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Were you ever taken in by the Western preachers of peace who hectored India for refusing to reprimand Russia after its invasion of Ukraine? In that case, you must familiarise your self with the plight of Armenia—an unlikely post-Soviet democracy within the South Caucasus whose survival is being imperilled by the mercenarism of our Occidental missionaries of worldwide order. Their impulse to punish Russia for waging conflict towards Ukraine has prompted them to reward Azerbaijan, a spectacularly corrupt hereditary dictatorship at conflict with Armenia.
The European Union “is popping to reliable vitality suppliers. Azerbaijan is certainly one of them,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Fee, declared in July. Weeks after she flew house, Europe’s newly emboldened associate proceeded to slaughter greater than 200 Armenians in a contemporary episode of a protracted pan-Turkic marketing campaign to coerce Armenia into full submission. There was a lot noise within the West, however no significant intervention was staged to help Armenia, a state that—for all its ills—ranks as much less corrupt on Transparency Worldwide’s Corruption Perceptions Index than at the very least 5 EU states and eight NATO members.
“Common” rules are for the weak: Chilly self-interest disguised as altruism governs the West’s personal conduct on the worldwide stage. Europe has determined, autonomously or underneath American stress, to emancipate itself from Russian sources of vitality. And it has chosen Azerbaijan as an different provider. It doesn’t matter that Azerbaijan can be waging its personal revanchist conflict towards a sovereign neighbour—and even that it’s extra despotic, intolerant, and repressive than Russia. What issues is that Azerbaijan is not Russia. It doesn’t matter that Armenians have endured centuries of mass homicide, demise marches, pressured conversion, and deportation and displacement from their natal lands by the Turks and the Azeris—the phrase genocide was, in truth, invented by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to convey the size of the concerted liquidation of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey between 1915 and 1921. What issues is that Armenian lives don’t a lot matter.
A troubled historical past
A traditionally alert particular person could detect within the indifference to Armenian life the residues of an historical prejudice. Armenians, escaping oppression and pogroms over the centuries, dispersed internationally. They acquired a heat welcome in lots of components of Asia, they usually repaid that welcome with a disproportionate contribution to their host societies: India, with which Armenia has had relations for almost 2,000 years, is among the many nations enriched by the Armenian diaspora.
Elsewhere, nevertheless, Armenians’ ingenuity and adaptableness bred contempt for them. They have been branded “japanese Jews” and handled with suspicion and scorn. A minor disagreeable private expertise with a person within the Twenties drove George Orwell to generalise that he “noticed the power of the proverb ‘Belief a snake earlier than a Jew and a Jew earlier than a Greek, however don’t belief an Armenian’.” Memos by British Overseas Workplace officers of the time resembling D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne hiss with a deep racist hatred of Armenians. Having incited the Armenians to struggle the Soviets with false assurances of help, the British abruptly deserted them. As early as 1920, Osborne’s boss, Lord Curzon, admitted privately that “we intend to do as little as we are able to for Armenia”.
This custom of apathy, disdain, and betrayal helps make clear why Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, felt sufficiently assured final week to brag overtly that he had “began the Second Karabakh Conflict.” Aliyev was alluding to the 44-day conflict in 2020 over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The area, inhabited by Armenians for longer than a millennium and replete with their monasteries, sought to hitch Soviet Armenia within the aftermath of the Purple Military’s invasion. On 4 July 1921, the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Celebration of the Soviet Union voted to approve the merger. The subsequent day, nevertheless, disregarding demography and democracy, Joseph Stalin gifted Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
Then, in 1988, almost seven many years after Stalin’s ukase, the native Armenians held a referendum to secede from Azerbaijan. The vote went largely unrecognised, and a whole lot of Armenians have been massacred within the Azeri cities of Sumgait and Baku. And so, when the USSR lastly disintegrated, Karabakh discovered itself contained in the Soviet-drawn frontiers inherited by Azerbaijan. A vicious trench conflict erupted within the mountainous terrain. Armenia, plunged into literal darkness by acute energy shortages, captured Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjoining lands. It was the primary main Armenian victory by itself soil in a thousand years.
