On October 10 a temporary ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan, brokered by Russia, was announced, nearly two weeks after Azerbaijan started shelling Armenians in the Artsakh Republic, more commonly known as Nagorno-Karabakh, located in the South Caucasus.
However,
since the ceasefire came into force, blasts still hit Stepanakert, the capital
of Artsakh, say eyewitnesses and the international media.
During
the military campaign, Azerbaijan has targeted not only whole towns, including
Stepanakert, but also Armenian cultural and religious heritage. On October 8,
Azerbaijan devastated the cultural house and the Holy Savior Cathedral, known
locally as Ghazanchetsots, in the town of Shushi. Ghazanchetsots is one of the
largest Armenian churches in the world.
The
church was bombed twice, heavily injuring three journalists who were
documenting the damage from the first bombing.
Raffi
Bedrosyan, author of the book “Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey ‒ Hidden, Not Hidden and No Longer
Hidden,” said:
“In the
1990’s war, when Azeris were still in control of Shushi, they used this church
as an arms depot, storing the Grad missiles that they rained upon Stepanakert,
which is directly below Shushi.”
After
Armenians liberated Shushi from Azeri occupation in 1992, Bedrosyan visited the
region, participating in water supply and road reconstruction projects.
“When I
entered this church,” he added, “it was still full of human waste and damage
left behind by the Azeris. It was reconstructed beautifully in a few years and
witnessed hundreds of weddings of Armenian young girls and boys.”
Azerbaijan
has been targeting Artsakh with the direct support received from Turkey. “We
support Azerbaijan until victory,” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said
on October 6. “I tell my Azerbaijani brothers: May your ghazwa be blessed.”
“Ghazwa”
in Islam means a battle or raid against non-Muslims for the expansion of Muslim
territory and/or conversion of non-Muslims to Islam. Erdoğan thus openly
claimed that attacks against the Armenian territory constitute jihad. Moreover,
it is not only Turkey and Azerbaijan attacking Armenians. Turkey has also
deployed at least 1,000 Syrian jihadists to Azerbaijan to fight against
Artsakh.
Azerbaijan’s
ongoing attack against Artsakh appears part of Turkey’s neo-Ottoman
expansionist aspirations. In recent years, the Turkish government has escalated
its rhetoric of neo-Ottomanism and conquest. In an August 26 speech, for
example, Erdoğan, said:
“In our
civilization, conquest is not occupation or looting. It is establishing the
dominance of the justice that Allah commanded in the [conquered] region…We
invite our interlocutors to put themselves in order and stay away from mistakes
that will open the way for them to be destroyed.”
Meanwhile,
Armenian president Armen Sarkissian asked Russia, the US and NATO to restrain
Ankara, describing Turkey as “the bully of the region.”
“If we
don’t act now internationally, stopping Turkey . . . with the perspective of making this
region a new Syria . . . then everyone will be hit,” he told the Financial Times in an interview.
Azeri-Turkish
aggression against Armenians has cost many lives. According to Armenian
sources, the total death toll in the Artsakh military has reached over 500 as
of October 12. Azerbaijani authorities have not released details on their
military casualties. The war has also taken its toll on civilians; the two
sides have reported more than fifty civilians killed. On October 9, Armenian
medical doctor VaheMeliksetyan, a lecturer at the Department of Clinical
Pharmacology, lost his life on the battlefield while providing professional
assistance to a wounded soldier.
“According
to our preliminary estimates, some 50% of Karabakh’s population and 90% of
women and children — some 70,000 to 75,000 people — have been displaced,” the
region’s rights ombudsman Artak Beglaryan told the AFP news agency.
The
organization Save the Children International also reported on October 9 that
“Hostels, schools and kindergartens in some Armenian cities and villages are
overcrowded after opening their doors to shelter people fleeing the violence,
mainly women and children… Many children arriving are separated from their
parents, as they were sent to stay with extended family or friends on the
Armenian side of the border,” Save the Children said.
Turkish
and Azeri attacks against Armenians for the purpose of conquering the region
are unjustified. Artsakh, whose population is 95 percent Armenian, is peaceful
and has been an integral part of historic Armenia for millennia. It has never
been part of an independent Azerbaijan. Artsakh fell under the rule of various
conquerors throughout the centuries, but mostly preserved its semi-independent
status as an Armenian entity.
