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Whereas we’re targeted on Ukraine, a brutal dictatorship within the South Caucasus is testing the world’s resolve: Since Dec. 12, Azerbaijani operatives have blocked the one street, often called the Lachin Hall, connecting the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous enclave to the skin world. It’s a take a look at. Failing it’ll invite a slaughter that can disgrace humanity.
In the intervening time, 120,000 besieged Armenians within the enclave, also referred to as Artsakh, have been minimize off from meals and medication. Colleges, kindergartens and hospitals went with out heating gasoline for days on the top of winter. One affected person has already died resulting from problems from the blockade, and an Armenian little one in crucial situation is unable to get to the Armenian capital of Yerevan for lifesaving therapy. The blockade — which drew an uncommon assertion of concern from Pope Francis and was condemned by the United Nations, European Union, U.S., France and Canada — goals to compel mass flight from an historical middle of Christian civilization.
Certainly, since seizing components of Nagorno-Karabakh in a 2020 struggle, Azerbaijan has repeatedly examined the world’s willingness to look the opposite manner because it batters Armenians in Artsakh and strikes at Armenia correct, a scrappy younger democracy simply up the street.
Repeatedly, Azerbaijani forces have dedicated acts of beautiful brutality — and remarkably, they’ve made little effort to cover it. Fairly the opposite, the hatred of Armenians is so ingrained in Azerbaijan that in lots of instances brutal acts are boasted of on social media.
One video reveals a horribly brutalized and disfigured Armenian girl in Azerbaijani captivity. In one other, the decapitation of an aged Artsakh man is proven. Others present the execution of Armenian prisoners of struggle.
Azerbaijan’s present section of the marketing campaign dates to the late Nineteen Eighties when it massacred Armenians in Sumgait, Kirovabad and different cities in response to peaceable democratic demonstrations in Artsakh calling for unification with Armenia. Since then, Azerbaijani authorities have been fomenting a hatred of Armenians so extreme that the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice has indicated pressing measures directing Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to “take all mandatory measures to stop the incitement and promotion of racial hatred and discrimination, together with by its officers and public establishments, focused at individuals of Armenian nationwide or ethnic origin.”
Azerbaijan’s impunity is as absurd as it’s grotesque. It issued a stamp exhibiting an exterminator in a hazmat go well with “exterminating” Artsakh; it constructed a army trophy park in its capital showcasing the helmets of fallen Armenian troopers and ugly mannequins for kids to degrade; and its president even refers to Armenians as “canines.” And now, the blockade and isolation of 120,000 human beings.
Among the many transparently pretend “environmentalists” implementing the blockade are Azerbaijani army personnel, similar to Telman Gasimov, who proudly flaunts a photo he took with Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army officer who hacked an Armenian scholar to demise in Budapest. Convicted of homicide, Safarov was extradited to Baku, the place, as an alternative of serving his sentence, he was given a hero’s welcome by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
That’s why Genocide Watch has raised the genocide menace stage going through Artsakh Armenians to a prime stage of 10, whereas the Worldwide Affiliation of Genocide Students finds vital “genocide threat components exist in (Nagorno-Karabakh) in regards to the Armenian inhabitants.” The truth is, greater than a dozen human rights organizations and activists issued a joint genocide warning after every week of Baku’s siege of Artsakh.
It is usually why, to Armenians, the concept of putting the autonomous enclave below any Azerbaijani management is a patent nonstarter. It’s why Armenians don’t imagine Azerbaijan’s publicly curated guarantees of “coexistence” — and admittedly, neither ought to the West. Azerbaijani management over Nagorno-Karabakh will imply just one factor: violence towards the Armenian inhabitants.
A part of the world’s silence to Azerbaijan’s acts towards the Armenians pertains to some Europeans’ hopes to evade Russian sanctions by shopping for Russian pure gasoline now being conveniently rerouted by means of Azerbaijan. That’s a unclean discount that ought to shame anybody concerned.
The blockade, which is getting into its seventeenth day, might look like a faraway squabble about some distant mountain street. However it’s a much more crucial matter: It’s a pivotal inflection level and a take a look at for the West.
Catastrophe is looming in Artsakh — and Armenia. If Aliyev is allowed to get away with the blockade, grave human struggling will observe and the floodgates to abject authoritarianism will open huge.
The world’s democracies ought to make their voices heard — on behalf of one in every of their very own, now in desperately dire straits.
Karnig Kerkonian is a lawyer and professor with greater than 20 years litigating and lecturing on issues of worldwide regulation, human rights and appellate regulation. He has served as an adviser in issues earlier than the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice and at the moment leads the worldwide regulation and federal follow teams at Kerkonian Dajani LLP in Chicago.
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