Elia Ayoub is joined by returning guests Karena Avedissian and Anna to talk about the recent crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh / Artsakh where the near entirety of the ethnic Armenian population was ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan. The Aliyev dictatorship running Azerbaijan has met no challenges from the so-called international community – quite the contrary. What happened in Nagorno-Karabakh is a crime against humanity, the sort of crime that should never be normalized.
You can support The Fire These Times on patreon.com/fromtheperiphery with a monthly or yearly donation and get a lot of perks including early access, exclusive videos, monthly hangouts, access to the book club, merch and more.
Recommendations
- https://allforarmenia.org
- https://www.miaseen.org
- https://syunfund.org
- https://astvatsaturian.org
- https://evnreport.com
- https://www.civilnet.am/en
Where to listen
All episodes are first released on Patreon, and you can get them on your Podcast feed by copy-pasting the RSS that appears at the bottom of your page when you join (here’s how) as soon as they’re up. Patreons get episodes anywhere from weeks to days in advance.
The conversation is available on any podcast app such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS. Just type in ‘The Fire These Times’ and you can subscribe directly there.
It is also on YouTube. At the moment the YouTube page is not being updated but it will be in the near future.
Contact
- You can follow The Fire These Times on: Website | Bluesky | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Substack
- You can follow Karena on Twitter | Bluesky
Episode Credits
Host: Elia Ayoub
Guests: Karena Avedissian & Anna
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
We got word that the first civilians were going to be let out. The first transportation turned into an overwhelming stream of people. As a result, today essentially the whole population of Artsakh has left. It’s gone, and the republic is now empty.
Anna: My name is Anna. Me and Karena have a podcast that is currently on hiatus called Obscuristan. I am a law student, and Armenian.
Karena Avedissian: Hi everybody, I am Karena. I am a senior analyst at the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, which is a little tiny bespoke think tank based in Yerevan. I am also Armenian.
Elia Ayoub: I don’t know how to even start approaching this topic. Before recording, I had the Guardian‘s website open to their “Europe Live” section, and they have bullet point summaries at the top: they are quite incredible statements when you put them next to one another. It encapsulates a bit of the absurdity of the situation, in addition to the situation being horrific.
I would like to ask you to explain, to the best of your ability, what the hell is even happening.
A: For those of you who didn’t listen to the last episode, and also for the people who did listen to it, I realize that we talked a lot about Artsakh but we didn’t fully introduce what it was. The region that you’re going to hear a lot about, that is experiencing a refugee crisis right now, is Nagorno-Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh used to be an autonomous region of the Soviet Union; after the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared independence from the republic of Azerbaijan, which was the successor state to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. They had been trying to rejoin Soviet Armenia during the entire Soviet period, citing severe ethnic repression.
When the Soviet Union fell, the ethnic Armenians living in this region said to the broader global community (and also to those who were trying to draw the borders) that You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about; we cannot live safely under an Azerbaijani government; this state entity is espousing hatred against us; they’ve already cleansed us out of Baku and Sumgait, which were cities where Armenians used to live and we were pogromed out of.
Effectively, they fought a war for their independence after the fall of Soviet Union, and they won that war, and they were able to establish a state. That state is called the Republic of Artsakh—or was, unfortunately. It was a struggling, fucked-up democracy, as we all are, and it existed in the region for the last thirty years. It was considered a “frozen conflict”—that’s really bullshit terminology, because the idea that it was “going nowhere but wasn’t getting solved” is not true. People were dying in this conflict regularly for those thirty years.
Azerbaijan, in 2020, invaded. They started bombing the entire region, and were able to conquer back a lot of territory. In 2022, Azerbaijan blockaded the entire region, so no food, no medicine, no fuel, no gas, nothing could get in and out—with the exception of the occasional humanitarian transport. During this blockade, if you were a person being transported for medical transport, Azerbaijan might kidnap you—not a rogue actor but the state would kidnap people.
So during nine months of blockade, Artsakh is on the brink of starvation; Azerbaijan starts indiscriminately shelling the entire region; the government of Artsakh surrenders on September 19 of this year. Now there’s a mass exodus; basically every Armenian living in Nagorno-Karabakh is trying to leave, because as they’ve been saying for the last one hundred years, they cannot live safely under a government that hates them so much that they would behead them and do all sorts of horrible things.
Me and Karena are here to talk about that today. Karena was on the ground in Armenia where all these refugees were flooding in from the Nagorno-Karabakh region. I want to also add that I have been talking about this so much that I think I gave a pretty sanitized version of what’s happening. From an actual human perspective of what just happened in Artsakh, it was genocide. I’m saying that up front to start with: that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the genocide in Artsakh, we’re talking about the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh. I want to start framing it through that, and I don’t really care what edges of parameters lawyers or legal thinkers try to tinker on. They try and say, This happened, and this didn’t, and check their little boxes. That’s not the purpose of words. That’s not the purpose of trying to say what’s happening to these people.
