At the moment, the indigenous people of Artsakh (known in the West as Nagorno-Karabakh), who have been Armenians for more than 8,000 years and Armenian of Artsakh (known in the West as Nagorno-Karabakh), are forced to leave their lands, their homes, their neighbourhoods, their institutions and even their lives on foot to try to save themselves from dying in the genocide unleashed by Azerbaijan and are desperately seeking exile in the Republic of Armenia or who knows where, under the watchful eyes of the “civilised” world, which observes, like a spectator watching a show, how a sovereign and indigenous people is subjugated to brute force with the complicity of the great geopolitical powers who, for the petty interests of money and power, remain immobile, betraying the permanent principles and values that differentiate us as human beings.
For money and geopolitical positioning, these important countries that consider themselves virtuous and powerful, that lead the world flying banners of fraternity, that generate speeches full of high-sounding or grandiloquent words and that quickly place themselves on the side of good, have already betrayed the Armenian Nation in the early twenties of the last century, supporting a warlike, defeated and barbaric enemy like Turkey to our detriment, despite the fact that Armenia collaborated with more than 500.000 fallen fighting side by side in the First World War. They have done it again in the 1990s when they deliberately ignored the Armenian state that they themselves recognised in 1920, in order to bring about a new Armenian state called the Republic of Armenia, dividing the Armenian people into two states. Again, when they put the just claims of the Armenian people of Artsakh in a freezer for 30 years, despite the fact that the courageous people of Artsakh resisted and won a war imposed on them by Azerbaijan to illegally appropriate their territory. In 2020 they allowed Azerbaijan and Turkey to commit all kinds of war crimes against the civilian population of Artsakh for 44 days in order for Azerbaijan to seize 85 per cent of sovereign Armenian territory. At the end of last year, they were distracted by the blockade of the Lachin corridor that was closed for 10 months, even though they were able to free it within minutes, bringing the 120. Now that the dictator presiding over Azerbaijan has ordered the bombardment of Armenian cities with heavy artillery and the latest technology in order to appropriate the remaining 15 percent, they prefer to watch the catastrophe of our people without lifting a finger while they count money and speculate at the expense of the dignity of men, women, old people and children who question them as accomplices of this barbarism.
They were even on the verge of allowing this new genocide to physically exterminate all the inhabitants (as it happened in 1915) if the people of Artsakh had not decided to withdraw in order to survive, an extermination that can still happen perfectly well as long as the “civilised” world continues to play “I did not do it” and allows Aliev to do as he pleases.
What is the difference between those who usurp a land and demand that its original inhabitants carry out an undignified, unjust and horrific mass exodus, and those who could stop this episode and do justice to it, but watch this incredible ethnic cleansing on television and mobile phones in the middle of the 21st century?
None.
You, the great powers of the world, are jointly responsible by omission for what you are allowing Azerbaijan to do now, as you have always allowed Turkey to do.
I earnestly request all those who speak or write about the brave people of Artsakh to stop mentioning a historical lie that you are trying to install, which is to claim that Artsakh belongs to the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.
Artsakh was never part of Azerbaijan. Never. There are countless historical, documentary and legal proofs, from documents drawn up at the League of Nations in December 1920, to the considerations documented by US President Woodrow Wilson in making the international arbitration ruling that delimited the legal borders between Armenia and Turkey, to documents issued by the authorities of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic expressly acknowledging that Artsakh is not part of Azerbaijan and that Artsakh has always belonged to Armenia.
The historical lie is based solely on a decree signed by Josef Stalin in 1921, who, in order to achieve a pseudo-domestication of strong nationalisms such as Armenian nationalism and in order to impose an economic, political and social doctrine that would allow him to arbitrate at will, ceded the administration of two historical Armenian provinces to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. These provinces are Nakhichevan and Artsakh.
This administration imposed from the central bureau of the USSR succeeded in making the Azeris carry out ethnic cleansing in Nakhichevan, mass murdering its original, indigenous and millenarian Armenian inhabitants, forcing those who managed to survive to flee, and also carefully eliminating all the millenarian Armenian cultural vestiges of our beloved province.
In Artsakh they were unable to do so because the more hardened people fought the administration and it never gained a foothold, because the Armenian people of Artsakh could never be subdued, not even now after the civilian population was bombed again, despite the forced retreat to ensure their survival.
