Global Courant
It happened quickly, the final invasion, in which hundreds of Orthodox Christians were killed by the aggressors. Armenia, led by a former human rights lawyer, had no choice but to save thousands of its citizens from death to surrender their enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh to the brutal forces of Ilham Aliyev, dictator of Azerbaijan.
It was Russia was again the main culprit: It was tasked by a foolish UN Security Council to keep the peace, but when Armenia condemned the invasion of Ukraine, Putin, in revenge, withdrew all protection from Nagorno-Karabakh and unleashed the Azerbaijani army.
120,000 citizens are now at his mercyforcing them to either leave their ancestral homes or else live under a tyranny that has fomented hatred against them for years.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a small, mountainous country in the clouds, inhabited by Armenians for centuries. It was the first to adopt Christianity in 301 AD.
Hundreds of Orthodox churches and their centuries-old mysterious tombstones (many now defaced or destroyed by the aggressors) draw visitors from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, who make the six-hour trek via Mount Ararat to Stepanakert, the center of the Karabakh democracy that this was. week extinct. The journey takes just 20 minutes by plane from a modern airport. But planes have not been flying for years because the Azerbaijani government is threatening to shoot them down.
The country fell to Russia in the early nineteenth century, and the demographic evidence from the first census of that time proves that it was entirely Armenian and that the area should have been assigned to this state when Stalin divided the territory in 1920. gave it to Azerbaijan, and the mistake was only corrected during a civil war after the collapse of the USSR.
The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh – still the vast majority of the population – first voted to join Armenia (the wisest course), but then (bravely as they thought) chose independence. The war had started with pogroms by Azeris in Sumgait and Baku. But over time, a local Karabakh defense force took over. The fighting was brutal. With ethnic hatred on both sides. The siege of Stepanakert in which Azerbaijani forces killed several thousand people in bombings of schools and hospitals, Guernica was written small. The people only survived thanks to supplies via a narrow road – a humanitarian corridor – from Armenia, which Azerbaijan closed earlier this year.
Nagorno-Karabakh won the war in 1994 and, like Kosovo, declared its right to self-determination. For the next quarter century it governed itself with help from Armenia. That happened reasonably with fair elections and democratic institutions such as an independent judiciary – as I discovered when I investigated the situation in the country for a lawsuit in 2014. It was not, as many news reporters said last week, a country of “Armenian separatists,” but of an Armenian people whose ancestors had lived in these highlands for centuries and who had fought and won for a quarter of a century for the right to resist a ruthless dictator. But there were many Azerbaijani provocations at the border – the ‘line of control’.
The Security Council, quite absurdly, entrusted enclave security to Russia, which did not take its duties seriously 2020 the war broke out again. Armenia has voted in the UN to condemn Russia for attacking Ukraine and as a result Putin decided to end all support for it and take revenge. The final straw came this month, when Armenia joined the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is prosecuting Putin over the kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Last week, the Kremlin targeted the Armenian ambassador and made what it described as a “harsh protest”: it threatened to withdraw security-imposed protection for Nagorno-Karabakh. When that happened, Azerbaijan invaded.
How should Britain respond? Aliyev, like Putin, is guilty of the international crime of aggression, and this country must denounce this violation. Russia must also be condemned for violating the duty imposed on it by the Security Council. We should certainly offer to take in some of the many thousands of refugees: they are innocent victims of an international double game. They have every reason to fear persecution if they stay where they belong. Their political leaders are already being arrested.
As far as the United Nations is concerned, Nagorno-Karabakh will be remembered as yet another reason why the country is no longer fit for purpose. That goal, the Charter reminds us, is to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” but it cannot expel Russia (even if Putin were to use nuclear weapons) that would veto its own expulsion, and it cannot not even expel Azerbaijan because of aggression. (because Russia would veto the necessary Security Council recommendation).
The only way forward is to replace the United Nations, because the Security Council is not fit for purpose. The country is incapable of reforms because Russia and China will veto reforms. “Security” can only come from an internationally representative body with the moral, military and economic power to deter authoritarian aggression.
Geoffrey Robertson AO KC is a former UN war crimes judge and author of An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians?