We know it, and that’s the framing we’re going with.
EA: The whole so-called debate around the term “genocide” and whether it is or not—I agree that it is. It’s one of those ironic twists of history that it has to do once again with Armenians, given how the term was first coined by Lemkin. For those who don’t know, he did so in reference to the 1915 Armenian genocide.
I also don’t care. I had a post on Mastodon that this is genocide, and someone commented, This is clearly ethnic cleansing, but can you explain why it’s genocide? First of all, ethnic cleansing can be part of genocide; usually is. But it’s all the other stuff as well. The direct murders, the destruction of cultural heritage—which has been very explicit. It’s another thing that Raphael Lemkin himself coined.
Karena, do you want to add anything, given that you are in Armenia?
KA: It was a lightning military operation by Azerbaijan, which started on September 19 and lasted for about twenty-four hours. This is a republic that, as Anna explained, had been under blockade for nine months, so the population was already malnourished, hadn’t had a normal meal in months; electricity and gas had been shut off; these people were cooking on wood fires outside. On top of that, they were basically bombed into submission.
The fact that it was cut off meant that the Artsakh defense forces had a limited supply of military equipment and were not able to mount a defense, as literally the only body that was left to protect the Armenians of Artsakh, of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The president of Nagorno-Karabakh signed a capitulation statement basically agreeing to the disbanding of the Artsakh defense forces and the dissolution of state institutions. So officially, from January 1, 2024, the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Artsakh, will cease to exist. In light of the disbanding of the defense forces specifically, and obviously the dissolution of the state more secondarily, the population of Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh basically fled ahead of the coming Azerbaijani assault. What that meant was, in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, people moved en masse to the airport, which at the time (and maybe still) was run by Russian peacekeeping forces whose mandate was to protect Armenians there, which they haven’t done. We can talk about that later.
Forty thousand Armenians fled to the airport to wait to be let out, and in the meantime people in the villages in the regions were trying to get to Stepanakert and then onward, out somehow. For a couple days, neither Azerbaijan nor Russian peacekeeping forces would allow the Armenian civilian populace to leave; they were trapped inside for a while. I remember—this is around the twenty-third of September—I was down in Goris, which is an Armenian city close to Nagorno-Karabakh, where the outflow of refugees would come. And we got word that they were going to be transporting a certain number of wounded soldiers, and immediately after that we got word that the first civilians were going to be let out. The first transportation of these people who came out turned into an overwhelming stream of people.
As a result, today essentially the whole population of Artsakh has left. It’s gone, and the republic is now empty.
EA: This brings me to the aforementioned statements. This is from yesterday in the Guardian:
“It’s a ghost town.”
“UN arrives in Nagorno-Karabakh to find ethnic Armenians have fled.”
That’s an amazing sentence, by the way. To “find,” like it was a surprise or something.
The Red Cross is saying the Nagorno-Karabakh capital is “completely deserted.”
There was a UN statement roughly four hours ago, as well as a statement from Germany. As it appears on the website:
“Germany calls for ‘permanent’ international presence in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
This all symbolizes a broader attitude that we have been seeing in the EU for some time now. We can go through the geopolitical reasons, and I can explain some of them to the extent I’m aware. The main one that comes to mind is Azerbaijani oil, that’s an easy reason for the EU’s decisions; the other one being Russia. What are your thoughts when you read statements like this one, which is symbolic of a broader trend? What comes to your mind?
KA: White hot fucking rage. Too little too late. We’ve been fucking saying this for years, howling into the abyss. No one fucking listened. This is also reflected in international media, for example. The New York Times, who had journalists on the fucking ground, is saying in their subhead that No one saw this coming. That’s honestly embarrassing.
EA: I saw this coming and I’m just some rando.
KA: Armenians begged the New York Times to cover the blockade, and they just didn’t. They didn’t send anyone. And now it’s a surprise. It’s not just the EU, and it’s not just Germany; it’s the UN, as you said. Throughout this blockade, and this humanitarian crisis that was created by the blockade, and the lack of basic necessities for the civilian population, people had been advocating—not just Armenians; human rights advocates and scholars, and some international aid organizations had been pushing to be let in to the territory, but because Azerbaijan was controlling the only road in or out, they wouldn’t allow that.
This included the UN and UNHCR. From what I’ve heard from different sources, the UN could have pushed more to be let in, but because Azerbaijan doesn’t want to “internationalize” this conflict, it wants to keep it as an internal matter, it wouldn’t allow these organizations in. But now we see that since the territory has been emptied of its Armenian population and these people have been forced to flee—now they’re let in.