At the end of Sovietisation, the selfishness and defection of the Soviet Armenian leadership, like good children of the regime, pragmatically and in order to remain in power, decided on independence for themselves alone and the 29,000 square kilometres they had left to govern. In doing so, they turned their backs on all their Armenian brothers and sisters who were scattered in the four corners of the world, thanks to the genocide to which our ancestors were subjected, and they also ignored claiming the rights of the Armenian state recognised in 1920 and of which they were a part, even though they were sovietised.
The international recognition in 1991 of a new Armenian state that did not include Artsakh within its territory, nor the populations of Western Armenia that were and are part of the Armenian state recognised in 1920 (since it is fully in force), sealed the political and legal fate of Artsakh (as well as Nakhichevan, of course) whose people had no choice but to try to get the world to recognise them as an independent Republic, and there began to circulate and take shape Azerbaijan’s historical lie of trying to appropriate a land that never belonged to it.
There and through Azerbaijan’s petrodollars, historians and journalists began to call the original, millenarian Armenian inhabitants of a land that belongs to the Armenian state recognised in 1920 “separatists”, and with that term they gave and give legitimacy to Azerbaijan’s attempts to illegally appropriate a territory that was always alien to it.
Since geopolitically the world is smiling on Azerbaijan for its gas, oil and for being a Western ally against Iran and other targets in the area, the Aliev clan rests in the peace of mind that no country in the world will recognise the Republic of Artsakh and knows that it has a free hand to act as it pleases and to do and say anything, And so it does, knowing that it will not be denied by the world, with the isolated exceptions of honourable people who have respect for permanent and immaterial principles and values and who sporadically have the courage to refute these falsehoods, suffering the vituperations of the Turkish and Azeri diplomacies acting in tandem.
Azerbaijan is a country with no history, with inaccurate registration only in 1918, but they say to the world that they originate from the areas they rule, when they are Tatars descended from Central Asia, lying with impunity.
Artsakh was the tenth province of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia in the era of Dikran Tigran the Great, king of kings, an Armenian who ruled all of Mesopotamia and an ally of Imperial Rome, between 95 and 55 BC. The entire area of Nagorno-Karabakh has always been part of the Armenian nation and legally Artsakh is a province of the internationally recognised Armenian state in 1920, a state that is fully and completely in force today and which today has legal continuity through the constitution of the Republic of Western Armenia, which was established in 2004 and completed in 2011.
The Republic of Western Armenia, as a continuation State of a State recognised as a Subject of International Law, opposes in the United Nations these falsehoods invoked by Azerbaijan and Turkey, making the voice of the original Armenian inhabitants heard, defending their right to self-determination and requesting the restitution of Our Lands usurped by these States from the Human Rights Council at the United Nations, based in Geneva. But the “civilised” world that would have to impose on Turkey the charge of having committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Armenian people and that would have to be on the side of the Armenian Nation to reinstate the Republic of Western Armenia on its millenary and ancestral lands of more than 8000 years of history, today is sadly complicit with the dictatorships of Aliev and Erdogan, at the expense of humble and courageous people who are devastated by this complicity.
We Armenians will never cease to demand justice and to go for what is rightfully ours, for each of our millenary provinces that have been recognised as Armenian by international law and that are usurped by Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Today everyone seems to be celebrating the sad and regrettable mass exodus of a sovereign and courageous people who are being forced to defile themselves in order to survive.
But we warn Azerbaijan, Turkey and the geopolitical powers that throughout history such short-lived victories are not the rule but the exception. We Armenians are still a humiliated and offended people in the words of Dostoyevsky, but we no longer play the role of victims. At any moment, patriots can emerge from among the people to set things right, as has happened historically, and I cite the righteous action of Operation Nemesis as a historical precedent that recently merited a monument in Yerevan.
Artsakh, Nakhichevan along with all our Western Armenian lands must be liberated and reclaimed for Armenia.
Stop lying.
Artsakh was not and is not part of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.
Artsakh is Armenia.
If it is legally outside the Republic of Armenia like all Armenians who are in the so-called Armenian Diaspora as a result of the Turkish genocide against our people, Artsakh today legally belongs to the Republic of Western Armenia and its people will return to their lands together with all Armenians of the world who demand justice.
Dr. William A. Karamanian
Consul General of the Republic of Western Armenia in the Argentine Republic
Արևմտեեան Հայաստան
