Recognize the Genocide that Happened—And the One Now Beginning
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 [...]
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.
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 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?
Originally published on 2016-05-06
About the author: Raffi K. Hovannisian is independent Armenia’s first minister of foreign affairs, currently chairs the opposition Heritage Party and directs the Armenian Center for National and International Studies in Yerevan.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
I graduated from the exact same PHD Program at Harvard that produced Kissinger and Brzezinski before me. They gave me Kissinger’s old office at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. I also went through the exact same Soviet/Russian Studies Program at Harvard that produced Brzezinski before me, and passed my PHD Oral/General Examinations in Soviet Politics and Russian History under Adam Ulam and Ned Keenan, respectively. R.I.P. Obama was behind me at Harvard Law School.Brzezinski has been Obama’s mentor and foreign policy guru since Obama’s student days at Columbia. Zbig ran Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign on foreign affairs and defense, and ...
Serbia rescued more Jews than any other part of the former Yugoslavia during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem , The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, to 127 individuals from Serbia, which is the highest number for the former Yugoslavia.On December 2, 2008, Arthur Koll, the Israeli Ambassador to Serbia, presented to the children and grandchildren of Borivoje Bondzic, Grozdana Bondzic, Ljubica Mandusic-Gazikalovic, and Jelica Rankovic the Righteous Among the Nations award. They are the descendants of Serbs who during the Holocaust risked their own lives ...
This article was published on Global Research April 29, 2013.Global Research Editor’s Note:The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government (which has recently been re-elected), the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The election was fought by Netanyahu on a political platform which denies Palestinian statehood. According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” According to Rabbi Fischmann, “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt ...
GR Editor’s NotePublicly available military documents confirm that pre-emptive nuclear war is still on the drawing board of the Pentagon. Compared to the 1950s, the nuclear weapons are more advanced. The delivery system is more precise. In addition to China and Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea are targets for pre-emptive nuclear war. Let us be under no illusions, the Pentagon’s plan to blow up the planet using advanced nuclear weapons is still on the books.Should we be concerned? Blowing up the planet through the use of nuclear weapons is fully endorsed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who believes that nuclear weapons ...
During the recent years of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, there has been one issue where the Western mainstream press simply cannot fully ignore or reject the Russian arguments. This issue concerns the life and actions of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) and his followers from what is known as the “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, a far-right organization that took terrorist actions against Polish and Soviet officials from the 1920s to the 1950s and which is now legally protected from any criticism in Ukraine).THE “WRONG” AND “RIGHT” VICTIMSBecause Bandera was born on January 1, 1909, celebrations ...
Although my grandfather, Josip Broz Tito, “gave” the name “Macedonia” to one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia, it is obvious that this act did not aim to create irredentist claims with its neighbors, with which Yugoslavia developed friendly relations and fruitful cooperation.For many years Skopje’s authorities had been presenting maps of “Greater Macedonia,” extending “the geographical and ethnic border of Macedonia” into Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia and Greece. Is that the model of regional cooperation that our friends in Skopje preach to follow?The European Union, the United Nations and the international community have invested considerable political and economic capital ...
A strange spy affair broke out in Balkan Casablanca, aka Serbia, on Wednesday. Were NATO “advisers” and liaison personnel embedded in the Serbian army command finally caught red-handed by vigilant Serbian counter-intelligence operatives, purloining secrets? Not this time. (Something along those lines actually did happen in 2002; it was when former armed forces chief of staff Momcilo Perisic was caught on camera in a Belgrade restaurant handing over secret information for cash to CIA’s Johnny-on-the-spot, John Neighbor.) But what allegedly occurred this time was not a boring rerun of the Perisic affair, although the basic contours of the unimaginative scenario ...
Genocide accusations are, it would seem, the latest fashion spreading out of the Balkans. On December 5, a former minister in the “government” of NATO occupied and administered Kosovo, Ivan Todosijević, who happens to be an otherwise occupation friendly and cooperative ethnic Serb, was sentenced to a two-year prison term. The court found him guilty of making what it considered the outrageous claim that the so-called genocidal “Račak massacre,” which in 1999 triggered NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, was an imposture. Since the trial began just two days before, by Balkan standards the swiftly reached verdict was remarkably expeditious, suggesting the ...
The Balkans have returned to the forefront of European geopolitics as a result of the New Cold War, with the US and Russia facing off in a proxy war over the planned Balkan Stream pipeline through the region. The geopolitical circumstances have evolved since the 1990s, when all of the former Yugoslavia was lumped together as the Western Balkans. In order to accommodate for the changing strategic reality in the region, it’s necessary to carve the Central Balkans out of the idea of the former, and the new division of the Balkans into Western, Central, and Eastern regions simplifies the ...