What’s most outrageous about this is that the report that’s come out of the UN is super problematic, and reports that the nationals who were part of this monitoring mission that was let in were from Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Albania, and Hungary, which are all allies of Baku. So there are legitimate fears and concerns that they wouldn’t report transparently about evidence of any atrocities against civilians that they might have found. And Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh is a very mountainous place—you can’t get everywhere in twenty-four hours.
Another concern that Armenians have been voicing is that during and in the aftermath of the assaults on September 19, connectivity was cut off. There was no internet or phone connection. A lot of the villages in the regions were completely cut off, and we don’t know what’s happened to a lot of people. We were hoping for an international presence on the ground so they could conduct search and rescue missions, collect bodies of dead servicemen for example, and any living people—because there are concerns that there are still elderly and disabled Armenians hiding in their homes, and there’s no one to go get them. I find that absolutely disgraceful.
A: You mentioned earlier, Elia, that this is an ironic twist of fate that it’s happening to Armenians again in history, and that the term “genocide” was coined to describe Armenians. I want to push back on that and say it’s not an ironic twist of fate; it is the fact that there is a broader purpose behind all of this violence. The same ideology that led to the Armenian genocide was what led to the genocide in Artsakh.
Just this morning I was looking at a map—a new birds eye view of Stepanakert (which the Azerbaijanis call Khankendi) was released, and one of the streets was named after Enver Pasha, who was one of the three architects, one of the “Three Pashas” who engineered the Armenian genocide. And it’s not just this stuff. I feel crazy, because every goddamn year they did something insane—they killed somebody, they beheaded somebody, something absolutely horrific happened—and then they would say why they did it. [Azerbaijani president Ilham] Aliyev would stand up and say, Bless the memories of our forefathers; someone else would say something about blessing the memory of one of the Pashas; someone else would say, We are one-nation-two-states with Turkey. It wasn’t even a wink and a nudge. They would say it.
They would say the quiet part out loud. They would say exactly what their intentions were and what they were informed by, what ideology was driving them. They would say exactly what their vision for this region was: a region without Armenians. It is a region not only in which Armenians don’t exist, but in which Armenians never existed. If you look at how they treat the history of Armenians, they don’t erase it just to say We’ve won and this is ours now. They erase it to say There were never Armenians here. They rename our cultural history. They rename Armenian churches to be Caucasian Albanian churches (I don’t even have time to go into the inane stupidity of that).
It’s day after day of absolute and total violence—not only the physical violence that Karena is describing. But also, the intentions of that violence were made clear for the past hundred years, and certainly in the last three years, and even more certainly for the last thirty years.
What kills me is that the people of Artsakh declared independence to avoid this exact eventuality. This was the nightmare scenario. This is what they wanted to avoid. They saw the writing on the wall. They knew the government that was controlling them, and for years they were treated like they were crazy. They were treated like ethno-nationalists who were so base and savage that they couldn’t fathom the idea of being governed by a government that was a different ethnicity than them. That’s how they were being treated. That’s how they were treated on the international stage; that’s how they were treated in academia. The number of books I’ve read that reduce this to Armenians just don’t want to be governed by Turks—it’s astounding!
Then we see the exact scenario that they were saying would play out, play out, and yet they are still treated as if what they saw with their own eyes, what they felt on their own skin, didn’t happen. That’s so—I’m beyond offended by it. I’m at a loss for how people can be so completely dehumanized in their own experience. I’m at a complete loss.
EA: Don’t they say that the last stage of genocide is denial of genocide?
A: It’s denial of genocide—but not just. It’s denial of our existence. The invisibility is so complete. I know there are other groups that have experienced this, but I don’t know that we’ve seen it on this scale, and I don’t know that we’ve seen it so accepted. I don’t want to say it’s “unprecedented,” because the horrors of the world never cease to fulfill my expectations. But that being said, there is something absolutely stunning; it’s gaslighting on a scale that I can’t even imagine. You’re telling people that Not only did we not kill you, but you were never there to die. You were never there to be erased. You have no cultural contribution, you have no historical contribution. You simply don’t exist.
And the international community is acting like that is acceptable. But not just: they’re mirroring it.
KA: This is where I wanted to add: the EU has paved the way for this to happen and has added to the gaslighting, as an international authority, as a supposedly values-based power. Just a couple hours ago, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said about the events that Russia was the one who betrayed Armenia, and that Azerbaijan is still their partner. He was asked something about how to build trust now between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and he said: “It is now up to Azerbaijan to show goodwill, good faith, to protect the rights and security of the entire population living in Azerbaijan, including the Armenian population.”
Of which there is none left.
This is Michel, today. Also today, president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, apparently in a phone call with Armenian prime minister [Nikol] Pashinyan, said, “The EU stands with Armenia in assisting displaced people.”