Today
the region is often referred to as “disputed” because Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin granted it to Soviet Azerbaijan as an autonomous region in the early
1920s. During Soviet rule, the majority of the population of Artsakh peacefully
and repeatedly requested reunification with Armenia. The Azerbaijani
government, however, responded by violence not only in Artsakh, but throughout
the whole Azerbaijan. It committed pogroms and mass killings against Armenians
in the Azerbaijani cities of Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, Shamkhor, and
Mingechaur, among others.
On
September 2, 1991, Artsakh finally announced its independence through the same
legal basis as did Azerbaijan, Armenia and all other former Soviet republics.
This announcement was based on the principles of international law and the
Constitution of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, however, once again resorted to
violence. The Artsakh-Azerbaijan war (1991-1994) brought complete or partial
destruction on Armenian villages and towns in Artsakh.
Another
violent attack against the region occurred in April 2016 and is known as the
Four-Day War. During this conflict, Azerbaijan launched a full-blown military
attack on Artsakh and reportedly committed war crimes. In the village of
Talysh, for instance, an elderly Armenian couple was found shot in their home
on April 3, 2016 and their corpses were mutilated.
The
European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) noted:
“During
April, 2016 the Azerbaijani armed forces committed a number of war crimes
against the population of Artsakh including torture, execution and mutilation
of bodies and beheadings. The ISIS style war crimes were committed by the
regiments of the Azerbaijani armed forces that established control over the
soldiers and civilians including children, elderly people. Their murders were
executions merely for being Armenian which is the result of the Armenophobic
policy implemented and promoted by president Aliyev’s administration over the
decade in Azerbaijan.”
Four
years later, the people and cultural heritage of Artsakh are again under fire.
Yet
those attacks are nothing new. Turks and Azeris have systematically engaged in
destructive violence against Armenian cultural heritage. A lengthy report
entitled “A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture” was
published in the art journal Hyperallergic in 2019 and documented “Azerbaijan’s
recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and
22,000 tombstones.”
“Oil-rich
Azerbaijan’s annihilation of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past makes it worse than
ISIS, yet UNESCO and most Westerners have looked away,” the scholar Argam
Ayvazyan said. ISIS-demolished sites like Palmyra can be renovated, Ayvazyan
argued, but “all that remain of Nakhichevan’s Armenian churches and
cross-stones that survived earthquakes, caliphs, Tamerlane, and Stalin are my
photographs.”
Destruction
of Armenian cultural heritage is a long-held Turkish tradition that culminated
during the 1913-23 Christian genocide targeting Armenians, Assyrians and
Greeks. Professor Peter Balakian notes:
“The
Armenian case discloses a range of cultural destruction. Statistics convey not
only the mass killing and forced deportations, but also the government and its
local collaborators’ destruction or silencing specifically of 1) cultural
property; 2) cultural producers (e.g., intellectuals and artists); 3) belief
and value systems; and 4) historical lands and corresponding identifications
with them.
“Statistics
compiled by the Armenian Patriarch Ormanian in Constantinople in 1912–1913 (at
the request of the Ottoman government) indicated that there were 2,538 Armenian
churches on Ottoman territory. During the genocide all but a handful were
plundered, appropriated, burnt, demolished, or entirely razed. The same census
also documented at least 1,996 Armenian schools and 451 monasteries, almost all
of which were later destroyed. The CUP’s [the Ottoman Committee of Union and
Progress] destruction of churches and schools furthered the eradication of the
living presence of Armenian history throughout Turkey.”
The
Artsakh-Azerbaijan dispute should thus be seen in the historical context of
wider policies of Azerbaijan and Turkey regarding Armenians. Throughout
history, these two nations have failed to recognize the Armenian right to
self-determination and often resorted to murderous violence.
The
ongoing problem in the South Caucasus is much larger than land. It is mostly
caused by obsessive Turkish-Azeri hatred against Armenians, and a delusional
belief that historically Armenian lands are not Armenian, and that these lands
should instead belong to Muslim Azeris or Turks.
An
effective way to stop the violence and destruction is for the world to
officially recognize the Artsakh Republic, for whose protection the indigenous
Armenians have made so much sacrifice throughout history.
***Uzay
Bulut is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara.
Her writings have appeared in The Washington Times, The American Conservative,
The Christian Post, The Jerusalem Post, and Al-Ahram Weekly. Her work focuses
mainly on human rights, Turkish politics and history, religious minorities in
the Middle East, and antisemitism.