2023-09-25 05:15:41
September 19, 2023. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh (also called Nagorno Karabakh) laid down their arms on September 20, 2023 in front of the advance of Azeri troops. It is a resounding success for the dark tyrant of Azerbadjan, Turkey’s accomplice in the centuries-old enterprise which aims to destroy the Armenian people.
It is also a crime once morest humanity denounced as such by humanitarian organizations. Aggravatingly, it was committed by a state which is still a member of the Council of Europe…
The current drama has its roots in the conflicts of recent centuries between the three imperialisms of the region: the Ottoman sultan, the Shah of Iran and the Russian Tsar.
The Armenians, like their Kurdish and Iranian neighbors, come from Indo-European migrations four or five millennia ago. They formed an important kingdom from before our era in upper Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, around Mount Ararat, at the summit of which Noah’s ark is said to have sunk, dixit la Gense (dictionary). But already at this time, they suffered from their situation between the Roman empire and the rival empire of the Parthians… Early Christianized, Armenia became the first Christian state in History but soon found itself isolated in the middle of the Muslim world.
The battle of Chaldiran, in 1514, near Lake Van, redrew the map of the region. Its consequences continue today. She sees Sultan Slim I confront the chah sfvide Ismal I. Winner, the sultan seizes eastern Anatolia, namely most of Kurdistan and the ancient kingdom of Armenia. THE chah retains part of Armenia and above all a region of Turkish-speaking population, Azerbadjan.
Thus, on the one hand, the Kurds, close to the Iranians in language, came under the authority of the Turks and stuck to their religion, Sunni Islam; on the other, the Azris, close to the Turks in language, came under the authority of the Persians and adopted their faith, Shiite Islam (dico).
In 1894-1896, as the Armenians of the Turkish Empire demanded a modernization of institutions, the Sultan rouge Abdul-Hamid II begins their large-scale massacre (300,000 dead). Twenty years later, his successors completed the crime.
For their part, the Russians, to the north, achieved, not without difficulty, the submission of the peoples of the Caucasus. This high mountain range between the Caspian and the Black Sea becomes the border natural of the empire. This is how northern Armenia and Azerbaijan became Russian.
The ferments of discord
The Bolshevik revolution arrived in 1917. Several peoples who were unfaithful to the tsars seized the offer made to them by Lenin to proclaim their independence in 1918. This was the case of Finland, Ukraine and, in the Caucasus, of Georgia as well as Russian Armenia and Azerbaijan.
But this was the moment when the former empire of the tsars was plunged into a terrible civil war (1918-1921) which left around seven million dead. The Allies gathered in Paris to settle the Great War and envisaged the reconstitution of historic Armenia with territories taken from Russia and Turkey. The Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920 leaves it to the President of the United States to define its new borders. On November 22, 1920, President Wilson delivered his verdict: in addition to the Russian districts of Revan and Stepanakert (Nagorno-Karabakh), the new Armenia must include the districts of Erzurum, Van and Bitlis as well as access to the Black Sea; in total 57,000 km2.
But Turkish general Moustafa Kmal does not see it that way. In September 1920, he sent the former Turkish Prime Minister Enver Pasha to the Congress of the Peoples of the East which was held in Baku, at the initiative of the Russian government.
Enver Pasha proposed to Lenin’s lieutenants Zinoviev and Radek a division of the Caucasus on the basis of the 1914 borders.
This is how on September 22, 1920, as soon as the Treaty of Svres had been signed, the Turks, assisted by Azri irregulars, launched the attack. They captured Kars on October 30, then Alexandropol (today Gyumri, second city of Armenia) on November 7. As usual, the Westerners do not intervene.
On December 2, 1920, Simon Vratsian, president of the Republic of Armenia, resigned himself to signing the Peace of Alexandropol with Turkey. He disavows the Treaty of Svres and renounces the Armenian districts of Türkiye. As for Nakhitchevan, a territory of 5,000 km2 and 500,000 inhabitants, almost half of whom are Armenians on the edge of Persia, it passes under Turkish protectorate. The same day, the president, crestfallen, chose to resign and left power to the communists.