EA: Accepting the status quo. They are quite literally saying, We’ll send some money, food, blankets to Armenia, in the hopes that Armenia will get closer to the EU. I’m trying to rationalize—you know it’s also kind of pointless. I’ve also been trying to raise awareness, raise the alarm about some of the policies of the EU in the past few years, largely when it comes to immigration stuff. I’ve interviewed folks from Border Violence Monitoring Network most recently. A lot of the ways Ursula von der Leyen and other high-ranking folks in the EU talk is to appease the far right, essentially. Maybe they are thinking this is the best way to defeat the far right; I don’t know what their rationale is, obviously. But what ends up happening is the Overton window shifts towards the right every time.
For me, in addition to what has happened in Artsakh being horrific in and of itself, it’s yet another indication of what is becoming more acceptable, the normalization of this (I’m talking specifically where the EU is concerned, because I’m in Switzerland). Of course it didn’t start there. This really concerns me, because the more this is normalized—I should say, I’m about to talk to a friend, Zacharias Zelalem, who is Tigrayan. We’ll be talking about what is happening in Tigray, and how the Ethiopian regime is becoming more and more overt and open about it. Just a couple days ago they were openly opposing the nomination of the WHO director, who is an ethnic Tigrayan.
In the context of the global dynamics of what’s happening here, and the whole “BRICS 2.0,” whatever the fuck that means, there seems to be a greater acceptance from entities that are supposedly values-based (by which I mean they say they are values-based, it’s part of their own statements) that the EU is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle. This is what they mean. What’s becoming clearer, as someone who is here, is the in and out: you might be in right now, and everyone who is in might be safe for now, and everyone who is out, damn them. That concerns me.
KA: I want to qualify some of my complaints about the EU; I’m not just complaining about the EU and their lack of action. They actually pushed for a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan by the end of the year or beginning of next year, while ignoring Armenian concerns about the need for guarantees for the security of Armenian lives there and international mechanisms to be on the ground. They pushed this, meanwhile treating Azerbaijan like a good faith partner even as it had violated every single point of the tripartite ceasefire agreement that ended the 2020 Artsakh war.
What’s happening is: a precedent is being set globally. Just look at the events around Kosovo and Serbia right now: Serbia’s leader [Aleksandar] Vučić has actually said publicly that he admires Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani president. People are watching, and they’re learning, and they’re seeing what red lines can be bent and pushed and moved, and how little they actually mean. International relations, to a large extent, is a construct. These red lines exist because we all agree that they exist. But once we start seeing that actually maybe they don’t, its honestly a free-for-all. It’s terrifying.
A: We’re talking about the EU now, just because the hypocrisy is kind of stunning, but I also want to have a meta-conversation about the analyst coverage of this too. I don’t know if they’re hypnotized or mesmerized or what.
The Armenian government refused to protect Artsakh or continue to act as Artsakh’s military partner in this last invasion. We can talk about what that is, but the very simple reason is it’s a weak fucking government; it’s weak for many different reasons. But I get asked about this a lot. Why didn’t the government do anything? I definitely have fucking thoughts about why they didn’t do anything, and I have thoughts about what they should have done and what they should have been doing for the last three years. But when I’m asked that question, I don’t want to answer it, because of where it’s coming from. Because you’re not doing anything either! And neither is anyone else! You’re not doing anything to make it easier for the Armenian government to act. Truly, you could bypass the Armenian government entirely and send aid directly to Artsakh if you really wanted to.
There are so many ways to think about this, and there’s an incredible obsession with how this has to “mean something.” What does this mean for Russia? What does this mean for Russia in Ukraine? What does this mean for the geopolitical balance? I couldn’t give less of a shit about what these analysts think about what it means for the geopolitical balance in the region, or what it means for Russia or Russia-in-Ukraine. Put simply: there has been a genocide, and all anyone is interested in is having this ticky-tack conversation about what political parties in Armenia contributed to it. It’s stunning.
Just to go back, the reason we call out the EU and the West a lot is because of that hypocrisy, but the reality is, this is a broader project that was allowed to go on for a really long time. It’s not particularly new to say Europe is hypocritical about this, or This particular European policy is contributing to the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Artsakh. It has been a broader issue that has been underlying this conflict and also a lot of other conflicts for a long time now.
The thing I keep referring to is that the Armenians have been saying the same thing. Their position hasn’t changed for a hundred years now. It’s never changed. There has never been a moment where Armenians said, Maybe we can give this government a try. It’s never happened. And it’s not because they’re so savage that they can’t think of it. You don’t think if they could, they would say, This is looking like it might work, we would rather remain in our homes, we don’t want to flee? You don’t think they would have done that if they could have?
Their position has not changed in one hundred years—and the other thing is, neither has Turkey’s or Azerbaijan’s position. Their positions also have not really changed for the past one hundred years. Through Soviet and independent rule, Azerbaijan’s position has pretty much remained the same. There has been rhetorical positioning, but the actual policies being enacted have remained the same. It’s crazy to suggest that no one saw this coming or that this was unpredictable or in some way a surprise to anybody—or that this wasn’t part of a carefully laid-out and enacted plan.
