protect those that need additional protection. Language that spells out the harmful effects of targeting specific people groups may further their ability to maintain autonomy and sovereignty from stronger threats.

Sarine Meguerditchian is an undergraduate student at Northwestern University studying Economics and Political Science, with hopes to specialize in the nexus between globalization and international human rights. Originally from Boston, MA, she has worked at both the local level in town and state politics, and most recently interning with the Massachusetts State Senator Edward Markey in his Washington, DC office. She is involved in several campus student organizations that focus on international affairs, and is active in raising awareness for her ethnic homeland, Armenia.

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/01/07/the-failures-of-international-law-what-nagorno-karabakh-taught-us-about-ethnic-cleansing/

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

Displaced Karabakh Armenians should be given possibility of returning in safety and dignity – Commissioner Mijatović

15:31, 12 January 2024

YEREVAN, JANUARY 12, ARMENPRESS. “Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities should ensure focus on human rights protection in their peace talks and establish strong human rights safeguards for all persons affected by the conflict”, said the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, as she published her Observations following her visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh, from 16 to 23 October 2023.

“It was the first time in decades that a human rights mission of this kind was able to visit the Karabakh region,” Mijatović’s office said in a press release.

“The visit was prompted by the mass displacement of over 101,000 Karabakh Armenians who fled to Armenia in the space of only a few days at the end of September. It followed Azerbaijan’s military action on 19 and 20 September, its subsequent full control over the region and the prolonged disruption in the movement of people and access to essential goods, services and energy supplies experienced by Karabakh Armenians as a result of a nine-month blocking of the road along the Lachin corridor by Azerbaijan. In Armenia, the Commissioner spoke with Karabakh Armenians who had left and were staying in shelters provided by the authorities," the Commissioner's office said.

Mijatović also visited Stepanakert, where she "witnessed empty streets, abandoned premises and almost no sign of the presence of civilians."

"On the basis of what she could hear and see, the Commissioner concluded that at the end of September 2023, Karabakh Armenians found themselves abandoned without any reliable security or protection guarantees by any party, and that, for them, leaving home was the only reasonable option available. While welcoming the efforts made by the Armenian authorities to provide all those in need who arrived from the Karabakh region with the first basic assistance, the Commissioner stressed that Karabakh Armenians who fled to Armenia, and in particular those belonging to vulnerable groups, should be guaranteed access to all necessary support in the immediate, medium and long term. “Council of Europe member states should maintain a focus on providing financial support to ensure that the humanitarian needs of displaced persons and their host populations can be fully met”, added the Commissioner. The Commissioner stressed that recently-displaced Karabakh Armenians in Armenia should be given the possibility of returning in safety and dignity – even if it seems hypothetical for most at the moment – including by finding flexible solutions, in particular as concerns their citizenship and legal status. Pending a possible return, ways should be promptly found, including by establishing security guarantees, for Karabakh Armenians to temporarily access their homes or places of habitual residence, and visit graveyards where loved ones are buried. It is incumbent on the Azerbaijani authorities to ensure that property left behind by Karabakh Armenians is protected from looting, theft or being taken over. The few ethnic Armenians who have stayed in the Karabakh region should also benefit from all human rights protection, including by having their freedom of movement secured."

The Commissioner also expressed hope that all internally displaced persons who so wish will be able to return as soon as possible in safety and dignity. "More generally, the Commissioner stressed that all persons displaced by the long-lasting conflict have the right to return to their homes or places of habitual residence voluntarily and under conditions of safety and dignity, regardless of whether they have been displaced internally or across borders,” reads the press release issued by Mijatović's office.

“All allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law and serious human rights violations reported in relation to the conflict need to be effectively and promptly investigated, the perpetrators brought to justice and if found guilty after a fair, independent and impartial trial, sentenced and punished. This includes allegations relating to the circumstances of the blocking of the Lachin corridor, the mass displacement of Karabakh Armenians and the military operation of 19 to 20 September”, said the Commissioner. She added that this must be done through a victim-centred approach that treats the victims and their families with sensitivity and compassion. A comprehensive approach to dealing with the past and addressing the serious human rights violations committed in the context of the conflict over the Karabakh region should also be put in place. “Other human rights issues addressed in the Commissioner’s Observations include the need to protect people from mines and explosive remnants of war; the situation of persons detained in connection with the conflict, including the conditions of their detention and level of contact with their families; and the importance of clarifying the fate of missing persons throughout the region and to provide answers to their families. Lastly, the Commissioner called on the authorities in both countries to combat hate speech and promote mutual understanding and trust, including by involving civil society in establishing human rights-compliant memorialisation and reconciliation processes,” the Commissioner’s office said in the press release.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1127896.html?fbclid=IwAR0lFxbLxXK-0sx3L2ZMCS-lkSI3q78nlxqJ5nLctMroFJkc8-HowZsLRR0

[Yervant1]

UAZMI

Jan 13 2024

Council Of Europe Urges Armenia, Azerbaijan To Focus On Rights, Safe Return Of Karabakh Refugees.

The Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic

The Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, has urged Armenia and Azerbaijan to focus in their ongoing peace talks on ensuring rights for everyone affected by the conflict between the two Caucasus rivals.

In a statement on January 12, she said her visit to the Nagorno-Karabakh region in late October -- the highest-profile rights visit to the Nagorno-Karabakh region in decades -- highlighted the plight of more than 100,000 Karabakh Armenian refugees.

Following decades of control by ethnic Armenians, nearly all of the residents fled Nagorno-Karabakh after Baku wrested control of the internationally recognized Azerbaijani region in a lightning offensive in September.

Mijatovic said "Karabakh Armenians found themselves abandoned without any reliable security or protection guarantees by any party, and...leaving home was the only reasonable option available."

She said those former residents must be allowed to return with their properties intact.

Ethnic Armenians have accused Baku's forces of retributive attacks and other abuses, including the widespread destruction of property.

Mijatovic welcomed "the steps taken by the Azerbaijani government to facilitate the return of internally displaced persons to the Karabakh region" but "expressed the hope that all internally displaced persons who so wish will be able to return as soon as possible in safety and dignity."

She said that "pending a possible return, ways should be promptly found, including by establishing security guarantees, for Karabakh Armenians to temporarily access their homes or places of habitual residence, and visit graveyards where loved ones are buried."

She said the Azerbaijani authorities were responsible for ensuring the protection of property and the prevention of looting.

"The few ethnic Armenians who have stayed in the Karabakh region should also benefit from all human rights protection, including by having their freedom of movement secured," she added.

She encouraged both sides to build trust.

Mijatovic's statement was a follow-up to her visit to the region from October 16-23.

As international officials have pressed peace talks, the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh separatists ousted from the region in September, Samvel Shahramanian, said in December that a decree he signed on the dissolution of separatist institutions was no longer valid.

The United States in January put mostly Muslim Azerbaijan on a watch list for engaging in or tolerating “severe violations of religious freedom” since Baku retook Nagorno-Karabakh from mostly Christian ethnic Armenians.

https://uazmi.com/news/post/cdc2aa79e90a5f7689fa26cd30312134

[Yervant1]

Jan 13 2024

Armenia honours Luis Moreno Ocampo

Luis Moreno Ocampo is a welcome guest at the Armenian Embassy where Ambassador Hovhannes Virabyan pinned a Medal of Gratitude on his lapel.

Not quite the same limelight as at the start of last year when the film Argentina, 1985 portraying his exploits convicting military juntas was a hot favourite to win an Oscar but on January 5 (Christmas Eve for Orthodox churches) Luis Moreno Ocampo was a welcome guest at the Armenian Embassy where Ambassador Hovhannes Virabyan pinned a Medal of Gratitude on his lapel.

