For embattled Armenians, it’s déjà vu

The Republic of Artsakh, an Armenian Christian enclave within Islamic Azerbaijan, exists no more. Once home to 120,000 Armenian Christians, as of October more than 100,000 of them had fled in a weeklong exodus as Azerbaijan took over.

The region, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, was captured by Azerbaijan in a September “anti-terrorist operation.” Within 24 hours of the lightning offensive, the outnumbered Armenian self-defense forces agreed to a Russian-brokered ceasefire. 

In a formal capitulation, leadership of the de facto republic announced it would cease to exist by January 1, 2024.

The violence capitalized on an already dire humanitarian crisis created by the Azeris who had imposed a nine-month road blockade that cut off delivery of food and fuel to the enclave. Azerbaijan claimed the blockade was necessary to prevent illegal mining and weapons smuggling. 

In an August report, Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, described the blockade as “ongoing genocide.”

Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, called Azerbaijan’s tactics “a direct act of ethnic cleansing and depriving people of their motherland.” 

‘A FAMILIAR PATTERN’

Artsakh, the Armenian name for the territory, is a historically Armenian mountainous region of nearly 2,000 square miles in southwestern Azerbaijan. The fledgling democracy had operated autonomously since declaring independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Internationally, it is recognized as part of authoritarian Azerbaijan. 

Artsakh was separated from Armenia and attached to Azerbaijan in 1921 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The region has been a flash point between the two former Soviet republics since the USSR’s fall, with wars fought in 1994 and in 2020. 

Russia had facilitated the 2020 ceasefire and sent peacekeepers to the region. The peacekeepers failed to act against the blockade and recent military offensive.

Artsakh has close ties to Armenia, which supported them in the 1994 conflict they won. Azerbaijan and Turkey see themselves as “one nation, two states.” Turkey aided the Azeris in the 2020 conflict in which Azerbaijan reclaimed territory lost in the previous war.

The latest Azeri attack followed a familiar pattern, said Bishop Mikael Mouradian, who has served the Armenian Catholic Church in Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, and now the U.S. and Canada.

“When all the countries were preoccupied by Covid, in July 2020 Turkey and Azerbaijan began so-called military training on the border of Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said. “In September 2020 they suddenly attacked the region.”

Distracting the world this time is Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

“Turkey and Azerbaijan used the same scenario that the Ottoman Turks used during World War I, when all the countries were preoccupied with the war,” Bishop Mouradian said, adding that the war also served as a cover and as an “excuse for the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians.”

MEMORIES OF GENOCIDE

In 1915, the Islamic Ottoman government, aiming to “Turkify” the empire, began eliminating the Armenian Christians through massacres and brutal systematic deportations. Of the 2 million Armenians living there in 1914, by 1922 there were fewer than 400,000. Some 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what is considered the first genocide of the 20th century. 

Foreshadowing the genocide were pogroms between 1894 and 1896 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who was angered by a growing Armenian campaign for basic civil rights. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered in the Hamidian Massacres. 

Turkey and Azerbaijan, descendants of the Ottoman Turks, deny the Armenian Genocide took place. However, “[T]he executions into mass graves, and death marches of men, women, and children across the Syrian desert to concentration camps with many dying along the way of exhaustion, exposure, and starvation” were “well-documented at the time by Western diplomats, missionaries and others,” reported The New York Times. 

The term “genocide” was coined by lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who said it originated in his study of Ottoman crimes against Armenians. 

As a result of the Armenian Genocide, by 1923 the Armenian population of Asia Minor and historic West Armenia had been eliminated. The surviving refugees settled in two dozen countries across the globe in a diaspora. Today, there are more Armenians in the diaspora than in the Republic of Armenia, which is much smaller than historic Armenia.

HISTORY OF PERSECUTION 

“Every Armenian has a genocide story,” said Simone Rizkallah, special advisor to the human rights group Philos Project. “Whether it’s the Hamidian Massacre in the 1890s, or what happened in 1915, or the 2020 war or now.”

Rizkallah is a first-generation American of Egyptian-Armenian descent. 

“The Armenians who ended up in Egypt in the 20th century were there because of what happened to the Armenians during the First World War,” she said. “My maternal great-grandfather was told by a Turkish friend/business partner, ‘It’s going to get really bloody here (Dyarbakir) for the Armenians, you should take your family and leave.’ So, he did. That is why my grandmother was born in Alexandria and my mother in Cairo.” 