KA: One of the things about the focus on internal Armenian politics and blaming Armenia was in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, when there were protests in Yerevan and they turned violent. Watching the international media, who we’ve been begging to cover the blockade and Armenian human rights under Azerbaijan, when they swooped in like vultures to cover these protests, was disgusting to see. You could see how easy it would be as an outsider who’s not familiar, who would be interested in the human side of this genocide, but instead seeing footage of cops beating up protesters—it was too easy to look at that and just say, Well, it looks like they’ve got their own problems, this looks really messy, or turn it into some kind of ACAB conversation, which just wasn’t fucking relevant.
Also one of the the things to remember is that this conflict is not over. This stage of the conflict is over, but it’s been renewed. We have a whole generation of traumatized people who have witnessed extreme violence, and Azerbaijan is now turning its sights on Armenia. Azerbaijani troops have made a major incursion into Armenian territory, last year in September 2022, took over some Armenian military outposts, and have started digging in and doing engineering works, creating new roads. How can you expect Armenia to guarantee the security of Artsakh when it can’t guarantee the security of its own citizens?
I saw recognition of that reality among a lot of the refugees who were coming across over the last few days. I saw a bus with a sign on the front that said Alaverdi, which is a city in Armenia’s north, near the Georgian border. Some people were getting inside, some refugees from Artsakh getting settled in, there was a family with kids and a gentleman sitting in the front—I approached them and asked, Why did you decide to go to Alaverdi and not some other city? And one of them said, The nature is like Artsakh, so I want to go somewhere that reminds me of that. But also: Because it’s not near a Turkish or Azerbaijani border.
One of the men I spoke to was from Hadrut, which was a majority-Armenian town in Artsakh until the 2020 war—it was conquered by Azerbaijani forces and ethnically cleansed. So he’d been displaced once; moved to Stepanakert; displaced again in this latest round. One of his kids was three, and has been displaced twice already. He told me he kind of felt tricked, and he didn’t want to move to another border region where that might happen again and he’d have to, for a third time, pick up his family and move.
A: One side of my family is from Artsakh and the other side is from the Lori region, which is where Alaverdi is. When Karena says that Azerbaijan has turned its sights on Armenia, again it’s pretty obvious. They’ve been talking about a Zangezur corridor, a corridor going through Armenia connecting Azerbaijan to its enclave on the other side of Armenia, which they’ve already also not only ethnically cleansed of Armenians but also the existence of any trace of Armenians. Entire cemeteries bulldozed over. The world’s largest collection of medieval cross stones, completely bulldozed over. They want a road connecting those things; that’s an official thing that they’ve asked for.
On the unofficial side, you see Azerbaijani politicians constantly talking about how these are their historic lands.
KA: They’re making claims now on the territory of Armenia, calling it “historic western Azerbaijan,” which is not a thing
A: It’s not a thing and never was a thing. It’s interesting, because they do that thing where they turn to their international audience and they say, We’re not talking about territorial claims; we’re saying these idiot Armenians think anywhere they live, they own it. Which is why they think when we say this is our historic land that we want to own it. Never mind that they have systematically conquered every piece they’ve ever called their historic land.
You see it in their messaging globally, too. You see them make little maps of France and California, which show where the Armenians live, and say: Marseilles is historic Armenia! Basically saying that Armenians can’t get along with anyone. It’s sort of funny.
KA: Or that we have revanchist claims on Marseilles and Los Angeles. Guys, watch out because they’re going to start claiming those territories.
A: Just because they live there. It’s funny, because Armenians have lived in lots of different places, where they just chill and live. There is one really specific independence movement that existed because of a level of ethnic oppression that was not tolerable—which isn’t to say that Armenians in other areas aren’t oppressed in other ways. But they’re not claiming independence, for obvious reasons.
This was really funny: I saw an Instagram account that was made to be a fake Armenian account laying claim to all these different areas. It was posing as an Armenian saying this stuff, like Armenians should “secede” from all these other regions, and it was really obviously an Azerbaijani bot account. But the reason I bring it up is because there’s this dual messaging again. There’s very clear, really obvious internal messaging to their own people of We will conquer back Zangezur and Syunik, this is our next claim, and then there’s the turn to the international audience: It’s about the fact that we’re not an ethnostate and Armenia is.
Which is absurd. But the more absurd thing is that it’s going to work. They’re going to say this, and people are going to debate whether this is actually the case. And it’s astounding to me because Armenians have been right about every fucking other thing, so why wouldn’t we be right about this? That’s where this conflict is headed next, and there’s a broad fear in Armenia, which I think is really well-founded, which is that the goal for both Russia and Azerbaijan is to turn Syunik into the next Nagorno-Karabakh, into the next Artsakh.