Why the gratitude? For using his prestige as the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to bring attention to the escalating Azeri aggression against Nagorno Karabakh as from 2022, a full year before the Armenian enclave was finally overrun last September. A month beforehand Moreno Ocampo had issued a report on “Genocide against Armenians in 2023,” not hesitating to use the G-word when others might describe the Azeri invasion of Nagorno Karabakh as the hardly less serious ethnic cleansing – at his acceptance speech in the Embassy, Moreno Ocampo only regretted that his report had come too late to bring United States attention to the danger in time, a danger continuing into the present and future because Baku constantly describes Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan.”

Beginning with praise of Armenians worldwide as a uniquely talented diaspora and ending with a quote from Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Moreno Ocampo centred his speech entirely on Nagorno Karabakh.

The medal presentation was accompanied by a short video to mark the occasion from Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan himself and followed by a reception offering Armenian delicacies.

https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/world/armenia-honours-luis-moreno-ocampo.phtml

[Yervant1]

The Washington Stand

Jan 16 2024

COMMENTARY: Artsakh: The Final Days of a Christian Community

Lela Gilbert

January 15, 2024

Nagorno Karabakh, a tiny Christian enclave locally known as Artsakh, was located for many years in the shadow of Azerbaijan — Ilham Aliyev’s Islamist regime. Despite its location, however, Artsakh’s little community of Armenian Orthodox believers always viewed itself as part of historical Armenia.

In 2004, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of weeks in Artsakh. While visiting with the local Christians there, I enjoyed dinners hosted by local leaders, attended the baptism of a newborn, and especially enjoyed an enlightening conversation with an Armenian Orthodox archbishop.

At the time, I learned that the little Christian community had found itself caught in a sizeable controversy following the demise of the Soviet Union. The first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict continued from 1988 to 1994. Artsakh identified itself as Armenian territory, despite ongoing disputes with its northern neighbor Azerbaijan. Struggles recurred until, beginning in December 2022, Artsakh came under siege by an Azeri blockade. At the time, the world largely ignored a prolonged assault on Artsakh’s 120,000 Christian souls.

During the Artsakh blockade, access to food and medicine were cut off, while public utilities —including electricity, internet, and gas — were either shut down or damaged. At the same time Azeris obstructed the Lachin Corridor, the primary roadway between Artsakh and Armenia. Emergency vehicles and humanitarian aid deliveries were barricaded for more than nine months.

Eventually, in September 2023, Artsakh’s remaining 100,000 Armenian Christians were driven out of their homeland. Azeri President Ilham Aliyev — close ally and confidante of Turkey’s neo-Ottoman leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan — was responsible for this expulsion.

It is worth noting that Armenia was the world’s first Christian nation, declared as such in the year 301 A.D. The phrase “ethnic cleansing” has been repeatedly used to describe the plight of Artsakh’s Christian believers. But few major news sources have taken note of the religious persecution that fueled the Azeri blockage.

Finally, on September 28, 2023, the president of Artsakh, Samvel Shahramanyan controversially signed a decree to dissolve all state institutions by January 1, 2024, formally bringing the existence of the so-called “breakaway state” to an end.

The panicked departure of more than 100,000 Christians followed, and thanks to our friend Anna Grigoryan, we’ve been able to collect accounts of four courageous women who were driven out of Artsakh with their children. Following are separate accounts of their final and painful departure from Artsakh and the huge ordeal of trying to begin new lives in Armenia.

Anahit M. writes, “On September 25 an explosion occurred where my nephew, Aram, was killed. Rushing to the hospital we saw hundreds of people severely injured. He suffered severe burns from the fire and later died at the hospital. Many others passed away. That day we lost a precious part of our lives … he was only 25. Meanwhile, we were forced to leave our city of Stepanakert. Although I deal with this pain every day, I still hope and believe that one day we will go back to Artsakh.”

Margarita explains, “We lived in our beloved Artsakh for 20 years. However, we were betrayed by our government. Sadly, we had to evacuate from there when the war began. I was a proud mother; my son served in the military for 16 months until we all had to flee from our city. I couldn’t bear leaving my son to die, so we took off with him. At this time, I can only put my hope on Jesus Christ, because He’s the only one that can change this situation.”

 

Sharmagh recalls, “I lived my whole life in Artsakh, working as a nurse for 12 years in the ER of the Stepanakert hospital. The 2020 war was brutal, and we lost many close ones. Then, after the war we came under total blockade for nine months. Facing hunger, we were disappointed [by] the whole world, yet still hoping for the best. But suddenly, on September 19, 2023, the war started, and we had to evacuate. It’s impossible to describe what we went through. People from all the villages and cities were gathered in the city of Stepanakert, on the streets. Suddenly the Azeris started to bombard Stepanakert and the villages surrounding it. After just one day of war, we were told to evacuate from our home, and for now we live in Yerevan. But we don’t lose our hope that one day we will return to out motherland.”

Roxanne remembers, “The morning of September 19 was dark and cold when I sent my daughter to school. Owing to the blockade, there was no food. I had to wait in a long line to get overpriced fruit, so my kids can eat that day. Coming back, I heard bombings. and was quickly debating on running home to my six-year-old or getting my daughter from school. … We heard explosions all night, had no food or water, just constant fear and putting our hands to our ears to not hear the sounds outside. After 24 hours there were no more bombings, but they ordered us to flee from our homes. I couldn’t even pack all the necessities because my mind was burdened with other thoughts.”

“We were told to be mindful of what to bring,” she continued, “so I only brought the documents [and] warm clothes for me and my kids. I only had two loaves of bread and one bottle of water, so each hour I broke a piece of the bread and gave it to my son with a little bit of water. Reuniting once again with my family, dirty, hungry, and lost, having no close friends in Armenia, we took the bus to a village far away from the border called Bazum, and later we moved to the city of Kirovakan. The Armenians were very kind to us, fed us, bathed us, and gave us a temporary place to stay. Every day, I grieve about how I left my husband’s grave and didn’t even bring a little soil from there.”

Today, more than 100,000 Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh are struggling to begin new lives in Armenia. Their hopes for returning to their earlier lives in Artsakh are fading, while their struggle to restart their lives is a daunting challenge. Although their plight is not widely reported in the United States, these Christian believers deserve our concern and our prayers. May their safety in Armenia continue, their wounds be healed, and their efforts to begin new lives be blessed and protected.

Topics:Religious Persecution, International Religious Freedom

Lela Gilbert is Senior Fellow for International Religious Freedom at Family Research Council and Fellow at Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. She lived in Israel for over ten years, and is the author of "Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner."

https://washingtonstand.com/commentary/artsakh-the-final-days-of-a-christian-community

[Yervant1]

COUNTERPUNCH

Jan 19 2024

The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to PalestineBY NICKY REID

It didn’t end with a death march. It didn’t end with mass graves. It didn’t end with firing squads or gas chambers. The Second Armenian Genocide didn’t end a thing like the first one did but that didn’t make its ending any less devastating or any less genocidal. The destruction of Artsakh ended with a whimpering statesman signing a piece of paper and just like that, an entire nation was erased. While Israel has been busy mercilessly grinding the Gaza Strip into a fine powder with the whole world watching, another far quieter but equally merciless Nakba has taken place in Central Asia with the whole world looking the other way.

On September 28, 2023, Samuel Shahramanyan, the last president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, better known to its ethnic Armenian citizens as Artsakh, signed a ceasefire with Azerbaijan in which the latter nation agreed to end its brutal siege of the prior provided that the NKR kindly agreed to cease to exist. On the first day of 2024 this genocidal “peace” deal formally went into effect but not before the last 100,000 citizens of Artsakh abandoned their ancestral homeland to run for their lives.