Her father’s family — also Armenian — had previously fled to Egypt from the Hamidian Massacres.

The paternal grandparents of Robert Bagdazian, administrator for Legatus’ Santa Barbara and Ventura-LA North chapters, fled Ottoman persecution from Harput in Turkey as it was ramping up just prior to the Hamidian Massacres.

“They were able to escape with the help, we believe, of American Congregationalist missionaries who were active there in the 1880s,” Bagdazian said. “We think that because my grandparents were Armenian Congregationalists, which is unusual. Armenians are usually either Armenian Apostolic/Armenian Orthodox or Armenian Catholic.”

Bagdazian converted to Catholicism while in college. Married with children and grandchildren, he is grateful to the Christians who helped Armenian refugees. 

Americans were at the forefront of that aid. The first international mission of the American Red Cross assisted Armenian victims of the 1896 massacres. Americans then responded with unprecedented generosity, donating more than $110 million to benefit Armenian refugees and orphans of the 1915 genocide. 

“Americans, historian Howard Sacher said, ‘kept an entire nation alive,’ with their help,” Rizkallah said. “That’s something to be proud of. We can do that again.” 

Bishop Mouradian, head of the California-based Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Nareg, was born in Lebanon, as were his parents. His forefathers are from Gemerek in the Sivas region of historical Armenia, now Turkey. 

“During the Armenian Genocide in 1915, several members of my forefathers were killed,” he said. “Those who could escaped through the desert of Deir ez-Zor in Syria. My grandfather reached Lebanon at age 6.” 

Genocide and diaspora can destroy one’s family history. 

“People generally do family trees,” Bishop Mouradian said. “It’s a very bad feeling for me. I cannot find names (before) my grandfather.”

A STEADFAST FAITH

Prior to being raised to the episcopacy, Bishop Mouradian was the first Armenian Catholic priest to go into Armenia as a missionary after the fall of the Soviet Union. He served 10 years there.

In 1992 he visited Skhvilsi, a remote village in southern Georgia that had been behind the Iron Curtain. Due to religious persecution, they had no priest for 70 years. So, on Sundays, the people would place priestly vestments on the altar and pray for one.

As then-Father Mouradian approached the village for the first time by car, still a mile away, he was astonished at what he saw. Carrying green branches and flowers, the villagers were walking to greet him. They refused to let him step out of the car. Instead, singing hymns, they accompanied him to the church — like the Jews’ joyful procession with Christ as he entered Jerusalem.

He began weeping. 

“I went to proclaim Jesus to them, but I was taught by the beautiful faith they had,” Bishop Mouradian said. “Armenian historian Yeghisheh declared we accepted Christianity as the skin of our body, which cannot be taken off like clothing.”

Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion. It did so in 301, a dozen years before Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire. 

Noah’s ark is said to have landed on Mount Ararat in ancient Armenia.  

Two of the 12 apostles, Sts. Jude Thaddeus and Bartholomew, were the first evangelizers of Armenia and were martyred there. They are patrons of the Armenian Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with Rome. 

“Most Christians are unaware of the spiritual and cultural significance of Artsakh and Armenia proper,” Rizkallah said. “Historic Armenian sites like the fourth-century Amaras Monastery are now in Azerbaijani hands, potentially erasing centuries of Christian heritage.”

Now, it seems, it’s déjà vu for Armenians.

“Unfortunately, what I was afraid of happened,” Bishop Mouradian said of the sudden end of Artsakh. As in the 1915 genocide, “the entire world watched in silence while the Armenians of Artsakh were persecuted and forcibly displaced from their 3,000-year ancestral lands. 

“History repeated itself, again,” he said. “All my fellow Armenians are feeling abandoned.”

TAKE ACTION

One way to advocate for the persecuted Armenians is to urge U.S. congressional representatives to support House Bill 5686, the Preventing Ethnic Cleansing and Atrocities in Nagorno-Karabakh Act of 2023. 

The measure calls for U.S. diplomatic monitoring of the region, 24-hour video monitoring of Armenian cultural sites, humanitarian aid, new sanctions on those responsible for the blockade and attack, foreign military aid to Armenia, and ending such aid to Azerbaijan.