Another exodus darkens the history of humanity. Another tragic chapter in the history of Armenians.
Among the postcards that 2023 will leave are those of the trucks, buses and cars packed with people who leave their ancestral lands with what they can take with them. Through the Lachin corridor they try to reach the Republic of Armenia, pushed by ethnic cleansing.
Another territory is emptied of Armenians. First there was Anatolia. Then Nakhchivan. Now Nagorno Karabakh. The 20th century concluded with the postcards of the exodus of the Albanians from Kosovo, an Illyrian and Muslim people expelled from their lands by the government of the Slavic and Christian-Orthodox majority that prevailed in Serbia. The 21st century began with the exodus of Venezuelans who fled hunger and authoritarianism in their rich and unfortunate country. The following decades saw exoduses of Latin Americans to the United States and from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
The album is completed by the ethnic cleansing that Azerbaijan imposed on the inhabitants of Nagorno Karabakh as soon as it finished crushing the Armenian resistance with a devastating attack. The Azeri autocrat Ilhan Aliyev and the one who pushed him to take these steps, the Turkish president Recep Erdogan, understood that the time was right.
When in July 2022, Ursula von Der Leyen arrived in Baku to sign agreements for four billion extra cubic meters of Azeri gas to travel the 3,500 kilometers of the gas pipeline that runs from the Caspian Sea to Europe, passing through Turkey, to compensate for the reduction of gas imports to Russia, the Azeri leader knew that Brussels would not interfere if Azerbaijan launched the final attack against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Goethe called “dark impulses of history” the moments that engender brutal leaderships with exterminating designs. Ashkenazi Judaism suffered from these “impulses” with Catherine II pushing them towards the western borders of Russia and prohibiting them from inhabiting the cities. Also with Nazism industrializing the annihilation in the concentration camps.
Two genocides accompanied by ethnic cleansing had preceded the extermination of the Jews in Europe. In 1904, German troops under General Lothar von Trotha massacred 70,000 members of two Bantu ethnic groups in Namibia: the Herero and the Nama.
The second was the Armenian genocide of 1915. The same nation that now suffers the expulsion of Nagorno Karabakh, after two devastating military offensives launched, once again, with the support of weapons and tactical and strategic advice from Turkey.
The war in Ukraine and the problem in the supply of gas and oil that this conflict generated for Europe created the conditions for Azerbaijan to attack without external pressure or obstacles. Immediately afterwards, Baku announced the dissolution of the Armenian state that existed, in fact, for the last three decades.
The First World War was the curtain behind which the Young Turk regime perpetrated the Armenian genocide, which had begun in a trickle in the late 19th century with the “Hamidian massacres,” which were perpetrated in the shadow of Sultan Abdulhamid II.
The few who looked out from the West at the brutal execution of the Panturanic designs were German anti-Semites, who took note because they were already hatching extermination plans.
The massacres and deportations of Hereros and Namas in southwestern Africa were the first genocide of the 20th century. But the systematization of mass annihilation and ethnic cleansing that, in 1915, eradicated the Armenians from the map of Anatolia, involved a scale immensely older.
At the beginning of the 20th century, only the British helped the Armenians defend their Transcaucasian territories from Ottoman attacks. However, Lenin handed over Nakhchivan to the Azeri Turks and, in the 1920s, with massacres and mass deportations, Azerbaijan had already emptied that territory that extends east of the Zangezur mountains of Armenians. Stalin finished putting Nagorno Karabakh under Azeri sovereignty. But as long as Armenians and Azerbaijanis were inside the Soviet Union, the risks of ethnic cleansing were low. That is why the Armenians of that mountainous enclave fought for secession when the Soviet state began to show signs of extinction.
Without the umbrella of the USSR, being under a Turkic and Muslim State worried the Christian ethnic group that had been exterminated in Anatolia and expelled from Nakhichevan. The first war between Armenians and Azeris, which lasted between 1988 and 1994, was won by the Armenians. But the covid pandemic was the screen that Turkey and Azerbaijan used to launch the great military offensive on Nagorno Karabakh in 2020.
With a vigorous economy and with the army reinforced with weapons sent by Turkey, Azerbaijan fought with advantages and defeated the defenses of the proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, recovering the seven districts that the Armenians had conquered around the enclave during the previous war, and occupying part of the territory, including Shusha, the second most populated city.
It was crucial for Russia to play the role of looking out for the Armenians.
Moscow has always appreciated that there are Christian ethnic groups in Transcaucasia, where the lands that Armenians have inhabited since the remote times of the Achaemenid empire are located. The enclave in which they had proclaimed the now extinct Artsakh was part of the ancient Armenian kingdom until its fall, in the first century of the Christian era. But Russia abandoned them again, as in 2020, when the Ankara-Baku axis understood that The war in Ukraine distracts Moscow and is the ideal screen to complete the territorial conquest that began three years ago.
The inaction of Russia and Europe in the face of the Azeri blockade of the Lachin corridor, the only land route through which food, medicine and fuel reached the enclave, was carte blanche to the military operation that demolished what was left of the resistance. The blockade of the corridor was suffocating the population of Stepanakert, with Russia concentrated in Ukraine and Europe urged to obtain the gas from Azerbaijan that it stopped buying from Moscow.
The final attack crushed Armenian resistance quickly. The question now is whether there will be an international reaction to stop the ethnic cleansing that has already begun in the South Caucasus. Nakhchivan was not the last tragic chapter in Armenian history. Now, the Armenians of Artsakh look at the land they inhabited in the rearview mirror of the cars, buses and trucks in which they undertake the exodus.
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