In many ways, this was the most shockingly successful genocide of the Twenty-First Century with thousands of years of culture and history obliterated with the click of a pen, but the final chapter of this final solution actually began several years earlier like so many others, with an American-sponsored bloodbath. After years of careful planning and hording high-tech weaponry, Recep Erdogan’s revanchist NATO sultanate of Turkey decided to reenact the Armenian Genocide by micromanaging a brutal proxy assault on the contested territory of Artsakh in 2020 using the neighboring Ottoman puppet state of Azerbaijan like a hammer.

Armed to the teeth with both Turkish and Israeli drones along with tens of millions of dollars in American cluster munitions, Azerbaijan’s notoriously ruthless strongman, Ilham Aliyev, laid siege to the supposedly treaty-protected Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, bombarding crowded civilian city centers and shelling the refugees who dared to flee from them. Over 6,000 people were slain in just over one month and another 90,000 were forcibly displaced under the threat of genocide. What population that remained was herded into the last corner of their territory as it was cut in half and totally surrounded by heavily armed Turkic gestapo.

A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation’s last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.

Ethnic Armenian settlements have existed in the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh for over 3,000 years, often at the mercy of the constantly competing Ottoman and Russian empires. Artsakh was just one piece of the ancient Christian region of Armenia which had once stretched across Eastern Turkey and deep into the Caucuses of modern-day Russia and Western Iran. Much of this territory along with 1.5 million Armenians was erased by the Ottomans during the gruesome final days of their vampire empire in one of the darkest chapters of the First World War.

That same damnable war also led to the rise of the Soviet Union which would ultimately include what little remained of Armenia as well as the neighboring Turkish outpost of Azerbaijan. In a typically cruel attempt to divide and conquer, the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.

But the movement to return Artsakh to Armenian rule never ceased and when peaceful attempts by the oblast to break away from Azerbaijan failed during the waning days of the Soviet experiment, a brutal ethnic conflict erupted into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War which raged on for 6 long years between 1988 and 1994. The ensuing carnage resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides. An uncomfortable peace was finally brokered by France, Russia and the United States in a coalition known as the Minsk Group but the people of Artsakh didn’t need meddlesome outsiders to tell them who they were.

After all, if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn’t Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.

The most disturbing thing about the strange and lonesome final days of Artsakh is that quite literally every single nation state touching that region, friend or foe, found some way to *** those people over and few states ***ed Artsakh harder than the Armenian fatherland. The final ceasefire that proved to be the final nail in Artsakh’s coffin was actually built on the internationally brokered ceasefire that officially ended the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 while handing over half of Artsakh to Azerbaijan and affording them the territorial advantage to take the rest of the Republic four years later. This oddly tragic ceasefire was brokered by the original three nations of the Minsk Group along with Azerbaijan and Armenia but conspicuously excluded any representatives from the Republic of Artsakh and also seemed to exclude the consent of the citizens that Armenia supposedly represents, who were nothing short of infuriated to learn of their nation’s act of diplomatic betrayal.

In fact, while this ceasefire may have temporarily silenced the rifles on the frontlines, it also led to months of riots back home in Yerevan, nearly a year of open upheaval that saw crowds of irate citizens seizing parliament buildings and beating their supposed representatives half to death in the streets. Scores of high-ranking Armenian officials resigned in disgust, including the nation’s own Minister of Defense, and an alleged coup launched by members of the Armenian Military was barely thwarted in 2021. That’s because representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.

After arming their mortal enemies in Azerbaijan for years with multi-million-dollar military hardware, the United States has taken to simultaneously dangling NATO membership over Armenia’s heads like scraps to a beggar that they put out in the cold themselves. In fact, Armenia spent the two weeks prior to Azerbaijan’s final assault on Artsakh engaged in joint military exercises with the United States intended to prepare them for “evaluation” on NATO eligibility, in spite or perhaps because of the fact that Armenia is already a member of Russia’s own NATO-style military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization aka the CSTO. This game of ballistic Caucasian footsie has been going on for years and it’s likely what inspired Russia to ignore its own security obligations to Armenia when Azerbaijan launched airstrikes within their borders during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that this is precisely what Washington is after, especially when you remember that they sold Baku the bombs that struck the fatherland.

But sadly, Armenia has become just corrupt and desperate enough to fall for this shell game just like Kiev did. That shiny NATO dream of a Coca-cola in every fridge and an Apache Helicopter on every pad. Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying *** about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry sorted affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China’s Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor. But Israel can live with that just so long as Turkey doesn’t open that corridor through Iran, so they’ve gladly filled in for their Yankee overlords as Azerbaijan’s biggest arms supplier in order to convince them to tear a page from their own playbook and choose genocide over diplomacy.

If your head hurts that’s because this schizophrenic skullduggery is absolutely batshit crazy but it’s also precisely what states do and it’s what states have always done. They rise, they fall, they *** each other over, and they devour entire nations like Artsakh in the process just to spit them back out again. Contrary to western lore, a nation is not a government built on the fickle materialism of blood and soil. A nation in its truest form is a tribal community bound by a shared history, culture, and vision for the future. The state on the other hand is nothing but a cartel designed to capture a nation behind its borders and destroy any real sense of community that once bound it with a monopoly on the use of force and the shifting territorial ambitions of the elites that such a caste system inevitably creates.

Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn’t Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation’s final solution.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/19/the-strange-and-lonesome-death-of-artsakh-is-a-warning-to-palestine/

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

MEPs, experts call for int’l peacekeeping mission, monitoring mechanisms in Nagorno- Karabakh to save Armenian heritage

10:32, 25 January 2024

BRUSSELS, JANUARY 25, ARMENPRESS. Participants of the Conference on Protecting Armenian cultural and religious heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh in the European Parliament concluded that the presence of international peacekeepers and existence of clear mechanisms would be needed in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to prevent the “cultural genocide” perpetrated by Azerbaijan.

Members of the European Parliament who participated in the conference said they will do everything to maintain focus on the issue in the EP.

The Conference on Protecting Armenian cultural and religious heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh was held at the initiative of MEP Miriam Lexmann.

“The European Parliament has numerously raised the issue of the fake Azeri narratives and deliberate destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. But nevertheless, the EU is playing a short-term economic game and has an agreement with Azerbaijan. This is unacceptable, and it is our duty to do everything to save the Armenian heritage,” she said.

Armenia’s Ambassador to Belgium and Permanent Representative to the EU Tigran Balayan said that Azerbaijan is not only deliberately destroying and distorting everything that is Armenian, but it is also violating all legal obligations. He blamed the arbitrary enforcement of legal decisions and inconsistent posture of actors for what’s happening. “We must create a monitoring mechanism, and the European Parliament has sufficient means to create such a group. Our duty is to save what’s still left in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Balayan said.

Pierre d’Argent, professor at the University of Louvain and a guest professor at the University of Leiden warned MEPs that Azerbaijan is trying to “control history”. “Discrimination and falsification of history are state policies in that country,” he said, noting that Azeri authorities are “questioning what’s Armenians, and for them, Nagorno-Karabakh doesn’t exist.”

Over 4,000 Armenian monuments, monasteries and cultural buildings are under Azeri control today and face the risk of destruction.

Europa Nostra (pan-European Federation for Cultural Heritage) Secretary General Sneška Quaedvlieg-Mihailović called on the EU to adopt stronger rhetoric and introduce clear mechanisms to prevent the cultural tragedy.

Conference of European Churches Secretary Peter Pavlovic also called for a monitoring mechanism in Nagorno-Karabakh.