It is coming clear these days that many university professors are increasingly fat-cat and lazy, not doing any research once they get tenure. It is a system-wide corruption of the academy, so entrenched that central administrations have only led the corruption in multiplying salaries and offices with no committed function to advancement of learning and dissemination of knowledge – the constitutional and statutory objective of the academy the best are devoted to everywhere.This deep-structural degeneration is not confined to any one place or region. Regular contacts from other universities report a similar decadence. The solution is straightforward, but unspoken: (1) ...
Unlike Hollywood movies where Americans have the lead in saving the world, the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic has shown the opposite. The first major test showed that the American health care system was inferior to the Russian one, created during the Cold War. And while the Kremlin has managed to provide real assistance to a number of European countries, certainly using it for propaganda purposes, Washington's actions can be characterized as a sign of weakness. In the race for a quality vaccine, Moscow has shown that it is ahead of its competitors, and despite the rigorous blockade, more and ...
In the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be purely tribal.July 11 this year will mark the 26th anniversary of the tragic events that took place in 1995 in the east Bosnian district of Srebrenica. With each passing year the ceremony loses some of its luster and pomp, as genocide fatigue sets in. The inquirer into these matters will get radically different answers and interpretations, mainly depending on the ethnicity of the local informant. As Diana Johnstone accurately observed, in the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be ...
Editor’s note:This article was written and originally published in January 2015. „God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle is our way, and death for sake of God is the highest of our aspirations“Jihadi credoWest Europe before the 2014 Christmas became once again a target of several mini-terrorist acts by the radical Islamists among whom the Wahabbies are the most active and dangerous. On Tuesday, December 23rd, Germany’s security service warn of the highest terrorist threat in decades as the German participation in the anti-ISIS struggle became the reason for potential terrorism. ...
It is not a secret that the American government has been supporting terrorist groups during the entire Syrian conflict. One of these days, another fact proving this statement was recorded.On September 20, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) militants with their allies launched an offensive on the Syrian Arab Army positions, north-east of Hama city, The National reported.Most likely, the attack of the militants was orchestrated by the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had provided them with the information on the locations and the military strength in the region.It is also reported that the militants' main object was the units of the Russian ...
Following the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region.NATO said its air bombardment was essential to halt repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and justified the ...
We bribed parties and politicians who have enticed hate between the nations. Our ultimate goal was to enslave you!WebTribune publishes their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for upcoming book “Secrets of the White House” last week.My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media.Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, has authored many books ...
IntroductionAfter the referendum’s results held in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on September 30th this year and the Western reactions on it (by the EU & NATO) it is absolutely clear that this small Balkan country is finally proven to be the Western puppet colony without its own real Government and above all the national sovereignty. To remind ourselves, the people of Macedonia were called to express their wish to change or not a state’s name into the Northern Macedonia and, therefore, its national name into the Northern Macedonians, in order to avoid further obstructions by neighboring Greece in ...
The Great European Powers and the BalkansThe Balkans is a term connoting peoples, cultures, and states that make up a peninsula of South-East Europe between the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. There are three crucial points of the Balkan’s significance from the geostrategic point of view: The territory of the Balkans is an important connection between West and Central Europe and the Near and the Middle East. Wealthy of the region’s natural resources. The region which is located betwixt the Danube River, the Black Sea and East Mediterranean is an important part of ...
Radio “Liberty” has always been a propaganda ministry. Formerly its propaganda was directed against the Soviet Union. Today it is directed against distinguished Americans who are known and respected for their allegiance to the truth.Radio Liberty’s latest target is an American scholar who is far more widely respected than Radio Liberty. Like everything else in Washington, the two-bit propaganda ministry is carried away by hubris and a mistaken opinion of its own importance.A Radio Liberty non-entity named Carl Schreck, of whom no one has ever heard has declared America’s most distinguished Russian scholar, Stephen Cohen, to be “a Putin apologist.”Stephen ...
As a matter of historical fact, a separate Macedonian ethnonational identity did not exist until the second half of the 19th century. This is partly due to the fact that Macedonia was ruled by Ottoman Empire for a longer period of time: from 1371 to 1912. It is known that Ottoman authorities did not recognize any kind of ethnonational or ethnolinguistic identities but rather only the confessional (millet-system). Therefore, the Christians of Macedonia were not differentiated between themselves on the ethnic bases. Furthermore, Macedonian territories were inhabited by different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups (Slavic- and Greek-speaking Christians, Turkish- and ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
