Author: Dr. Rich Quinlan
September 17, 2024
From the spring of 1915 through the fall of 1916, as many as 1.2 million Armenians were murdered by Ottoman forces, in the midst of the First World War. While individuals such as Raphael Lemkin, Henry Morgenthau, and Leslie A. Davis attempted to inform the world, and specifically the United States of what was transpiring, the response to the bloodshed was sorrowfully muted. Lemkin famously introduced the term “genocide” to the world following the horrors of the Holocaust, but his thinking was shaped by the events of the Armenian Genocide. Henry Morganthau alerted the U.S. Department of State on July 16, 1915, about "a campaign of race extermination” against the Armenians. Davis was a U.S. consulate in Mamouret-el-Aziz, and his book, The Slaughterhouse Province, is a devastating account of the horrors inflicted upon the Armenian people during his time at the consul post from 1914-1917. In a tragic embodiment of history repeating itself, the world has again responded with a collective hush to the genocidal events that were carried out by Azerbaijani forces for months in 2023. Like the events of over a hundred years ago, reports of the 2023 Armenian genocide were widely disseminated, with the Council on Foreign Relations referring to the people of Nagorno-Karabakh as “experiencing ethnic cleansing at warp speed”. The two most troubling questions concerning these events are why they are happening and why has the world been so reluctant to condemn the actions of Azerbaijan? Tragically, money, resources, and trade lie at the heart of the bloodshed and suffering that is currently being inflicted upon the people of Armenia.
In order to best understand the history of the region and the motivations for Azerbaijan’s actions in Armenia, I turned to Vic Gerami, esteemed writer, journalist, documentarian, and host of The Blunt Report with Vic. Gerami is also the founder of the Truth and Accountability League, an organization that works to present accurate accounts of events happening throughout Armenia, and to combat online hate speech and harassment. While Gerami has an expansive knowledge of the ancient history of Armenia, I focused our conversation on the immediate crisis in the region. A critical point that Gerami made was Azerbaijan’s lack of water resources but abundance of natural gas, oil, and varied minerals, including cobalt, copper, and gold. These natural resources make Azerbaijan an attractive trading party for nations throughout Europe, particularly England, who faced criticism for helping the Anglo-Asian Mining Company, a based in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku, secure mining rights in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Additionally, British Petroleum (BP) is a significant friend of Azerbaijan, along with Russia’s bountiful oil trade. However, the complexity of the relationships between Azerbaijan and others transcends money; there are intricate geo-political affiliations at play as well, as Gerami went on to explain.
In the tangled web of international relations, Azerbaijan finds itself as an ally of both Israel and Iran. Gerami discussed Azerbaijan’s trade relationship with Iran, which topped $470 million USD in 2023, yet sent $14.3 million worth of goods to the Islamic nation in that same year, although focusing more attention on Israel. In January 2024, Israel became the lead purchaser of Azerbaijani oil, with a value of $297 million. However, superseding any trading partnership is the value of military and intelligence gathering within the region. Israel and Azerbaijan exchanged military technology prior to the 2020 war in Artsakh, the Armenian name for the Nagorno-Karabakh region, and the ties have only deepened in the immediate years. This is reflective of the two countries’ long relationship dating back to Israel’s acceptance of Azerbaijan’s declaration of independence in 1991 (the United States accepted this independence on the same date) and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit in 1997. In the current context of the war in Gaza, Azerbaijan has remained far quieter than Turkey, its largest ally, but the nation whose shadow looms over all the violence being carried out against Armenians is Russia.