MEP Fabio Castaldo said that European satellites should be used to monitor and document what’s happening in Nagorno-Karabakh and use the images as evidence in international organizations. He said that only a strong package of sanctions against Azerbaijan could be the solution to the issue.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1128817.html?fbclid=IwAR0H1buNoaAb06Vr827oPnH1xDsbtyTDoe1FCxjUspRanhUVzeBBgWMjBb0

[Yervant1]

Inter Press Service

Jan 25 2024

HUMAN RIGHTS

Jailed in Limbo: The Armenian Prisoners in Azerbaijan

By Anush Ghavalyan

YEREVAN, Armenia, Jan 25 2024 (IPS) - On July 29, 2023, Vagif Khachatryan, a 68-year-old Armenian retiree, woke up early in Nagorno Karabakh —a self-proclaimed republic in the Caucasus region—to travel to Armenia. He needed to undergo delicate heart surgery.

Despite the pressing medical emergency, it was not an easy decision. The only road that connected Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia and the rest of the world had been cut off for seven months by the Azerbaijani army. Even if he was travelling in an International Committee of the Red Cross car, Khachatryan knew he could face trouble.

He was arrested that day by the Azerbaijani border guard service. Four months later, a military court in Baku handed him a 15-year sentence for crimes allegedly committed during a war fought more than 30 years ago.

Vagif Khachatryan is yet another victim of a conflict that has its roots in the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Armenians remained the majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the enclave was officially on the territory of the newborn Republic of Azerbaijan.

A war was already unravelling in Karabakh. The Armenian victory also led to the forcible displacement of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis. In September 2020, the latter launched an offensive through which they took over two-thirds of the territory under Armenian control.

But there were still more than 100,000 Armenians left.

In December 2022, Baku blocked the only road connecting Artsakh with Armenia and the rest of the world, depriving its inhabitants of the most basic supplies including food and medicines. It was that lack of medical assistance that pushed Vagif Khachatryan to his fate seven months later.

With Khachatryan already in prison, the blockade on Nagorno Karabakh was lifted in September 2023 in the wake of a new Azeri attack. The road was opened so that the Armenians remaining in the enclave fled en masse to Armenia.

Senior international bodies like the European Union Parliament accused Azerbaijan of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. Today, Karabakhis are restarting from scratch in Armenia, the Khachatryans among those.

“The fact that my father has a heart disease gives me hope that he will not be tortured in Azerbaijani custody,” Vera Khachatryan told IPS by telephone from Jermuk, 170 kilometres southeast of Yerevan.

Her father’s arrest, she said, has also had an impact on her mother. “She suffers from new health and psychological problems which only add to those derived from forced displacement,” explained the displaced woman.

On September 28, Karabaj authorities issued a decree dissolving the self-proclaimed Nagorno Karabakh Republic as of January 1, 2024.

Secrecy

On December 13, 2023, a prisoner exchange took place: Azerbaijan released 32 Armenian soldiers in exchange for the last two Azerbaijani soldiers under Armenian custody. Armenia’s support for Azerbaijan to host the United Nations Climate Summit in Baku was also part of the deal.

Both sides described it as “a sign of goodwill.”

“Azerbaijan uses the prisoners´ issue as a political tool to put pressure on Armenia or to obtain something in return,” Siranush Sahakyan, representative of the Armenian prisoners’ interests at the European Court of Human Rights told IPS by phone.

“No repatriation conducted by Baku other than the prisoner swap was held under an amnesty or any other legal procedure,” stressed Sahakyan.

Armenia claims that more than 100 prisoners of war and civilians remain in Azerbaijan, including three former presidents of Nagorno-Karabakh, the speaker of parliament and members of the cabinet. Baku says the total number of Armenian prisoners in its custody is 23.

Other than the contradicting figures, their state also poses a major source of concern. In a March 2021 report, Human Rights Watch denounced that the Armenian prisoners of war suffered abuse in Azerbaijani custody and called on Baku to release “all remaining prisoners of war and civilians.”

Faced with Baku’s inaction, Yerevan appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

“Azerbaijan is obliged to submit a report on arbitrarily detained senior officials to the ECHR before the end of January 2024,” Hasmik Samvelyan, spokesperson for the Armenian Representation for International Legal Affairs, reminded IPS in a telephone conversation.

For the time being, the International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent body that has access to Armenian prisoners.

“Our representatives have visited all the captives detained in Baku and checked the conditions in which they are held,” Zara Amatuni, ICRC communications officer in Armenia, told IPS by telephone.

Several of the prisoners’ relatives confirmed to IPS that they had the opportunity to speak with them. The ICRC mediates to facilitate communication by telephone every 30 to 40 days. The organisation avoided giving more details after appealing to the importance of confidentiality.

“We present our observations only to the competent authorities,” the ICRC press officer stressed to IPS.

Repatriated prisoners have also consistently refused to talk to journalists about the conditions of their imprisonment, and that´s also the Armenian state´s policy. Many see it as a way to avoid triggering a reaction from Azerbaijan that could worsen the imprisonment conditions.

Waiting for justice

During an international forum on the future of Nagorno Karabakh held on December 6 in Baku, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev declared that the Armenian prisoners “are waiting for Azerbaijani justice to rule.”

The recent wave of repression against the media and any voice critical of the Government does not invite hope. Last December, Amnesty International denounced the arrests of at least six independent Azerbaijani journalists in just one month on “fabricated” charges.

In its latest world freedom report, the Freedom House claimed Azerbaijan is one of the 57 countries classified as “not free” out of the 159 studied. The Washington-based NGO denounced “numerous arbitrary arrests and detentions”. It also described Azerbaijan’s judiciary as “corrupt and subordinate to the executive.”

Another of those waiting for Azerbaijani justice to rule is Vicken Euljeckjian. This Lebanese who also has Armenian nationality was captured along with Maral Najarian —another Lebanese Armenian— by Azerbaijani soldiers while driving from Yerevan to Nagorno-Karabakh on November 10, 2020, a day after the Russian-brokered ceasefire was announced.

Four months after their arrest, Beirut secured Najarian´s release, but not Euljeckjian´s. The latter was sentenced to 20 years in prison in June 2021. His name, however, appeared on the list of prisoners to be swapped on December 13, 2023, but a last-minute surprise prevented it.

“After three years of separation, pain and despair, we were very excited to hear that he would finally be released. Suddenly, his name was replaced with that of another prisoner three hours before the exchange,” Vicken´s wife Linda Euljeckjian recalled to IPS by phone from Beirut.

Hoping to ease the process, Linda and her daughter travelled to Yerevan to meet with Armenian officials. But the latter could do little, so the family also approached senior Lebanese officials.

“After pressure from the local media, the Lebanese government appears to be interested in discussing the issue of my husband’s repatriation with Azerbaijani officials,” said Linda.

While she waits for the release of her husband, the issue of Armenian prisoners of war and civilians in Azerbaijan remains among those to be settled in a conflict inherited from the 20th century.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2024/01/jailed-limbo-armenian-prisoners-azerbaijan/

[Yervant1]

Asbarez.com

European Lawmakers Call for Mechanisms to Prevent ‘Cultural Genocide’ in Artsakh

by Asbarez Staff

January 25, 2024

in Armenia, Artsakh, Featured Story, Latest, News, Top Stories

A conference tackling the protection of cultural heritage in Artsakh takes place at the European Parliament on Jan. 25

 

Members of the European Parliament on Thursday called for the dispatch of an international peacekeeping mission to Artsakh, as well as the creation of succinct mechanisms to prevent the “cultural genocide” being perpetrated by Azerbaijan.

The European lawmakers made the suggestions during a conference on Protecting Armenian Cultural and Religious Heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh that took place at the European Parliament on Thursday.

“The European Parliament has on numerous occasions raised the issue of the fake Azeri narratives and deliberate destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. But nevertheless, the EU is playing a short-term economic game and has an agreement with Azerbaijan. This is unacceptable, and it is our duty to do everything to save the Armenian heritage,” said European Parliament member Miriam Lexmann, who organized the conference.

