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Posts Tagged ‘Nagorno-Karabakh’

On Ethnic Cleansing, Washington DC Has Always Been the Hypocrite

Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2023

The U.S. double standard has been apparent as well with respect to Israel’s “slow motion” ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes on the occupied West Bank. For decades, Israeli governments have confiscated land—even portions long inhabited by Palestinian families—and turned those plots over to Jewish settlers. The once predominantly Palestinian West Bank now resembles a geographic Swiss cheese,

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/on-ethnic-cleansing-washington-dc-has-always-been-the-hypocrite/

by Ted Galen Carpenter

depositphotos 415885866 s

Flags of Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkey on the background of the map of Nagorno-Karabakh

U.S. administrations have repeatedly condemned foreign adversaries for engaging in ethnic cleansing of minority populations. That has been an explicit grievance against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) because of Beijing’s treatment of its Uygur population in Xinjiang province, and against Syria and Iran because of their conduct toward Kurdish inhabitants. Serbian authorities in both Bosnia and Kosovo became high-profile targets of Washington’s outrage because of their alleged ethnic cleansing campaigns directed against Muslim populations. In the latter case, Bill Clinton’s administration cited that factor as the most important justification for the U.S.-NATO air wars against Serbs in 1995 (Bosnia) and 1999 (Kosovo).

U.S. leaders have adopted a very different stance, however, whenever Washington’s allies or dependents behave in that fashion. Such hypocrisy became evident most recently when Joe Biden’s White House reacted with nonchalance as Azerbaijan’s military forces attacked and expelled Armenian residents from their long-standing enclave inside Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. The principal policy statement came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and it treated the episode as akin to a humanitarian crisis caused by a natural disaster. “The United States is deeply concerned about reports on the humanitarian conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh and calls for unimpeded access for international humanitarian organizations.” The administration not only failed to explicitly condemn the brazen case of ethnic cleansing, it (along with Israel) had been providing arms aid to Azerbaijan.

It was hardly coincidental that the Azeris are important political and security clients of Turkey, while both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh had close economic and military ties with Moscow. This episode offered an ideal opportunity for Washington to placate an increasingly restless Turkey and help take down two Russian clients. Considerations of justice and international law seemed to play little role in the U.S decision. Russia, bogged down in its stalemated war in Ukraine, was in no position to protect its Armenian allies.

The United States and Turkey thus scored a geo-strategic victory and further eroded the Kremlin’s power in Russia’s near abroad. However, both countries were accomplices in a clear case of ethnic cleansing that has led to the expulsion of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the enclave as of October 2, 2023. This episode has to be especially painful for all Armenians, given the history of Turkish oppression that culminated in the Ottoman government’s orchestration of the Armenian genocide during World War I that claimed the lives of at least 664,000 victims and involved the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of other Armenian inhabitants.

It is not the first time that Washington appeared to be content when an ethnic cleansing campaign benefited fellow NATO member Turkey. In July 1974, Richard Nixon’s administration—and especially Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—did little more than make insincere clucking sounds of disapproval when Turkish forces invaded the Republic of Cyprus and took control of the northern third of that country.  Kissinger and Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, remained indifferent even as Turkey expelled Greek Cypriot residents from the conquered territories.

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Half of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Population Displaced by Fighting – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on October 8, 2020

150,000 displaced would be small change for a US operation.

But the percentage is good.

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/10/07/half-of-nagorno-karabakhs-population-displaced-by-fighting/

Dave DeCamp

Half of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population has been displaced due to the recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, officials from the ethnic Armenian enclave said on Wednesday. The population of Nagorno-Karabakh is about 150,000.

“According to our preliminary estimates, some 50 percent of Karabakh’s population and 90 percent of women and children — some 70,000 to 75,000 people — have been displaced,” Nagorno-Karabakh’s rights ombudsman Artak Beglaryan told AFP.

The latest numbers put the death toll for the battle that began on September 27th around 360, including dozens of civilians on both sides. The real number is believed to be much larger since Azerbaijan has yet to confirm military casualties.

Azerbaijan has been accused of indiscriminately shelling Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert. The human rights organization Amnesty International said it identified Israeli-made cluster bombs that appear to have been used by Azerbaijan in Stepanakert. Cluster munitions are banned under a convention signed by over 100 countries, although neither Azerbaijan, Armenia, or Israel have signed it.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. The collapse of the Soviet Union turned the border dispute deadly, and tens of thousands were killed until a ceasefire was reached in 1994. Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh has operated as a de facto independent state with Armenian support.

