The Jerusalem Post: Baku needs to be held accountable for war crimes committed against the Armenian people
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has quietly and deftly engineered a plan that promises to strengthen his country’s ties with Azerbaijan. In recent weeks, Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition have lobbied the Trump administration to extend the Abraham Accords to Azerbaijan in the hopes of establishing “a strong foundation for trilateral collaboration” with the U.S. and Azerbaijan, The Jerusalem Post writes.
As noted, proponents of this idea believe that Azerbaijan can counter the nearby threat of Iran and see its vast pool of natural resources as an alternative to Russian gas. Some have even tried to reframe and position Azerbaijan as a Western-aligned state. But forming any U.S.-Israel-Azerbaijan alliance would be a grave mistake.
For starters, Azerbaijan is not a pro-Western state and does not share the same democratic principles and values with the United States. It is a country led by a petro-dictator, Ilham Aliyev, who has no respect for human rights and has leveraged his country’s oil and gas for transactional diplomacy and various geopolitical trade-offs.
As mentioned, before granting Azerbaijan a seat at the world’s table, they need to be held accountable for war crimes committed against the Armenian people, including the ethnic cleansing of more than 120,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, which was the biggest displacement of Armenians since the Armenian genocide of 1915.
They also need to release Armenian political prisoners currently being held illegally, including humanitarian Ruben Vardanyan, who was unjustly arrested by the Azerbaijani government when trying to leave Nagorno-Karabakh and has been subjected to a sham trial without any due process.
Azerbaijan ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to leave the country, limiting the only access Armenian political prisoners have to the outside world and the ability to report on their condition.
Overlooking these transgressions sends the wrong message to despots and bad actors that they can act with impunity. Instead of extolling Azerbaijan under these false pretenses and turning a blind eye to their malfeasance, the international community should be treating them as a repressive state that in many ways has more in common with Tehran than with Washington.
It is quite remarkable that a country founded in the wake of a genocide would help another country carry one out today. But that is exactly what is happening right now with Israel and Azerbaijan. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms sales, Israel supplied Azerbaijan with 70% of its arsenal between 2016 and 2020. Many of these weapons, including long-range missiles and exploding drones, were used by Azerbaijan in capturing Nagorno-Karabakh.