Armenia’s representative to the EU Tigran Balayan said that Azerbaijan is not only deliberately destroying and distorting everything that is Armenian, but it is also violating all legal obligations. He blamed the arbitrary enforcement of legal decisions and inconsistent posture of actors for what’s happening.

“We must create a monitoring mechanism, and the European Parliament has sufficient means to create such a group. Our duty is to save what’s still left in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Balayan said.

Pierre d’Argent, professor at the University of Louvain and a guest professor at the University of Leiden, warned the European lawmakers that Azerbaijan is trying to “control history.”

“Discrimination and falsification of history are state policies in that country,” he said, noting that Azeri authorities are “questioning what’s Armenians, and for them, Nagorno-Karabakh doesn’t exist,” d’Argent said.

More than 4,000 Armenian monuments, monasteries and cultural buildings are under Azeri control today and face the risk of destruction.

Sneška Quaedvlieg-Mihailović, the Secretary-General of Europa Nostra, pan-European Federation for Cultural Heritage called on the EU to adopt stronger rhetoric and introduce clear mechanisms to prevent the cultural tragedy.

Conference of European Churches Secretary Peter Pavlovic also called for a monitoring mechanism in Nagorno-Karabakh.

European Parliament member Fabio Castaldo said that European satellites should be used to monitor and document what’s happening in Nagorno-Karabakh and use the images as evidence in international organizations. He said that only a strong package of sanctions against Azerbaijan could be the solution to the issue.

https://asbarez.com/european-lawmakers-call-for-mechanisms-to-prevent-cultural-genocide-in-artsakh/?fbclid=IwAR2gZJ1D1nZvuq6nv7mCJTy9SSO5wI1z-X3w6ZBzh84UbGvVNWLPoUJOOT8

[Yervant1]

Crisis 24

Jan 26 2024

Europe: Pro-Armenia activists to demonstrate in major cities in multiple countries Jan. 27-28 /update 1 Pro-Armenian activists to protest in major cities across Europe Jan. 27-28. Heightened security, transport disruptions likely near protests.

Pro-Armenian activists plan to protest in urban centers in 15 European countries Jan. 27-28. The purpose of the demonstrations is to denounce Azerbaijan's control of Nagorno-Karabakh and demand sanctions against the government in Baku. Organizers are planning gatherings in over 50 cities, including Berlin, London, Madrid, and Vienna. A list of cities is here, although further impromptu events are likely. The largest events are likely to be in Paris and Berlin, as France and Germany have the largest Armenian diaspora in Europe.

As of Jan. 26, locations and start times have only been announced for events in France, including:

• Marseille: Simultaneous gatherings at Beaumont Armenian Apostolic Church of Marseille on Impasse des Monts and Prado church on Avenue du Prado starting at 12:00 Jan. 28

• Nice: Courthouse (Palais de Justice) in the Vieille Ville from 11:30 Jan. 27.

• Paris: Place du Canada from 13:00 Jan. 28

• Strasbourg: Allee des Droits de l'Homme opposite the European Court of Human Rights from 13:00 Jan. 27

Heightened security and localized transport disruptions are likely near all demonstration sites. Low-level confrontations between demonstrators and law enforcement officers or counterprotesters cannot be ruled out.

https://crisis24.garda.com/alerts/2024/01/europe-pro-armenia-activists-to-demonstrate-in-major-cities-in-multiple-countries-jan-27-28-update-1

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

Pro-Artsakh demonstrations held in 50 European cities

10:58, 31 January 2024

BRUSSELS, JANUARY 31, ARMENPRESS. The Europeans for Artsakh movement gathered thousands of supporters across Europe on January 28-29 to condemn Azerbaijan’s policy of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The movement advocates for EU sanctions against Azerbaijan, condemns the ethnic cleansing and genocidal policies of Azerbaijan, demands the immediate release of Armenian POWs and hostages, calls for the defense of Armenia, particularly Syunik, and expresses solidarity with Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and seeks international guarantees for them to live freely and independently in their homeland, safeguarding their fundamental rights.

The ‘Pan-European Mobilization’ demonstrations and events took place in 50 cities across Europe, such as Paris, Vienna, London, Hamburg, Athens, Stockholm and more.

Turkish author Pınar Selek attended the demonstration in Nice, France. She expressed support to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and said she’s ready to fight for Armenia because the world ‘has a debt to pay to Armenia.’

“By protecting Armenia, we will protect justice, dignity and peace,” she said.

Demonstrations took place in Georgia as well, where participants gathered outside the EU representation in Tbilisi.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1129224.html?fbclid=IwAR1QqXPpHkNLHZCv_XoAAxjv2BehiIUF4cNTNlLGTq0kJEP4-J60AWVmKag

[Yervant1]

Feb 25 2024

ARA ABRAMYAN PROVIDED THE UN AND UNESCO HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS CONFIRMING THE RIGHT OF ARMENIANS TO NAGORNO-KARABAKH Following Azerbaijan's September 2023 expulsion of more than 100,000 of the indigenous Armenian population, the UN received documents confirming that its predecessor, the League of Nations, had secured Armenian sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.

YEREVAN, ARMENIA, February 25, 2024 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In 2008, the Institute of International Law, with the support of businessman and philanthropist Ara Abramyan, Founder of the Ararat Alliance Forum, published a multi-volume historical study "Nagorno-Karabakh in International Law and World Politics: Documents and Commentaries." https://sarinfo.org

The study provides indisputable historical evidence that Nagorno-Karabakh has not only been a primordially Armenian land for thousands of years, but also reasonable confirmation that, from an international legal point of view, it never belonged to Azerbaijan.

During the collapse of the USSR, the people of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic voted in a referendum in 1988 for their independence, and for 30 years the NKR existed as a de facto independent, although not recognized, state.

The modern Republic of Azerbaijan, during the collapse of the USSR, in 1991 declared itself the legal successor not of Soviet Azerbaijan, into which Vladimir Lenin included Nagorno-Karabakh, but of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR), created in 1918 and which existed for less than two years.

There are documents in the UN archives indicating that the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was at one time denied admission to the League of Nations precisely because it claimed illegal rights to Karabakh, which, as part of the territory of Armenia, is mentioned in the reference note of James Eric Drummond, Secretary General of the League of Nations, March 1921.

It follows from it that the League of Nations on the issue of the territorial affiliation of Karabakh considered this region as a territory originally belonging to Armenia. Accordingly, following the review of the Armenian-Azerbaijani territorial delimitation by the League of Nations, it was confirmed that independent Azerbaijan has no rights to the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Ara Abramyan, a long-time UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 2003, also drew the attention of the UN and UNESCO to the critical threat looming over the cultural and historical heritage sites of Nagorno-Karabakh. The enclave is a real open-air museum, thanks to more than 500 unique monuments of ancient and Christian culture located on its territory. (www.museumofthebible.org/location/ancient-faith-the-churches-of-nagorno-karabakh)

Azerbaijan announced plans to create a working group to change the identity of these monuments - the so-called "restoration of Albanian religious temples", i.e. Albanization of Armenian churches by erasing ancient Armenian inscriptions from them.

"This, in essence, is an act of state vandalism, comparable in its cynicism to the Taliban's shooting of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, and a civilizational challenge to all humanity and international institutions, including the UN," Abramyan emphasized. "This is also a direct disregard for a number of international documents, including the requirement issued by the International Court of Justice on December 7, 2021 for Azerbaijan to take the necessary measures to prevent all acts of vandalism committed against the Armenian cultural heritage and to punish the perpetrators." (www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/180/180-20211207-PRE-01-00-EN.pdf)

A clear illustration of how Baku deals with the cultural heritage of the Armenian people after their expulsion from its historical lands is the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, part of Azerbaijan, where by 2007 the destruction of the cultural and historical trace was finally completed and not only representatives of the Armenian people remained , which made up 75 percent of the population, but also Armenian temples, museums, necropolises and cemeteries. The same thing happened with 105 once-Armenian-populated villages, whose names were replaced with Azerbaijani ones, and all traces of centuries-old Armenians living there were erased from the face of the earth.