The latest clashes are the heaviest the disputed territory has seen since 1994. The US, France, and Russia co-chair the Minsk Group, which was formed in 1992 to promote negotiations and talks over the Nagorno-Karabakh. The three countries are meeting in Geneva on Thursday to discuss the renewed fighting.FacebookTwitterWhatsAppRedditLinkedInTumblrEmailPrint

Author: Dave DeCamp

Dave DeCamp is the assistant news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave. View all posts by Dave DeCamp

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Will Artsakh (Karabagh) be the tomb of Erdoğan ?, by Thierry Meyssan

Posted by M. C. on October 7, 2020

In accordance with his family’s ideology, he put his opponents under the greatest burden, for example, attributing the Khojaly massacre (1992, more than 600 victims) to “Armenian terrorists”, even though it was a black operation during an attempted coup in his country; in any case, this allowed him to present in a biased manner the actions of ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) in the 1970s and 1980s

https://www.voltairenet.org/article211009.html

by Thierry Meyssan

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict certainly had its origins in the dissolution of the USSR, but it was revived by the will of the Turkish president. It is unlikely that he took this initiative without first referring it to Washington. This is also what President Saddam Hussein did before invading Kuwait, falling by ambition into the trap set for him and causing his downfall. Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 6 October 2020 عربيDeutschελληνικάEspañolfrançaisitalianoNederlandsPortuguêsрусскийTürkçeJPEG - 71.3 kbOn his Twitter account, President Erdoğan wrote on the day of the outbreak of hostilities: ” – During the phone calls we had today, a wise and resolute stance, the “one nation, two states” approach, once again testifies, as I mentioned to Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, that Turkey will continue to strengthen its cooperation with its Azerbaijani brothers. – As we call on the Armenian people to defend their future against their domination and those who use them as puppets, we call on the whole world to support Azerbaijan in its struggle against occupation and oppression. – The international community, which was unable to provide a necessary and sufficient response to Armenia’s provocative aggression, is once again showing its double game. The trio from Minsk, which has maintained its negligent attitude for about 30 years, is unfortunately far from being solution-oriented. – By adding a new attack to the previous ones against Azerbaijan, Armenia has once again shown that it is the biggest threat to peace and tranquility in the region. The Turkish Nation supports its Azerbaijani brothers with all its means, as always. »

A very ancient conflict, frozen for the past 30 years

The Turkish people define themselves as descended from the “children of the wolf of the steppes”, i.e. as descendants of the hordes of Genghis Khan. It is composed of both “one people and two states”: Turkey and Azerbaijan. The political rebirth of the former automatically engenders the arrival of the latter on the international scene.

Of course this political renaissance does not mean a resurgence of the violence of the barbarian hordes, but this past has nonetheless forged mentalities, despite the efforts of many politicians who, for a century, have been trying to normalize the Turkish people.

In the last years of the Ottoman era, Sultan Habdulhamid II wanted to unite the country around his conception of the Muslim faith. He therefore ordered the physical elimination of hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims. This was supervised by German officers who acquired during this genocide an experience that they later put at the service of Nazi racial ideology. The Ottoman policy of purification was pursued on a larger scale by the Young Turks at the beginning of the Republic, particularly against the Orthodox Armenians [1].

Murder being an addiction, it reappeared sporadically in the behavior of the Turkish armies. Thus, in March 2014, they escorted hundreds of jihadists from the al-Nosra Front (al-Qaeda) and the Army of Islam (pro-Saudi) to the city of Kessab (Syria) to massacre the Armenian population. The jihadists who participated in this operation were today sent to kill other Armenians in Karabagh.

These massacres ceased in Azerbaijan during the brief Democratic Republic (1918-20) and the Soviet period (1920-90), but resumed in 1988 with the collapse of Moscow’s power.

Precisely during the Soviet period, in accordance with Joseph Stalin’s policy of nationalities, an Armenian region was joined with Azerbaijan to form a Socialist Republic. Thus when the USSR was dissolved, the international community recognized Karabakh not as Armenian but as Azeri. The same mistake was made in the rush in Moldova with Transnistria, in Ukraine with Crimea, in Georgia with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A series of wars immediately followed, including that of Nagorno-Karabakh. These are cases where international law developed from an error of appreciation at the beginning of the conflicts, as in Palestine, which was not rectified in time, leading to inextricable situations.

Westerners intervened to prevent a general conflagration. However, the example of Transnistria attests that it was a step backwards in order to better jump: thus the United States resorted to the Romanian army to try to annihilate the nascent Pridnestrovie [2].

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, then CSCE) created the “Minsk Group”, co-chaired by the United States, France and Russia, to find a solution, which it never did: Russia did not want to choose between its former partners, France wanted to play the important game, and the United States wanted to maintain a conflict zone on the Russian border. The other conflicts, created at the dissolution of the USSR, were deliberately fuelled by Washington and London with Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia in 2008 or the EuroMaydan coup d’état aimed, among other things, at expelling Russians from the Crimea in 2014.

