With its Russian torture chambers and slaughter of civilians, the struggle in Ukraine is horrifying sufficient. However what if one other nation is profiting from the distraction to commit its personal crimes in opposition to humanity?
Meet Azerbaijan.
You most likely haven’t heard of Azerbaijan’s brutality towards an ethnic Armenian enclave known as Nagorno-Karabakh, however it deserves scrutiny. The previous chief prosecutor of the Worldwide Felony Court docket, Luis Moreno Ocampo, whom I received to know years in the past when he sought accountability for the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur area, now describes what is going on in Nagorno-Karabakh similarly.
“There may be an ongoing genocide in opposition to 120,000 Armenians dwelling in Nagorno-Karabakh,” he wrote in a latest report.
We have a tendency to consider genocide because the slaughter of an ethnic group. However the authorized definition within the 1948 Genocide Conference is broader and doesn’t require mass killing, as long as there are particular “acts dedicated with intent to destroy” a selected ethnic, racial or non secular group.
That’s what Azerbaijan is doing, Moreno Ocampo argued, by blockading Nagorno-Karabakh so that individuals die or flee, thus destroying an historic group.
“Hunger is the invisible genocide weapon,” he wrote. “With out fast dramatic change, this group of Armenians might be destroyed in a number of weeks.”
“It’s critically essential to label this as genocide,” Moreno Ocampo advised me, and in addition essential that the USA and different world powers — together with Britain, which has been too quiet — step up stress on Azerbaijan.
The idea of genocide was developed partially as a response to the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing of Armenians in 1915 and 1916, so Azerbaijan’s hunger of Armenians at present means that historical past dangers coming full circle. The group Genocide Watch has declared a “genocide emergency,” the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention lately issued an “energetic genocide alert,” and the Worldwide Affiliation of Genocide Students warned of “the danger of genocide” and known as for Azerbaijan to be held accountable for crimes in opposition to humanity.
The present disaster started late final yr, when Azerbaijanis started blockading the one street into Nagorno-Karabakh, the Lachin hall to Armenia, on which the territory relies upon for meals and drugs.
“Individuals are fainting within the bread queues,” the BBC quoted a neighborhood journalist as saying from Nagorno-Karabakh. The report added that the Halo Belief, a nonprofit that works to clear minefields, has needed to droop operations “as a result of its workers are too exhausted to work after queuing for bread all night time and returning dwelling empty-handed.”
A 3rd of deaths in Nagorno-Karabakh are attributed by the native authorities to malnutrition, the BBC mentioned. I’ve no manner of verifying these studies, however each indication is that the state of affairs is dire — and getting worse by the day.
But I worry that the West is fatigued and searching inward, for it has likewise paid little consideration to different world crises aside from Ukraine, from horrendous atrocities in Ethiopia to Sudan’s warlords’ slaughtering of civilians. For dictators, tragically, this isn’t a foul time to commit struggle crimes.
The backdrop is that authoritarian Azerbaijan has a principally Muslim inhabitants talking a Turkic language, whereas Nagorno-Karabakh has a principally Christian inhabitants that speaks Armenian. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Nagorno-Karabakh sought independence; a struggle ended with a stalemate during which the enclave operated autonomously however with shut hyperlinks to neighboring Armenia. In 2020, Azerbaijan fought a quick struggle during which it reclaimed many of the enclave, and it now desires to get well the remaining — and, I think, to push out a lot of the ethnic Armenian inhabitants.
The world, together with Armenia’s prime minister, acknowledges that sovereignty of Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan feels it has a proper to combine Nagorno-Karabakh politically and economically with the remainder of the nation. Although this isn’t integration however hunger, and the one level even international locations as far aside as the USA and Russia agree on is that Azerbaijan ought to reopen the Lachin hall and finish the struggling.
One attainable compromise to finish the looming disaster is printed by Benyamin Poghosyan of the Utilized Coverage Analysis Institute of Armenia: Azerbaijan would open the Lachin street and Nagorno-Karabakh would concurrently open a number of roads into Azerbaijan (which Azerbaijan seeks). The U.S. State Division hinted at this strategy in a press release denouncing the blockade. As a part of that compromise, Azerbaijan would assure the liberty of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
This may be unsatisfying, for it rewards Azerbaijan for ravenous civilians, and nobody might a lot belief guarantees from Azerbaijan. However the unhappy job of diplomats is to plot flawed, much-hated agreements which can be higher than any various consequence, and on this case a faulty deal is preferable to the mass hunger and ethnic cleaning of Armenians, once more.