On January 4, 2024 the US State Department added Azerbaijan to the US List of Religious Freedom Offenders, citing its treatment of Christians, Muslims, and ethnic Armenians displaced from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

"Considering that the issue of preserving the Armenian factor and world cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is not so much a matter of politics or geopolitics, but rather a universal human problem, a matter of a fair world order, preservation and transmission to future generations of the cultural code of humanity," Abramyan wrote in his address to the Secretary General UN, "I request that a special UN conference be convened with the participation of historians and international law experts to consider the historical and legal right of Armenians to sovereignty in Nagorno-Karabakh, and to discuss mechanisms of international law to protect the cultural Christian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh from the barbaric actions of the Baku regime."

THE ARARAT ALLIANCE FORUM (https://araratalliance.am/en) is an Armenian NGO conducting historical, economic, strategic and cultural studies to help advance democratic development and strengthen national security of Armenia. The First Ararat Alliance Forum was held in June 2022 in Yerevan.

https://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/508778/ara-abramyan-provided-the-un-and-unesco-historical-documents-confirming-the-right-of-armenians-to-nagorno-karabakh

[Yervant1]

 

Asbarez.com

 

Azerbaijan Dismantles Charles Aznavour Monument in Stepanakert

by Contributor

 

February 28, 2024

 

in Armenia, Artsakh, Latest, News, Top Stories

Azerbaijan has dismantled a monument of Charles Aznavour in occupied Stepanakert, which was erected next to the Paul Eluard Francophone Center in celebration of the singer’s 100th birthday in 2022.

Artsakh’s State Council for the Protection of Cultural Heritage shared two photos of the Charles Aznavour monument, as well as a screengrab from an apparent video of the same location posted in January 2024.

Earlier, the monuments of poet Hakob Hakobyan, philanthropist Alex Manoogian, politician Alexander Miasnikian, admiral Hovhannes Isakov, military leaders Anatoly Zinevich and Kristapor Ivanyan, and others were dismantled.

The monument of Artsakh Hero Ashot Ghulyan in Stepanakert was also dismantled.

Videos shared on social media depict graves of soldiers killed during the Artsakh Liberation War being vandalized.

https://asbarez.com/azerbaijan-dismantles-charles-aznavour-monument-in-stepanakert/?fbclid=IwAR1gGgbSn-LFu1epMXQSJSZk6BcNqoZiKQWKN-4OR9ylJcVUbfzPniVkALo

[Yervant1]

Feb 29 2024

The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict Comes to Michigan

The other Biden policy abroad that left an imprint on Tuesday’s presidential primary.

MATTHEW PETTI

A new candidate is making waves in the Democratic primaries: nobody. Organizers had urged Democrats to vote "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, a way to show President Joe Biden that his foreign policy risked losing a crucial swing state. Around 13 percent of Democratic primary voters did, exceeding organizers' expectations.

The campaign was led by Arab Americans angry with U.S. military involvement in Gaza and Yemen. Other voters were motivated by a lesser-known side of Biden's foreign policy: The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) also campaigned for uncommitted votes in order to protest Biden's support for Armenia's enemy Azerbaijan.

"We didn't deliver the bulk of those votes, clearly, but we were part of it, and we were happy to be a part of it," says Aram Hamparian, executive director of ANCA. Armenians are looking to organize similar campaigns in Nevada and Pennsylvania, two other swing states with robust diaspora communities, according to Hamparian.

The U.S. Census counts 17,000 Armenian Americans in Michigan, although it may be an undercount, as the Armenian Community Center in Dearborn says that there are 50,000 Armenian Americans in the state. Both the Armenian and Arab communities in the state date back more than a century.

The Armenian uncommitted campaign went public on February 20, when ANCA board member Dzovinar Hatsakordzian published an op-ed in The Armenian Weekly announcing that she would vote "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary.

"I was surprised with the reaction of the community," Hatsakordzian tells Reason. "When we started, we didn't think that they would be open to the idea, but [the support] was overwhelming."

Armenian Americans "tend to align along with the area they live in" in terms of party politics, but "they'll cross a party line if they feel like there's a very stark issue before them," Hamparian says. "The military aid to Azerbaijan is our chief complaint about Biden."

In September 2023, the Azerbaijani military stormed the Armenian-majority territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving out almost the entire population, an act that many outside observers have called ethnic cleansing or even genocide. It was the ugly coda to a long, brutal conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh had attempted to declare their independence from Azerbaijan, leading to a war that involved atrocities and mass displacement on both sides. (The territory is also called Artsakh in Armenian.) The conflict froze in the mid-1990s and restarted with an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2020.

"If they do not leave our lands of their own free will, we will chase them away like dogs and we are doing that," Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said in an October 2020 speech. Aliyev also stated that he would welcome Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians as fellow citizens, a claim that Armenians were inclined to disbelieve after Azerbaijani troops beheaded two elderly Armenian men on camera.

Azerbaijan's wars have been funded, in part, by the American taxpayer. Congress initially tried to stay out of the conflict, banning military aid to Azerbaijan in 1992. A decade later, the U.S. government reversed course, hoping to gain a new strategic ally, because Azerbaijan is located between Iran and Russia and along key air routes to Afghanistan.

Every president since George W. Bush has waived the congressional aid restrictions, and Washington provided $164 million in "security assistance" to the Azerbaijani military between 2002 and 2020. Most of that aid, over $100 million, came during Donald Trump's presidency.

After the 2020 offensive, then-candidate Biden demanded an end to the aid. But after he took office, Biden continued to sign off on the security assistance programs.

"The bulk of military aid to Azerbaijan went under Trump, and the [2020 offensive] took place in the last months of Trump's presidency, so he bears heavy responsibility for that," Hamparian says, but "having witnessed the war, [biden] continued the military aid."

There was a particularly strong sense of whiplash within the Armenian-American community in April 2021. That month, Biden recognized the World War I–era mass murder of Armenians in Turkey as a genocide, a move that Armenian Americans have long called for. A few days later, Biden went back on his campaign promise and approved additional aid to Azerbaijan.

The Biden administration announced its genocide recognition with massive media fanfare, while it quietly notified Congress about the military aid. Biden was behaving "as if somehow Armenians will not notice that he's arming a genocidal state in the same week that he's recognizing a genocidal crime," Hamparian says.

U.S. military aid, which mostly focuses on border security, is not a make-or-break issue for the Azerbaijani army. Between 2010 and 2020, the majority of Azerbaijan's weapons came from Russia, with smaller contributions from Israel, Belarus, and Turkey. Russia also supplied nearly all of Armenia's weapons in the same period.

In addition to selling weapons to both sides, Russia has had peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh since November 2020. Those troops have largely not acted to protect the local population.

However small U.S. aid was in the grand scheme of things, Hamparian believes that the very existence of that aid was "morally emboldening" to Azerbaijani leaders, who thought they had an American green light.

Then came the starvation siege. In late 2022 and early 2023, the Azerbaijani army gradually cut off Nagorno-Karabakh's access to the outside world. Severe shortages set in. Azerbaijan was even rumored to be building a concentration camp for Armenian men, a rumor that New Lines journalists were able to corroborate using satellite imagery.

Her voice filled with emotion, Hatsakordzian describes the Armenian-American message to the Biden administration at the time: "We went to them, and we said we know this is going to end with ethnic cleansing…Why is my taxpayer money going to fund a genocidal country such as Azerbaijan?"