A global discussion board known as the OSCE Minsk Group was convened in 1992 to allow the belligerents to barter a closing settlement. Its progress was impaired by routine outbreaks of hostilities till its was undone fully by Azerbaijan when it commenced a full-blown conflict in September 2020.
Not like Armenia in 1991, nevertheless, Azerbaijan in 2020 didn’t struggle solo: Its troops have been skilled, outfitted, and superintended by Turkey—a member of NATO—which additionally trafficked a thousand Syrian mujahideen on its payroll to function cannon fodder. “One nation, two States” was their official motto. The murderous pan-Turkism that animated the joint enterprise towards Armenia, the world’s oldest Christian State, acquired an explicitly spiritual gloss with the participation of fighters from Pakistan, which doesn’t recognise Armenia, in the reason for the ummah.
Their deeds on and off the battlefield—torture, beheadings, mounting the decapitated heads of Armenian civilians on the carcasses of pigs—would make ISIS blush with delight. Aliyev opened a museum in Baku, the Azeri capital, whose chief displays have been the helmets of Armenian troopers slain in conflict.
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When India helped
Not one of the powers that dispense lofty sermons on peace right now lifted a finger on the time. To its abiding credit score, India was one of many few nations that supplied Armenia tangible help within the type of arms in its second of want. Three separate sources confirmed to me that Delhi had come near airlifting a cache of subtle weapons, however the conflict had plunged Armenia into such disarray that the administration in Yerevan, working and not using a command construction, was unable to determine how one can obtain the materiel.
By the primary week of November 2020, Azeri forces have been punching into Shushi—the excessive mountainous linchpin of Armenian defence. Fearing a complete rout, Yerevan successfully agreed to cede substantial tracts of territory as a part of a humiliating armistice mediated by Moscow.
Azerbaijan needs greater than disputed land and entry to roads connecting it to the Azeri exclave of Nakhichevan. It needs to drive a hall by means of the center of Armenia’s southernmost province to create an unimpeded hyperlink between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Being “a defeated nation”, Aliyev informed his troops earlier this month, Armenia has no proper to withstand Azerbaijan’s calls for. What makes him so sure? Properly, as Aliyev helpfully defined, “The truth that Azerbaijan is true will not be questioned by main worldwide actors.”
The place Delhi should are available
Armenia is reacting to Baku’s bellicosity in contradictory methods. On the one hand, its authorities is making ready the inhabitants to simply accept its capitulation to Azerbaijan’s calls for by arguing that doing so will herald peace and prosperity. Historical past cautions towards this plan of action as a result of concessions by Armenia, removed from ensuing within the recession of Azeri-Turkish aggression, have tended at all times to extend the appetites of its enemies. Nibbling away at Armenia’s periphery, Azerbaijan has already registered rhetorical claims to it its territorial core.
On the identical time, Armenia is more and more turning to India for its defence wants. Yerevan lately positioned orders for an indigenously developed missile system and artillery weapons.
Ordinarily, India shouldn’t intrude within the affairs of different nations or turn out to be a celebration to distant conflicts. However non-interference by Delhi on this specific conflict is unlikely to influence Armenia’s adversaries to maintain out of India’s affairs. It will behove us to do not forget that the forces that search Armenia’s annihilation yearn additionally to cut back India. To disclaim them whole victory in Eurasia is to delay and foil their designs in South Asia.
Solely Armenians can in the end save Armenia. However it’s in India’s pursuits to do greater than switch weapons to Yerevan. It ought to supply to coach Armenia’s armed forces. Delhi may additionally ship a high-level delegation to Yerevan to reveal to Ankara, Baku, and Islamabad that India is keenly within the safety of the area.
The West’s resolution to sacrifice Armenia on the altar of Azeri aggression is, other than every little thing else, phenomenally silly for two causes: One, Azerbaijan doesn’t have the pure sources to fulfill even a small fraction of Europe’s requirement; two, 1 / 4 of the fuel fields which might be speculated to feed Azerbaijan’s future provides to Europe is, in truth, owned by Russia.
India’s alternative to face with Armenia at the very least has the advantage of being sensible.
Kapil Komireddi is the writer of Malevolent Republic: A Quick Historical past of the New India. Comply with him on Telegram.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
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