KA: Syunik is Armenia’s southern region, for listeners.
A: There’s a fear that this region will be the next to be occupied or militarized or turned into a conflict zone, and I think that’s a real founded fear.
KA: It’s a real founded fear also because France has just opened a consulate in Syunik, and they’ve made some kind of agreement on military cooperation between the French military and the Armenian military. The French military is now going to be observing the Armenian military training exercises, offering in a consulting capacity how they can improve.
A: There’s a lot of obvious military and defense activity in Syunik, for people who just want to protect themselves. But Azerbaijan has made claims on it, and there is a broad fear that it is the next place to be occupied. To get into the geopolitics of it a little bit, this would allow Russia to maintain a conflict in the region (which has always been Russia’s interest) and it would allow the Azerbaijani government to chip away at Armenia and Armenians piece-by-piece, and continue working on their genocide project, which is what gives the totally despotic and corrupt government in Azerbaijan their only source of legitimacy. They get to say, Look, we conquered back this territory, and we’re conquering back this territory.
It’s very feudal. But we’re already seeing the project unfolding, with this doublespeak that is somehow invisible. It’s crazy. The only conclusion I can come to is that they’re not interested in hearing it. If they wanted to hear it, they’d be perfectly capable of hearing it. They’ve done an excellent job hearing Russia’s doublespeak. And the left has done an excellent job hearing the United States’s doublespeak. So why is it that when it comes from the mouth of Ilham Aliyev, or [Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, no one can acknowledge it?
Part of that might be a failure of Armenian stories on the left. Sure. But I’m not letting other people off the hook for their own moronic behavior, because the victims didn’t sufficiently insulate themselves from it.
KA: Until this escalation, I was of the opinion that a lot of it was our own fault, that we haven’t been screaming in the right channels. But at this point, I don’t know. Maybe this is me washing my hands of agency or just being cynical, but I think it’s not on us. I don’t know why.
EA: My two cents on this: if I compare the examples that I know (Palestine, Syria, or Iran), the messaging of the diasporas is not necessarily the same. You might say some have been more “efficient” than others—the Palestinian one has been—or things have just gotten worse, in terms of the lived experiences of people there, for liberating the occupied territories in any meaningful way. With Syria, the closest thing I can think of to what’s happening now was 2016. And no parallels are perfect: the goal there wasn’t to ethnically cleanse Syrians from eastern Aleppo; the Assad regime just wanted to take back Aleppo, so whoever stayed, stayed at their own risk, regardless of their ethnicity.
This is a different goal, but the methods are similar enough. At the time, I also remember very clearly the mayor of eastern Aleppo (who I met last year, he’s obviously in exile) going to the parliament in France, a bunch of different places, receiving standing ovations, and being applauded and all of that—rightly so in this example—but that did not translate into anything being done for Aleppo at the time.
And I don’t even mean military intervention, which was not going to happen anyway, for various geopolitical reasons. I mean just dropping aid, and food. That did not happen. And if I have this correct, they had the legal right to do so. The UN had passed a resolution that you do not need the permission of the Assad regime to deliver aid. You can just do it. But they didn’t want to do it, for various reasons.
A: To be clear, whether or not they have the “legal right” to do it—You have the legal right to drop aid. There is a legal right to drop aid, and in fact there are international norms that demand that you do so. It’s always interesting to me when these things get framed. I see it in international law circles, the way that the same things will alternate between being framed as rights and responsibilities depending on what the position on them is in that moment. Of course they had the legal right to drop aid, and you could name three other international norms, that are well settled, that would say they have the responsibility to drop aid.
But we talk about one or the other based on what we want to do. One thing that I’ve noticed—me and Karena, and Armenians in general, are going to keep showing up and talking about this, because it’s one of the only things we can do. And also, we’re going to show up in spaces like this and try and see the connections between this kind of struggle and the struggle in Palestine. Because honestly Israel has also perfected this sense of doublespeak. We’re going to keep talking to these communities, but there is also an element of—a lot of Armenians have become convinced that their only hope is themselves now.
And I don’t want to say that’s true, but it is a little bit true in that the only solutions they have are internal. That wouldn’t be the ideal way to do this, but that is the only solution that Armenians have to turn to. A lot of Armenians are turning to things like civilian defense, or training themselves about being prepared militarily on a personal level. To me, it’s upsetting. Not because I’m like, Oh it sucks, the liberal world order is falling apart and no one can rely on each other, that’s not why. It’s because it also shows that there aren’t sufficient connections between even armed struggles in the region that they can support themselves and each other when they are fighting the same shit.