The attack on the Republic of Artsakh (Karabagh) by Azerbaijan and Turkey was justified by the speech of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev at the UN General Assembly on September 24. [3] His main idea was that the Minsk Group had qualified the status quo as unacceptable, but that “statements are not enough. We need action. He could not have been clearer.

In accordance with his family’s ideology, he put his opponents under the greatest burden, for example, attributing the Khojaly massacre (1992, more than 600 victims) to “Armenian terrorists”, even though it was a black operation during an attempted coup in his country; in any case, this allowed him to present in a biased manner the actions of ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) in the 1970s and 1980s. He pointed out that four Security Council resolutions ordered the withdrawal of Armenian troops, playing on the homonymy between the Armenian population of Karabagh and the neighboring state of Armenia; one way of ignoring the fact that the Council also enjoined Azerbaijan to organize a referendum of self-determination in Karabagh. It accused, not without reason, the new Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, of being one of the men of the speculator Gorge Soros, as if this erased what had gone before.

The conflict can only end after a referendum of self-determination, the outcome of which comes as little surprise. For the time being, it benefits those who, like Israel, sell arms to the aggressor.JPEG - 29.9 kb The Turkish, Azeri and Pakistani armies display their unity against the Armenians.

For Erdoğan, one war too many?

Having said this, let us analyze the current conflict from another angle, that of international balances, keeping in mind that the Turkish army is already illegally present in Cyprus, Iraq and Syria; that it violates the military embargo in Libya and now the cease-fire in Azerbaijan.

Baku is organizing itself to postpone the inevitable deadline even further. Azerbaijan has already obtained the support of Qatar, which also supervises the financing of jihadists in this field of operations. According to our information, at least 580 of them have been sent from Idleb (Syria) via Turkey. This war is expensive and KKR, the powerful company of the US-Israeli Henry Kravis, seems to be involved as it is still involved in Iraq, Syria and Libya. As in the destabilization of communist Afghanistan, Israeli weapons could be routed through Pakistan. In any case, in Turkey, posters flourish placing side by side the flags of the three countries.

Even more astonishing, President Aliyev received the support of his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko. It is likely that he is acting in agreement with the Kremlin, which could herald a more visible Russian support for Orthodox Armenia (Russia, Belarus and Armenia are all members of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization).

Strangely, Shiite Iran has not taken a position. Yet, although ethnically Turkish, Azerbaijan is the only other Shia people in the world because it was part of the Safavid empire. President Hassan Rohani had included it in his plan for a Shia Federation presented during his second election campaign. This withdrawal gives the impression that Tehran does not wish to enter into conflict with Moscow, which is officially neutral. All the more so since Armenia plays a non-negligible role in the circumvention of the US embargo against Iran.

On the Armenian side, the diaspora in the United States is lobbying intensely in Congress in order to make President Erdoğan -whose country is a member of NATO- responsible for the conflict before an international tribunal.

In the case of a tacit agreement between Moscow and Washington, this war could be turned diplomatically against President Erdoğan, now unbearable to the Big Two. Like Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who brutally changed from valet of the Pentagon to public enemy No. 1 when he thought he had the authorization to invade Kuwait, the Turkish president may have been encouraged to take the blame.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

Article licensed under Creative Commons

The articles on Voltaire Network may be freely reproduced provided the source is cited, their integrity is respected and they are not used for commercial purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND).

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Armenia Heats Up as the Proxy War Continues | Gold Goats ‘n Guns

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2018

I’ll bet you never realized your peace and freedom rested on creating turmoil and revolution in Armenia.

Of course NATO is involved as it is a CIA tool. The other plus is when a country joins NATO they have to get their military up to snuff. That means spending their money as well as US taxpayer funded “foreign aid” to line MIC pockets.

https://tomluongo.me/2018/04/23/armenia-heats-up-as-the-proxy-war-continues/

TOM LUONGO

Armenia is an important part Russia’s long-term plans.  A member of the Eurasian Economic Union Armenia is key to protecting Russia’s southern flank.

So, I was not shocked back in 2016 when the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh was activated by the U.S. after a brief visit by then Secretary of State John Kerry as punishment for Russia’s intervention into Syria.

Nagorno-Karabakh had been peaceful for more than twenty years before Kerry’s visit.  And within days, fighting broke out on the Azeri side of the region which lies between the two countries.

So, color me not shocked that as the Neoconservatives take control of the Trump White House that they activate a color revolution in Armenia while simultaneously pushing Russia in Ukraine, Syria, the U.K., the financial markets and seemingly everywhere else at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

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