Thereupon, Armenia sees itself plunged into the Russian civil war. It was Sovietized and secularized by the Red Army with a brutality that offended even Lenin, which is saying something! Russia concluded with Turkey Kars, on March 16, 1921, a line d’amiti et de fraternit頻 by which the Turks retain Kars and Ardahan but give up Batoum, which is integrated into Georgia, and Nakhichevan.
Finally, apart from Finland, all the peoples who had chosen independence fell into line in 1921 under the rule of the Georgian Joseph Stalin, commissioner for nationalities in the Council of People’s Commissars. They became autonomous socialist republics within the USSR, thus baptized on December 30, 1922.
Stalin bet on sowing discord within these republics theoretically free to ask for their independence. This is how he attributes the autonomous republic of Nakhichevan to Azerbadjan even though it has no border with it. In the same way, it keeps Armenian Karabakh enclaved within Azerbadjan.
Later, in 1954, Nikita Khrushchev did not act otherwise by attributing Russian crime to Ukraine. In this way, he wanted to increase the weight of Russian speakers within this Soviet republic and to block its irredentism…
Ethnic cleansing and crimes once morest humanity
From the 1920s, the Azris used all means to drive the Armenians out of Nakhichevan. It was done in a few years. In the 1990s, Azerbadjan having become independent, the dictator Gaydar Aliyev, father of the current leader, destroyed all the heritage vestiges of the Armenian presence in Nakhitchevan (cemeteries and churches).
It goes without saying that the same fate awaits Nagorno-Karabakh (4,000 km2) and the 120,000 Armenians who still live there, now that this territory is occupied by the army of dictator Ilham Aliyev.
By the referendum of December 10, 1991, the inhabitants of the autonomous territory of Nagorno-Karabakh voted for their independence under the name of the Republic of Artsakh (Armenian name of the territory) as the Soviet Constitution gave them the right to do.
The fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics, including Georgia (70,000 km2, 4 million inhabitants in 2019), Armenia (30,000 km2, 3 million inhabitants) and Azerbadjan (90,000 km2, 10 million inhabitants), and several other autonomous entities of the USSR… including Crime, also voted, that year, for their independence in a democratic manner.
No state recognizes the Republic of Artsakh, not even Armenia. But the blockade organized by Azerbadjan forces it to intervene militarily. Through their determination, the Armenians, who once once more fought for their survival, succeeded in repelling the Azeri troops, who were poorly armed and poorly motivated. They even managed to occupy two Azeri districts and established territorial continuity between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. Faced with the threat of a humanitarian catastrophe due to the blockade, the UN passed four resolutions and an arbitration body, the Minsk group (United States, France, Russia) obtained a ceasefire in 1994.
The situation stabilized for two decades. Armenia is relying on Moscow. In October 2002, it participated in the founding of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) under the aegis of Russia with four other ex-Soviet republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
At the same time, Azerbaijan is rapidly modernizing its armed forces and its arms industry thanks to fabulous oil and gas revenues. Dictator Ilham Aliyev unsuccessfully launched a first four-day war (April 2-5, 2016) once morest Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. He renewed his attempt with a Forty-Four Day War (September 27-November 9, 2020). This time, he benefits from the active support of the Turkish military of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey as well as Syrian auxiliaries and Israeli weapons!
Armenia, for its part, can only count on the support of Iran, to which it is connected by a bridge over the Ataraxes. The two states have in common that they are ostracized by international community and the Islamic Republic shows towards its Christian Armenian minority a benevolence which cannot be denied, without comparison with the murderous intolerance demonstrated by Turkey and Azerbadjan, eminent members of the Council of Europe!
strangely, Russia stands aside and refrains from protecting Armenia. Should we think that Vladimir Putin was irritated by the coming to power in 2018 of a pro-Western leader, Nikol Pashinian? Or did he want to spare Turkey in view of the upcoming conflict in Ukraine? Perhaps the future will tell us. In any case, the president only intervenes at the end, acting as arbiter. He supervises the signing of the ceasefire on November 9, 2020, and undertakes to maintain two thousand Russian soldiers in Nagorno-Karabakh as guarantors of the security of the territory and the protection of the churches. Armenia is reassured by this, quite wrongly.