This is really the same shit that was affecting Yezidis; it is the same reasons the Kurds don’t have a state anymore. That is something where I take responsibility to look at us: we’ve had a state for thirty years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, and that state could have been a place where all of the different people who were oppressed by pan-Turkism, by Turkish imperialism, and by the brand of pan-Turkism in Azerbaijani nationalism—that state could have been a place for those groups to come together. But for a variety of reasons, the state did not become that.
It’s been really heartbreaking to see the effectiveness of the Turkish divide-and-conquer campaign over the years, because we’re sort of cut away from all these natural alliances—and even some of the alliances that are less natural, but necessary. We should have been there. So it’s less a scenario where I blame us, and more an area where I think it’s hard to see that globally is where a lot of things are.
I have to be honest: I don’t have much more to say; I have no more to offer an international audience. I have no more to offer even well-meaning listeners at this point. I don’t know. Karena and I are in a group chat, and she and a different friend of ours are both on the ground in Goris and Kornidzor, which was the point where all the refugees were flooding, and the reality of talking about that, and seeing that update—I don’t know how to convey that minute-by-minute trauma that these people went through, and the (much smaller, minuscule) amount of trauma that was inflicted on the rest of the Armenian community by witnessing that—and when I say “minuscule,” I mean it in relative terms, because we’re all fucked up.
I don’t know how to convey that. It’s horrific, it’s been shit. It’s been insane. That’s all I can really offer, and until we get past that point, we’re never going to have conversations about how we can form natural alliances. At some point we have to get past this. I’m waiting, and I’m trying to get past that point of invisibility enough to go forward. That’s what is so frustrating. We’re constantly just trying to get past the point of invisibility to have a conversation about What can we do next.
I expect this from Western powers, I expect this from Europe, I expect it from Russia. But it’s really hard when you’re also hitting that wall in progressive spaces, and also in NGO organizing. I’ve been trying to convince refugee organizations that they should be involved, and they all have some reason not to be. What is this chokehold? And at what point can we ask people to break out of their being mesmerized by the complexity of the problem and just start organizing?
I don’t mean to be despondent, but at some point—we’ve been on your podcast twice, and both times we’ve kind of been saying the same thing, with more details about different events. But it shouldn’t stay the same!
EA: Complexity is an interesting term in this context, because ultimately no “conflict” is devoid of complexity. Israel-Palestine is complex—it’s not simple, sure—but it’s not complex in the sense that it can’t be understood. It’s not even complex in the sense that it is very difficult to understand, maybe not even moderately difficult. And things that are complicated get resolved in one way or another, or at least get tackled in one way or another, if there is will and political resources deployed to do so.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland were complicated as fuck. Still are; Northern Ireland is still complicated—more so if not as much as the civil war in Lebanon. But it also has to do with the fact that the fate of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was seen as important. We need to do something, and Let’s get involved, and there are a lot of mea culpas, and Brits reevaluating their relationship to the island of Ireland, all that stuff. To this day, Biden still talks about the Troubles and the Good Friday agreement as one of the achievements of the nineties.
But that kind of rhetoric is not available—at least it’s not deployed—in the same way when they talk about the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia. Even though it was also related; the West was involved; but the fate of Bosnia, and the fate of Bosnians after the Bosnian genocide, was not seen in the West, and still isn’t to this day, as the same kind of world as the Troubles. There is this bracketing in terms of what counts as history in the West or the Global North, and whatever isn’t there can be endlessly rendered more complicated, talked about as if it is more complicated than it actually is.
Last time we joked about this, talking about that Gilmore Girls episode about Israel-Palestine, and the explanation that was given in that class makes it so much more complicated than it actually is. It’s about making it more abstract, more eternal—the essence of Israelis and Palestinians, or Jews and Arabs, or Azerbaijanis and Armenias, is just there, it’s just a thing that everyone is born with.
KA: Yeah, it’s taken for granted. Actually, I had an argument with a former friend who is a journalist, and has focused on the region a lot so he should have known better—he wasn’t just a complete outsider parachuting in and figuring it out. In the 2020 war, he went completely silent, didn’t make any statements about anything, and it really upset me; he was someone who I had hosted in my home. And he completely misunderstood what I was saying. I told him he was too quiet, and he was like, Well, you know I can’t take a side.
I was blown away that that’s what he thought I was asking. I’m asking you to condemn the violence. That’s as simple as it gets. And he couldn’t take that position. I found it to be so emblematic of this kind of spinelessness and lack of curiosity and lack of critical thinking when it comes to lesser-known conflicts or people who are more peripheral to the power centers of Europe and North America.
A: I know someone—also, I would say, a former friend (because I never addressed this)—who visited Baku during the blockade. It was someone who I’d spoken to about this, and I was stunned. It was an ongoing blockade; there was no food coming into Artsakh. People were surviving off of subsistence farming, and farmers were getting shot at. And anyway if you live in New York City, you don’t have a farm—there’s no food in Artsakh, and this person was visiting Baku. It was astounding; it was crazy to me. Visiting Baku and saying nothing. I’m still floored by it.