When the 2020 war finally ceased, Russian troops were brought in as peacekeepers. This was an uneasy presence for all parties involved, as Azerbaijanis saw the return of Russian forces as a symbol of Soviet-era repression, while the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh became people without a true home. The Russian “peacekeeping” mission endured various setbacks as sporadic violence between Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers eventually overflowed into a vicious two days of fighting on September 13th and 14th, 2022. The death toll remains disputed by both sides, but hundreds of people lost their lives, as days of smaller clashes continued until the end of the month. As 2022 drew to a close, protests around the Lachin Corridor, led by Azerbaijani demonstrators, caused that critical land connection between Armenia and Karabakh to be closed, only with Azerbaijan opening a checkpoint in April 2023. This checkpoint became a new point of contention, as eventually even Red Cross supply trucks were denied entrance to the disputed territory, bringing the region to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. As Gerami’s Truth and Accountability League notes, “Azerbaijan illegally blocked the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia and the rest of the world, to starve 120,000 Armenians”. Azerbaijan conducted this action despite numerous requests from organizations, ranging from the U.S. Congress to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to reverse these actions.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan unleashed a military barrage the country labeled an “anti-terrorist” program that ultimately gave the nation complete control over Karabakh, with thousands of Armenians fleeing the area. Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, publicly celebrated what he saw as a victory with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov stating the military action provided “a historic opportunity” to Azerbaijan and Armenian relations. Other advisors to the president, including foreign policy advisor Hikmet Hajiyev, noted that “collateral damage” would result from the military actions; he claimed that this was the result of Armenian forces using civilians as “human shields”, a claim that could not be found to be factual. While Baku attempted to promote a new chapter in relations between the two countries, those words proved to be hollow as Artsakh was dissolved on January 1, 2024.
In the spring of 2024, Russian forces began leaving the region as the war in Ukraine continued to place an increasingly debilitating pressure upon Moscow to feed its war machine, a war effort that is also reliant upon Azerbaijani oil. With Russian peacekeeping troops out, Moscow bogged down in the quagmire of its own making in Ukraine, and the world’s attention fixated on the unceasing fighting in Gaza, the tragedy currently befalling the Armenian people is overlooked, despite the perpetrators of the violence announcing their goals in public. At a press conference in July 2024, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev referred to Armenia as “western Azerbaijan”. The Armenians currently trapped in the Artsakh region face starvation and disease in a nightmarish humanitarian disaster, as well as a clear effort by Azerbaijan to destroy Armenian history through cultural genocide.
The United States’ government has responded to Azerbaijan’s brutality against Armenians by unanimously passing the “Armenian Protection Act of 2023” (S.3000) which aims to block all U.S. military assistance to Azerbaijan by removing President Biden’s authority to waive Section 907 of the FREEDOM Support Act for Fiscal Years 2024 and 2025. Additionally, several amendments have been introduced by the U.S. House of Representatives to be included within the Fiscal Year 2025 Foreign Aid bill. These actions include Amendment 146, which demands $100 million in U.S. funding for the Republic of Armenia under the Assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia (AEECA) account to support victims from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). This bipartisan amendment was introduced by New Jersey Democratic representative Frank Pallone, who is also the co-chair of the Congressional Armenian Caucus along with Florida’s Gus Bilirakis and New York Republican Nicole Malliotakis; Amendment 51 was also introduced by Nevada Democrat Dina Titus, which would prohibit funds in the bill from being used to support Azerbaijani continued occupation of Artsakh.
The United States should be applauded for its efforts to bring attention to this crisis and deny Azerbaijan the ability to continue its assault upon innocent victims in Artsakh. However, this needs to be a global effort with far louder voices emerging from the European Union and United Nations. In his infamous speech in Obersalzberg on August 22, 1939, Hitler callously remarked, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"; there must be more voices speaking in collective unison against the current suffering of the Armenians before their pain becomes another tragic entry in the history of genocide.
Glossary
Barrage: A targeted bombardment upon an area.
Bipartisan: Cooperation between two political partners who often do not agree with each other’s policies.
Cultural genocide: The attempted destruction of a group’s culture, religion, and identity.
Ethnic Cleansing: The mass deportation or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society.
Genocide: Internationally-recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Geo-Political: International relations based on geographical factors.
Human Shield: A non-combatant often forced to shield a legitimate military target.
International Court of Justice (ICJ): The principal judicial component of the United Nations (UN). It was established in June 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations and began work in April 1946.
Quagmire: A difficult, precarious, or entrapping situation.
Repression: Act of subduing someone by force.
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