Those fears came true in September 2023, when the Azerbaijani army overran the territory, leading to a mass Armenian exodus. The Biden administration then paused military aid to Azerbaijan, and the Senate moved to make it a two-year suspension. At the time, Hamparian called Washington's actions "a day late and a dollar short."

Hatsakordzian says that she does not currently plan to vote for Biden, and that in order to win back her vote, "he can sanction Azerbaijan, he can stop sending weapons to Azerbaijan, and take concrete actions to stop the genocide that is going on."

Some Armenian Americans also sympathize with Arab Americans' campaign against the Biden administration.

The two campaigns "share the exact same frustrations" with U.S. foreign policy, says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, a Washington-based nonprofit. She is an Armenian American whose own family escaped to Jerusalem in the wake of the Armenian genocide, before fleeing again due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whitson compares Armenian-American grievances with U.S. support for Azerbaijan to Palestinian-American grievances with U.S. support for Israel: "You have a strong diaspora community that's deeply opposed to an abusive regime, and they find their own government supporting it."

ANCA has been more circumspect about its stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hatsakordzian and Hamparian emphasize that Armenians have good relations with their Arab and Jewish neighbors alike. Yet Hamparian supports, on principle, the other efforts to pressure the Biden administration in the primaries.

"Everyone who voted 'uncommitted' went to the polls trying to bring accountability to our foreign policy system, and that's a good thing," Hamparian says. "Exercises like this remind [politicians] that foreign policy doesn't start and end at the State Department. It's the property of the American people."

https://reason.com/2024/02/29/the-armenian-azerbaijani-conflict-comes-to-michigan/

[Yervant1]

Panorama, Armenia

March 9 2024

Thomas Becker: Ethnic cleansing in our time in Nagorno-Karabakh

By Thomas Becker, Legal and Policy Director of the University Network for Human Rights

The story was originally published on Hartford Courant

We should not look away from the images of horror. People fleeing their homes. Asymmetrical warfare. Shortages of food and medicine. Innocents dying. Am I talking about the Middle East, or perhaps Sudan? Nope. My story of epic suffering happened recently on the periphery of Europe.

Just over a year ago, the government of Azerbaijan using purported “eco-activists” launched a blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road between Armenia and the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite warnings, the world largely treated the act as innocuous. Nine months later, however, nearly all 120,000 ethnic Armenian inhabitants have been ethnically cleansed from the disputed territory. And the Azerbaijani forces carried it out in only five days.

Nagorno-Karabakh does not hold the world’s attention as some other conflicts do, but the dispute over the territory has been tragic nonetheless. Nagorno-Karabakh is a contested region in the Caucasus located between Armenia and Azerbaijan that was, until only months ago, controlled by ethnic Armenian majority.

In September 2020, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, triggering a 44-day war that shifted control over parts of the territory to Azerbaijan. Despite an internationally negotiated ceasefire, Azerbaijan continued to subject ethnic Armenians in the region to torture, illegal detentions, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances. It upped its assault by enacting a brutal and illegal blockade of the Lachin Corridor that starved and suffocated Nagorno-Karabakh’s indigenous and captive population before it launched a full-blown military offensive in September 2023, forcing nearly all of Nagorno-Karabakh’s inhabitants to flee to Armenia in under a week.

In the weeks leading up to the extermination, we at the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) presented a briefing paper to U.S. officials and a submission to the United Nations warning of the impending ethnic cleansing. Around the same time, 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 Azerbaijan’s actions. Weeks later, our fears materialized. The world was shocked.

But for many in the region, like a young survivor, who, for security, I will refer to only by his first name, Mels, the path to ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh had been paved for 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.” Unaware if he was alive, Mels’ grandmother prayed for his return. The Red Cross eventually facilitated this, but the day he came home, 30 pounds lighter and unrecognizable, she died.

Mels is one of the roughly 150 Armenian victims of atrocities UNHR interviewed in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh over the past three years. Our team, including lawyers, academics, and students from Harvard, Oxford, UCLA, Wesleyan, and Yale, spent hundreds of hours collecting the stories of victims and their families, which we present in a report we published this week, on the blockade’s anniversary, entitled “We are No One”: How Three Years of Atrocities Against Ethnic Armenians Led to Ethnic Cleansing. In it, we document how the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh unfolded.

For those of us who work in human rights, the intention to commit ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh has been on full display for years: one need look only as far as the public statements of the leadership in Azerbaijan to understand its goals.

Azerbaijan’s authoritarian 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.”

With such open violent and hateful rhetoric receiving almost no condemnation, it is difficult not to feel cynicism as the world just finished commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created in response to the ethnic cleansing of Jews by the Nazis.

Instead of performative celebrations or mere statements by the international community, leaders who carry out these crimes must be held to account. But our institutions have failed Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh as they indeed fail others. We must act now to strengthen and democratize the global institutions charged with preventing genocide. If we don’t expose and reckon with these recent failures, we will inevitably see them again – perhaps in southern Armenia, Azerbaijan’s stated next target.

https://www.panorama.am/en/news/2024/03/09/Thomas-Becker-NK/2974629

[MosJan]

[MosJan]

Ruben Vardanyan, former Minister of State of Artsakh, co-founder of the Aurora humanitarian initiative, has been nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize by a group of renowned public and political figures, including a Nobel Laureate, Ruben Vardanyan's office informed Public Radio of Armenia

 

https://en.armradio.am/2024/04/08/riben-vardanyan-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize/#:~:text=Ruben%20Vardanyan%2C%20former%20Minister%20of,informed%20Public%20Radio%20of%20Armenia.

 

Ruben Vardanyan, former Minister of State of Artsakh, co-founder of the Aurora humanitarian initiative, has been nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize by a group of renowned public and political figures, including a Nobel Laureate, Ruben Vardanyan’s office informed Public Radio of Armenia.

“Ruben Vardanyan was nominated for this high award for the creation and support for around five dozen new and unprecedented educational, charitable, scientific and humanitarian structures not only in Armenia, but also in a number of other countries,” his office said.

The nominators mentioned his activities in besieged Artsakh, where Ruben Vardanyan invested a lot of effort, trying not only to alleviate severe humanitarian needs, but also to create opportunities to improve the living conditions of people and children in difficult situations.

“The fact that Ruben Vardanyan’s charity covers not only national, but also international levels, and has global influence and significance, was considered valuable. The Aurora humanitarian initiative – one of the major projects he authored, aims to help and reach out to all those who risk their lives to do good in all corners of the world, on all continents,” Vardanyan’s Office said.

It is noted that Ruben Vardanyan, together with his colleagues, implemented a total of 700 projects in Armenia, Artsakh and the Armenian world, investing in philanthropy, education, preservation of historical and cultural heritage, tourism and infrastructure development and a number of other fields.

Vardanyan was illegally detained by Azerbaijan at Hakkari bridge checkpoint on September 27, 2023, and is still held in prison in Baku. He faces up to 14 years in jail.

[MosJan]

[MosJan]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C501pRfLM6s/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

 

Evidence collected by the Center for Truth and Justice (CFTJ) was cited today in oral arguments before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.

