By Raffi K. Hovannisian
The United States, Europe, and their partners must
officially recognize the Mountainous Karabagh Republic within its
constitutional frontiers. Stepanakert, Mountainous Karabagh—I no longer know what
to do on April 24—or where to go. This is the day Armenians across the globe
commemorate the genocide in 1915 that destroyed the Armenian people and its
homeland of thousands of years.
Armenians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. Kharpert, Armenia, Ottoman Empire, April, 1915 (Public Domain)
Raffi Hovannisian with solders
Those killing fields, the homes of my grandparents, are
located in historic western Armenia—now eastern Turkey. But a century later,
this very region has erupted in all-out war. Turkish forces are on the
offensive again, this time, Armenians having been eliminated, against an empowered
Kurdish majority. For an Armenian, it is a difficult place to travel to on
April 24—to assert our memory amid the bombshells and havoc of another people’s
national struggle.
In Washington earlier this April, I was taking several
meetings with the Department of State and at other offices. As it is known,
official Turkey still denies that genocide was ever committed. And it expects
its “strategic partners,” such as the United States, not to call it by that
name.
In the past week, respected national newspapers
shamefully published Turkish ads denying the Armenian Genocide. Denialist
billboards went up, too. And in his address this April, President Obama called
the events of 1915 everything but “genocide.” You can see why Washington, too,
is also a difficult place to be on April 24.
So I decided to return to Yerevan, Armenia, for April 24.
To be clear this is modern-day Armenia—just a sliver of the great homeland
which survived 1915, was absorbed into the Soviet Union, and eventually
declared independence in 1991. This is the Armenia, whose foreign minister I
was and whose flag I raised at the United Nations. Here millions of Armenians
and their guests—this year George Clooney, Charles Aznavour, and others—march
up to the Eternal Flame of 1915 and lay flowers every April 24.
But even Yerevan, this year, was a difficult place to be
on April 24. Because the minds of Armenians were elsewhere. They were drifting
a couple hundred miles southeast—where, even as we commemorated the victims of
the Armenian Genocide, the groundworks of a new genocide against us were being
laid.
A lot has been written about Nagorno (Mountainous)
Karabagh, or Artsakh; people have different opinions of it. But the simplest
and most irrefutable narrative is this: For as long as we know, since the
ancient Armenian kingdoms, Mountainous Karabagh has been an Armenian cultural
cradle. Even when Josef Stalin and his Bolshevik entourage, in order to placate
nationalist Turkey, unilaterally transferred these lands from Soviet Armenia
and subjected them as an autonomous region to Soviet Azerbaijani rule in 1923,
Mountainous Karabagh—unlike Nakhichevan to its west—managed to keep its
majority Armenian population.
As the USSR collapsed and the people of Artsakh voted by
lawful referendum to declare their own independence from Azerbaijan, Baku in
turn unleashed all-out war—and lost. As sovereign Armenia’s foreign minister, I
helped launch the peace process in Helsinki in March 1992.
Twenty years later, this April, Turkey-allied Azerbaijan
launched its largest campaign of racist aggression since the Russian-brokered
ceasefire that had been signed in 1994 among Azerbaijan, Mountainous Karabagh,
and Armenia. For four days, Azerbaijan’s drones and helicopters bombed peaceful
Christian Armenian civilians. Soldier and villager alike were taken captive
and, ISIS-style, beheaded alive in such inhumanity that even transcends the
definition of a war crime.
From Stepanakert, the capital of Mountainous Karabagh, I
can now report the following. Azerbaijan’s belligerent conduct, a hell-bent
design developed over the years to wipe out not only Karabagh but Armenia in
toto, renders a negotiated settlement no longer possible, and it is
imperatively time for the international community to take a stance in
equivalent application of international law and, yes, in pursuit of
guaranteeing strategic security interests.
The United States, Europe, and their partners to the east
and south must officially recognize the Mountainous Karabagh Republic within
its constitutional frontiers. It is no
less deserving of recognition, under the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the
Rights and Duties of States, than Kosovo, East Timor, Eritrea, or South Sudan.
It gives no consolation that Azerbaijan is a blatant
clan-based dictatorship or that official Ankara is in the throes of realizing
xenophobic rhetoric domestically and in foreign affairs, but it would help
along the way if the Republic of Armenia itself, naturally among the first to
recognize, put its own democratic house in order, rooting out the corruption of
its own authorities, systemic fraud and falsification, stolen elections and
political prisoners.
This is a complicated issue indeed; let us not pretend
otherwise. But on the verge of a new genocide this April, let us also not mince
words and find pretext for inaction.
Armenians living peacefully in Mountainous Karabagh were
murdered this April. They will be murdered again. Do you recognize a genocide
when you see it?
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