The last act took place in the fall of 2022. Taking advantage of the fact that Russia is stuck in Ukraine and that Europeans need Azerbaijan’s oil and gas more than ever, Ilham Aliev launches attacks once morest Armenian territory. -mrs ! On September 13 and 14, more than thirty localities were bombed and more than two hundred soldiers were killed. The Azeri army occupies more than 50 km2 of Armenian territory. rvan is dismay. In the absence of Russian support, the Armenian government obtained in October from the European Union the sending of an observation mission to its border.
The CSTO summit, which is being held in the Armenian capital on November 23, 2022, testifies to the powerlessness of Moscow to guarantee the security of its near stranger. The Armenian president ostensibly turns his back on his Russian counterpart and in the streets of the capital, we see demonstrators hostile to Putin appear and display Ukrainian and European flags! Nikol Pashinian is sorry and judges damning that Armenia’s membership in the CSTO might not contain Azeri aggression . However, he is aware that he cannot expect anything from Westerners either…
Now sure of its impunity, on December 12, 2022 Baku blocked the Lachin corridor which connects Nagorno-Karabakh to the rest of the world, and began the blockade of the territory, threatening its population with starvation. Finally, on September 19, 2023, following a bombardment from Stepanakert, capital of the enclave, Azerbadjan obtains the surrender of the last resistance fighters. The territory is occupied by the Azeri army and integrated into Azerbadjan. As in Nakhichevan previously, its Armenian population is condemned to take the road of exile, leaving behind a religious and cultural heritage doomed to destruction.
Impunit assure
The war that Azerbaijan is waging in Nagorno-Karabakh is only territorial in appearance. This conflict must be read in the long history of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey in 1915, writes historian Vincent Duclert, specialist in genocide. Turkey and Azerbaijan set out to destroy a people of survivors (Le Monde, September 22, 2023).
Faced with this drama on the margins of Europe, the European Union appears powerless, even more than Russia.
Let us remember that the dictator of Azerbadjan, Ilham Aliev, ranks among the worst tyrants on the planet. He owes his power not to regular elections but to his status as heir like the North Korean Kim Jong-un, the Syrian Bashar El-Assad, the Saudi prince Mohamed Ben Salman or even the Gabonese Ali Bongo. Its diet is classified by Reporters sans frontires among the worst on the planet in terms of freedom of expression (162nd out of 179).
Through his renewed attacks once morest the Armenians, he was guilty of the worst violations of international law, without comparison with the peaceful annexation of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, which might absolutely be justified politically and legally.
By his bombing of cities and especially by his desire to literally starve the population of Nagorno-Karabakh, he was guilty of crimes once morest humanity in every way comparable to those committed by his Turkish cousins in 1894-1915 once morest the Armenians.
However, this character still appears in the Council of Europe and its magistrates sit on the European Court of Human Rights, a machin which claims to dictate their conduct to the citizens of the European Union, something for which General de Gaulle wisely refused to join. For the gallery, remember that Baku, capital of Azerbadjan, hosted the Eurovision contest in 2012. Notwithstanding the kitsch nature of this demonstration, the symbol is distressing.
Russia and Belarus were quite rightly excluded from the Council of Europe following the invasion of Ukraine, but no one is thinking of doing the same for Azerbadjan and for good reason! On July 18, 2022, Ilham Aliev received the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Layen with big smiles.
This came with the avowed objective of protecting the gas supplies of the Union and primarily of its homeland Germany, very affected by the boycott of Russia. It was less than two months before the attacks of the Azeri army once morest Armenia! Barely five months before the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh.
We can reasonably think that this summit meeting might have reinforced the dictator in his resolution to put an end to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. He understood that the Europeans placed their fuel and gas supply well above humanitarian law and, in fact, the Europeans avoided any threat of sanctions when Ilham Aliyev released his troops.
This reminds us of Churchill’s words following the Munich Agreement (1938): You had the choice between war and dishonor. You have chosen dishonor and you will have war . Here we can replace the word guerre par pnurieseven if it is not excluded that soon, Armenia itself will be assailed by the two brigands who hold it in its pincers, Erdogan and Aliyev.
Andre Laran
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#Armenian #tragedy #Life #death #NagornoKarabakh