This week, the ICJ is holding hearings on Azerbaijan’s preliminary objections in the case of Armenia v. Azerbaijan. In Armenia’s rebuttal to Azerbaijan’s objections on jurisdiction, Joseph Klingler, counsel for Armenia, cited evidence collected and published by CFTJ regarding the torture and arbitrary detention of Armenian prisoners of war by Azerbaijan on grounds of anti-Armenian hatred. CFTJ’s extensive evidence of torture motivated by ethnic animus plays a role in refuting Azerbaijan’s objection that Armenia’s claims do not properly fall under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

“In the words of another, independent NGO. That has conducted its own interviews of former detainees. All POW’s described in this report testify that the Azeri military, prison emplloyees as well as the actors in the legal and judicial system inflicted both physical and mental torture against them as a means of punishment for simply being Armenian. The POW’s all indicate that they had to repeat phrases and words specifically aimed at humiliating Armenians. Torture was also used as a means of intimidation and coercion to produce false confessions to be used during sham trails.” stated Joseph Klingler, attorney at Foley Hoag LLP and counsel for Armenia

[Yervant1]

Reuters

April 16 2024

Armenia asks World Court to pursue ethnic cleansing case against Azerbaijan

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Armenia on Tuesday urged the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hold Azerbaijan responsible for what it said was the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

"After threatening to do so for years, Azerbaijan has completed the ethnic cleansing of the region and is now systematically erasing all traces of ethnic Armenians' presence," Armenia's representative, Yeghishe Kirakosyan, said on the second day of hearings at the U.N.'s top court.

The case is part of the fallout from decades of confrontation between the South Caucasus neighbours, most explosively over the disputed region in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan's armed forces recaptured the mountainous region in September after years of ethnic Armenian control, prompting most ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.

In a case first filed at the ICJ in 2021, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of glorifying racism against Armenians, allowing hate speech against Armenians and destroying Armenian cultural sites.

Armenia said that put Azerbaijan in violation of a U.N. anti-discrimination treaty. Baku denies all the accusations against it.

On Monday, Azerbaijan told the court that most of Armenia's complaints related to the armed conflicts over Nagorno-Karabakh and did not fall within the scope of the U.N. treaty.

It also accused Armenia of not genuinely engaging in negotiations before bringing the case to the ICJ, also known as the World Court. Kirakosyan rejected these claims.

"Armenia negotiated with Azerbaijan in good faith and pursued discussions far beyond the point of utility," he said.

In November, the court issued emergency measures in the case, ordering Azerbaijan to allow ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh to return.

Azerbaijan says it has pledged to ensure all residents' safety and security, regardless of national or ethnic origin, and that it has not forced ethnic Armenians to leave Karabakh.

The hearings will cover only the legal objections to the jurisdiction of the ICJ and will not go into the merits of the discrimination claims. A final ruling in both cases could be years away and the ICJ has no way to enforce its rulings.

Reporting by Bart Meijer Editing by Ros Russell

https://www.reuters.com/world/armenia-asks-world-court-pursue-ethnic-cleansing-case-against-azerbaijan-2024-04-16/

[Yervant1]

BARRON'S

April 16 2024

• FROM AFP NEWS
  

Baku 'Ethnic Cleansing' Complete, Armenia Tells Top UN Court

• 
  

By Jan HENNOP, Richard CARTER

UPDATES with statements from Armenia, Azerbaijani agents

Armenia Tuesday accused Azerbaijan at the UN top court of having "completed ethnic cleansing" in the former breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, claims dismissed as "cherry picking" by its bitter rival Baku.

The two countries are embroiled in a long-running legal clash at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), just as military tensions are again ramping up following last year's conflict in the disputed mountainous area.

A world away from the fighting, robed lawyers in the gilded halls of the Peace Palace in The Hague are battling over whether the ICJ has jurisdiction in tit-for-tat cases brought by both sides.

Azerbaijan has been violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) "for decades," Armenia's ICJ representative Yeghishe Kirakosyan told AFP.

Kirakosyan added: "Azerbaijan has been espousing policies and practices of racial hatred towards ethnic Armenians which have actually led to escalation and to war and the atrocities committed during the war."

"After threatening to do so for years, Azerbaijan has completed the ethnic cleansing of the region," Kirakosyan, representing the Armenian government, told judges in testimony earlier Tuesday.

Baku was "now consolidating it by systematically erasing all traces of ethnic Armenians' presence including Armenian cultural and religious heritage," he said.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars, in the early 1990s and in 2020, before Azerbaijani forces last September retook full control of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive that ended three decades of Armenian separatist rule over the enclave.

Tensions have remained high since the Azerbaijani operation that triggered the exodus to Armenia of most of the enclave's entire ethnic-Armenian population of more than 100,000 people.

Baku has vigorously denied allegations of "ethnic cleansing", saying Armenians were free to return as long as they agreed to live under Azerbaijani rule.

Elnur Mammadov, Baku's agent at the court, told AFP that Armenia was "abusing" the ICJ to wage what he called a "public media campaign against Azerbaijan."

"We believe this court is being abused by Armenia... without having any genuine attempt to resolve these disputes at the negotiating table, which would be and is the preference of Azerbaijan," he told AFP.

Mammadov urged the ICJ to throw out the case, arguing that what Armenia is alleging against Azerbaijan does not fall under the CERD and therefore the court has no jurisdiction.

"The problem with the evidence presented today (by Armenia)... They were cherry picked. They ignored the context," he said.

The ICJ, which rules in disputes between states, issued emergency orders in December 2021, calling on both parties to prevent incitement and promotion of racial hatred.

But while the ICJ's orders are binding, it has no enforcement mechanism and tensions grew, culminating in Azerbaijan's lightning offensive last September.

Both Mammadov and Kirakosyan said they believed peace was possible between the two rivals.

"The ultimate goal is peace, a durable peace," Kirakosyan told AFP.

"And the more immediate goal, mid-term goal, is the right to return for the ethnic Armenians that have suffered throughout the decades," he added.

Mammadov said that peace was "absolutely" achievable.

"We believe it's time for peace," he said.

"But in the meantime, we do continue with these proceedings in order to have the proper assessment of the past events, of the past crimes committed against Azerbaijan."

The proceedings continue for two weeks.

jhe-ric/rlp

https://www.barrons.com/news/baku-ethnic-cleansing-complete-armenia-tells-top-un-court-c28ad4e3

[Yervant1]

/ Reuters

April 17 2024

Russian peacekeepers have begun withdrawing from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh, says Kremlin

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Russian peacekeepers had begun withdrawing from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh area, ending a multi-year deployment which gave Moscow an important foothold in the strategically-important South Caucasus region.

Azerbaijan retook the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in September last year despite the presence there of Russian peacekeepers in a move which triggered the mass exodus of ethnic Armenians living there.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has since questioned his country’s traditional alliance with Russia – which has a string of military facilities inside Armenia – and has started to forge closer ties with the West.

Armenia has also asked Russian border guards to leave their posts at the country’s main airport in Yerevan from Aug. 1.

When asked about Azerbaijani media reports of a Russian withdrawal from Karabakh and areas nearby, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday:

“Yes, it really is the case.” He did not elaborate.

Azerbaijani news agency APA reported late on Tuesday that Russian peacekeepers had begun withdrawing and that the first personnel and equipment had disappeared from a monastery revered by Armenians in Azerbaijan’s Kalbajar district a few days ago.

APA said Azerbaijani police officers had replaced the Russians at the site.

Russian peacekeeping troops deployed to Karabakh in November 2020 under a Moscow-brokered deal that halted six weeks of fighting between Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian forces.

Almost 2,000 servicemen, 90 armoured personnel carriers, and 380 vehicles and pieces of other hardware were deployed at the time, the Russian defence ministry said.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

https://wtaq.com/2024/04/17/russian-peacekeepers-have-begun-withdrawing-from-azerbaijans-karabakh-says-kremlin/

ALSO READ

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-peacekeepers-have-begun-withdrawing-azerbaijans-karabakh-says-kremlin-2024-04-17/

https://www.unionleader.com/news/military/russian-peacekeepers-have-begun-withdrawing-from-azerbaijans-karabakh-says-kremlin/article_b6f7c463-2ab3-5ce7-b742-34fa2e8003bc.html