Two years ago this October, Azerbaijan committed what had been, until the Israeli rampage of the past year, among the most egregious cases of ethic cleaning since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when in the matter of days its armed forces took control of the “Armenian enclave Nagorno-Karabakh” in which 120,000 Christian Armenians were forced to flee the land which had been their home for centuries, The American Conservative writes.
In the months that followed, Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, claimed that “present-day Armenia is our land.” An agreement reached between Armenia’s U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Aliyev ceded four Armenian villages to Azerbaijan the following April. Fast forward to the last week of September, when the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Kristina Kvien, attended a memorial service for the Armenians who died fighting Azerbaijan. To mark the occasion, the U.S. embassy issued a statement that read, in part, that “the United States is committed to working with the Armenian government to assist those who have lost their homes and livelihood.”
Yet such sentiments are difficult to take seriously when roughly a week later NATO sent a high-level delegation to Baku to kiss Aliyev’s ring.
The distinguished former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, said that in his view Azerbaijan has consistently twisted the history of the Artsakh conflict to suit its own purposes, and it is no surprise that it has done so again on the occasion of the NATO delegation’s visit. “However, it is depressing that, even in victory, the Azerbaijanis are unable to muster even a shred of compassion for the defeated Armenians, who have inhabited those mountains for centuries, but were recently evicted forcibly from their ancestral homes in what amounts to a case of ethnic cleansing,” the ambassador noted.
As noted, the collusion between NATO and Azerbaijan leaves little doubt as to where NATO’s true priorities lie, priorities that have long been hidden behind the high-sounding rhetoric of shared “values” and “human rights.” But understanding Washington’s morally abhorrent policy toward Armenia is easy enough: The conflict between Israel and Iran in which Armenia finds itself, through no fault of its own, in the middle.
Israel’s role in helping to facilitate Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing campaign is of course ignored in Washington—though it is no secret in Israel, where Haaretz has acknowledged that the Netanyahu regime has “its fingerprints all over Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing in the Nagorno-Karabakh.”
