The Hollow Refrain

Imagine, for a moment, that in a small enclave of a country made up of a sub-set of a much larger Canada (a country we might call Canadistan which, for the purpose of this analogy, was a country that had never really existed), a large group of Americans lived. They lived just across the border from Vermont—ethnic Americans, who had nothing in common with the Canadistanis. These Americans had lived in this area for thousands of years, as their architecture, language, religion, and culture proved.

Due to the vagaries of history, this area had been fought over many times, most recently with two wars—in the 1990s and the most recent in 2020. The Canadistanis claimed that this enclave belonged to them; moreover, they claimed that the Americans were not the native inhabitants of the area, despite all the historical evidence. In fact, the President of Canadistan, a brutal dictator, claimed that the entire United States was actually truly part of the broader Canada, and would soon be part of Canadistan. 

Stretching the imagination, as the analogy might do, if we were to speak of Azerbaijan instead of Canadistan, and Armenia instead of the United States, we would have an accurate picture of what is happening at this moment in Europe, as the Turkic State of Azerbaijan—no more than branch of a broader Turkey—attempts to starve to death the enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh, or Artsakh, made up of 120,000 ethnic Armenians.

The wars for this area, and the creation of a fictitious State of Azerbaijan by Joseph Stalin, began in earnest with the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Armenia became the first Christian nation on earth when, in 301, King  Tiridates III, or ‘the Great,’ as he is known in Armenia, proclaimed it the national religion, 36 years before the baptism of Constantine. The heritage, extraordinary culture, language, and history of Armenia is undisputed, except, of course, by the Turks and those who share their ethnic similarity.

It was Turkey, in its guise as the Ottoman Empire, which attempted the first officially recognised genocide, when, between 1915 and 1917, more than 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greek Orthodox, were murdered. This genocide, recognised by most civilized nations today, is still denied by the nation of Turkey—more vociferously than ever under the new Ottoman regime of President Erdogan. Those who speak of the genocide, as Pope Francis did during his visit to Armenia in 2016, draw the wrath of the Turkish government, who said the Pope’s words bore the hallmarks of the “mentality of the Crusades.”

We are reminded of the saying, allegedly first used by George Santayana, that those “who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Adolf Hitler, when speaking of the need for utter ruthlessness in Nazi racial policies, said in a speech in Obersalzburg in August 1939, “who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”—in other words, who remembers, and who cares?

Not, it seems, the European Union, happily receiving much-needed gas and oil from Azerbaijan and pretending that, somehow, they are not taking Russian fuel; not the United Kingdom, Azerbaijan’s largest trading partner, and not, sadly, the United States, a major trader with Azerbaijan.

Since December last year, the only access road between Armenia and the 120,000 Armenian men, women, and children living in the enclave of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagh has been blockaded by Azerbaijan. No food, medicine, fuel or supplies have been allowed through. In early August, Luis Ocampo, the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, declared that a genocide was already occurring due to the blockade.  A few weeks later, UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide Juan Mendez warned that the world needed to “mobilize to prevent a genocide in Nagorno-Karabagh.”

“Never again” is the hollow refrain that echoes from the mouths of politicians and pundits every time a genocide occurs—until it happens again. Guilty by inaction, self-interest, and often the pursuit of profit, the call not to forget and not repeat dies as each petro-dollar is paid and the wheels of big business and big government move inexorably forward.  

A genocide is occurring in a region that identifies more with Europe than the East. The starvation of a population, with the clear intent to ethnically cleanse them from their land in order to replace them with an alien population, is an entirely preventable genocide. It merely takes the application of trading barriers to prevent it. There will be no need of armed forces, no European or U.S. troops will need to shed their blood in a far-off land: but profit and trade will need to be replaced by the force of right action.

It is not only the protection of the 120,000 citizens of Artsakh at stake: it is the threat to the entire country of Armenia. The neanderthal dictator of the Turkic ‘State’ of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, who, as in the great tradition of democratic North Korea, was ‘elected’ in October 2003 after his father’s resignation and subsequent death, stated in December of last year that “present-day Armenia is our land.” That is a threat to the existence of a nation state, a threat of war, and the promise of a far greater genocide than the Ottoman slaughter of this Christian people. A wise expert once said, speaking of relations with unsavoury characters and governments, “they are all monsters, we just have to decide which monsters to deal with.” That amoral, or immoral ‘realpolitik’ may be the way the world turns, but is it possible, for once, that not only will “never again” take the place of realpolitik, that good actions replace self-interest and that, unlike Hitler, someone remembers the “annihilation of the Armenians,” and stops the next genocide.