The effectiveness of that invisibility—I don’t have an answer for how you break out of that, because it is really intense. And Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s project has been very effective. But it’s also time that we started demanding more of our own communities too. Armenians do this on a micro level when they demand to be acknowledged as Armenian in every interaction that you have with them. So you’re going to do that, but also there’s a lot of other stuff. I really want people who study the Middle East, who study the Soviet Union, to look at their work, to look at their projects and the circles that they’re moving in, and ask themselves: Are Armenians being addressed here? and not treat it like that’s some niche little issue.
I’m sick of it. I’m so fucking sick of it—the degree to which Armenians have been erased from their place in all of these stories and histories is unfathomable. It’s vast. So if you are working in these areas, if you’re an advocate in these areas, if you’re working with clients from the former Soviet Union, if you’re studying the Soviet Union, if you’re studying Turkey, if you’re studying the Middle East, you should be asking yourselves: Why aren’t Armenians showing up in the work that I’m doing? Because if they’re not, you’re doing something wrong.
That is something I began to take more seriously now, because I see it everywhere. I see it in legal circles, too, where there’s a sense that This conflict is separate. I would bring this conflict up in class and it wouldn’t be discussed. The professors couldn’t talk about it. They couldn’t wrap their brain around the idea that there was something to be learned from this conflict or from these people or from their advocacy. You couldn’t talk about it. Palestine was to the point where there’s something to be learned from it, but Armenia was not.
That is a starting point for me. If you’re an organization that is involved in any of these areas, you should have Armenian people involved. You should have Armenian stories involved in some way. That’s one starting point for everyone listening.
EA: The last thing is asking if you have any final thoughts to wrap up this episode, at the pace that you want. Are there certain aspects of this conversation that you want us to get more into that we can pin and talk about some other time? And where are places people can go to donate and support or read or share? Ultimately that’s the fastest thing that listeners of a podcast can do. Not that they should stop at that.
Go ahead if you want with some reflections, and we’ll leave it at that for now.
KA: The scale of the tragedy and the grief will become more apparent in the coming months. I’m on the ground and I feel fine, but I must not be, because what I saw was not good. It was traumatic seeing the scale of that kind of helplessness, of civilians who were arriving malnourished, often on the top of open-top trucks for thirty-six hours, often under the rain. Elderly people, children.
And I don’t know. With my friends I can talk about little things here and there that I saw that were interesting or shocking or whatever, but as a whole I can’t really talk about it because I don’t know how yet. I’m sure it will come with time.
But in terms of helping, there are a couple organizations. One of the main ones I want to mention is an organization called All For Armenia. I’ll give you the link so you can post it. I saw them, they were on the ground. They were often in places where even the Red Cross wasn’t. For example, when the cars were coming in, they were packaging sandwiches and boxes of juice and candy, and just kind of throwing them into the cars as they were driving by. This was often the first food that people were getting. And this is a local organization, not the fucking empty-ass UN tent I saw that was fucking empty inside. Or the Red Cross—which was doing some things on the ground, I can’t say that they weren’t.
A: I would say All For Armenia as well. There’s the Anna Astvatsaturian Foundation making baby boxes for babies born in Artsakh before the blockade. If I’m correct they managed to even send something during the blockade. I might be wrong about that. But it’s a pretty effective group, and I think they’re going to be putting together some longer term plans. Also their volunteers were all in Artsakh, so right now they’re working on supporting their own volunteers.
Through an organization called Miaseen you can fund a displaced family, which is also something I highly recommend. If you have a hundred dollars of disposable income in your life, that is really useful to these people. I also think it’s an important form of mutual aid, because these people were protecting not just the security of Armenia, but they were the literal front line for the violence that Azerbaijan is about to unleash, starting with Armenia, but really on non-Azerbaijanis, on those who stand in the way of the state project. (I don’t know what form that identity is going to take, entirely, because that state project isn’t even complete, and they’re going to have to turn their sights on more people to be able to maintain that project.) I think we owe it to these people; I think we owe it to each other.
And the last thing I’ll say is: if you want to know what’s going on, follow Armenian news sources. There are English Armenian news sources. CivilNet English is a good one. Hetq is an investigative space that has English-language reporting, more longform pieces. Read EVN Report; Karena writes excellent articles for them. Just follow Armenian news sources; you’re going to get more information and you’ll know what the hell is going on. Because the other thing that’s really hard is that if you read non-Armenian-language news on this, it’s difficult to know the basic facts of what the fuck is happening. It’s just bizarre sentences after bizarre sentences.
EA: Karena, Anna, thanks for coming on again.
A: Thank you, Elia, for always having us.
KA: Thank you for giving us a platform and giving these events a platform. Honestly, thanks.
A: And not for the first time, one of the few people.
Leave a Reply