TRUST is required to build peace but it is in dire shortage in our region of South Caucasus. Trust is "assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something" as defined by dictionaries. While it is a sought out trait on a personal basis, it is virtually a non-existent phenomenon on the regional and wider-regional realities.
There is an old saying: "Trust cannot be demanded or forced, it has to be earned." The mistrust is very deep. The recent bloodshed around Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) just put oil into the fire.
The causes for this deeply-rooted mistrust is understandable for those who know the history of the region. Just a glance at the developments of the last 100 years and the last 7 months is enough to understand that, in fact, the region has not changed, the goals of the actors have not changed, simply the coloring has changed.
The hypocrisy of our neighbours have not changed, either. Vice versa, it has been elevated into state policy level. The opinion piece that was recently published in the New Straits Times by the representative of diplomatic mission of Azerbaijan is a vivid case in point.
It propagates the "peaceful" nature of Azerbaijan with "goodwill" gestures from its president so "generously encouraging mutual confidence and sustainable cooperation in the postwar period." Yet a glance at the daily news flow from Azerbaijan and actions and statements from its leadership speak to the contrary.
Seven months ago Azerbaijan unleashed a war of aggression against Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), third time within the last 3 decades, under the guise of the so-called "restoration of territorial integrity of Azerbaijan" with the sole purpose of cleansing those areas from its indigenous Armenian population that have "dared" to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination enshrined in international law and its millennia-old historic legacy.
With the unprecedented support from Turkey in all possible areas including conduct of military operations, and foreign terrorist fighters that were transported to the area in thousands, Azerbaijan was attempting to "liberate" areas that have never been part of independent Azerbaijan.
By doing so, it simply tramped over the international law, UN Charter with its principle of non-use of force and settlement of disputes by peaceful means, its commitments within the OSCE Minsk Group negotiating format, and unabatedly engulfed itself into blatant violations of international law and international humanitarian law through indiscriminate shelling of densely populated civilian areas, use of cluster munitions and incendiary ammunition of mass destruction containing chemical elements.
Innumerable cases of war crimes committed by the Azerbaijani side including beheadings, torture, and mutilation of combatants and civilians live and dead were registered. The video evidence was put to circulation in social media with the purpose of spreading fear and intimidating the Armenian population.
The November 10, 2020 trilateral statement brokered by Russia on the cessation of fire and all military activities did not change the situation with respect to violations of international humanitarian law. The refusal by Azerbaijan to abide by Paragraph 8 of the said trilateral Statement which calls for exchange of all detained persons, and insistence on holding over 200 prisoners of war in stark violation of Geneva Conventions as well, cannot in any way be considered as a gesture "encouraging mutual confidence."
Moreover, the latest report of the Human Rights Watch released in March 2021 states: "Azerbaijani forces abused Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) from the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, subjecting them to cruel and degrading treatment and torture either when they were captured, during their transfer, or while in custody at various detention facilities.
"The abuse, including torture of detained Armenian soldiers, is abhorrent and a war crime. It is also deeply disturbing that a number of missing Armenian soldiers were last seen in Azerbaijan's custody and it has failed to account for them."
Armenophobia has become the fuel in the engine of independent Azerbaijan especially during the reign of the current president. The people are being intoxicated with hatred against Armenians starting from the kindergartens. All footprints of Armenians, everything belonging to Armenians have to be erased or misappropriated.
History is being revised to create an ownership of lands that historically had never seen anything called Azeri or Azerbaijan. Desecration, destruction and misappropriation of centuries and millennia old Armenian cultural heritage continues as we speak.
In the last months 2 Armenian churches have already been erased from the face of the earth, several are being altered into the so-called "Albanian" paving the way into their misappropriation. The Azerbaijani president urges to erase the Armenian writings on centuries-old churches labeling them "fake" thus preparing ground for yet another act of vandalism.
Dozens of monuments are destroyed, and Nagorno Karabakh is following in the steps of Nakhijevan where all Armenian religious and secular monuments were destroyed or misappropriated. Only in 2005 about ten thousand khachkars, unique pieces of Armenian art inscribed in the Unesco List of Intangible Heritage, were simply bulldozed down into the Araks River in Nakhijevan by Azerbaijan.
Yet, pretense cannot be abated. While agreeing on a formal level to the dispatch of a Unesco technical mission to enlist all cultural heritage in the areas that have passed under control of Azerbaijan, it creates all hindrances not to allow the mission to show up till all the "cleansing" operation is completed. Truly a case for confidence-building.
Hate-speech and demonization of Armenians has become a tool for identity-building for Azerbaijan. Daily pronouncements of threats and claims this time towards sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia by the president of Azerbaijan are the true face of "Aliyev's unambiguous interest and bold stance toward peace and cooperation right after the bloody war" and "practical goodwill efforts of Azerbaijan" in the words of the author of the opinion piece. The recent opening of the so-called "Military Trophy Park" in Baku serves as an evidence of the neo-fascist nature of the ideology being promulgated in Azerbaijan.
The story does not end here, and it is not that simple. Those familiar with the region know well the history of the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansings carried out in the first two decades of the 20th century and repeated at the end of this bloodiest century in the history of Armenia.
The current events are one piece of the chain that started then and continue up until now. It is not by accident that Turkish president states that Turkey and Azerbaijan are "one nation and two states."
The "long" history of Azerbaijan, that its representative attempts to implant into the minds of the readers in his opinion piece, started only 100 years ago in 1918 with the rejection of the League of Nations to recognize it as a state as it was claiming territories that it did not control, among those being Nagorno Karabakh and Nakhijevan.
In fact, the League of Nations registered at the time that the "territory in which the Republic of Azerbaijan has arisen, …appears to have never formerly constituted a State, but has always been included in larger groups such as the Mongol or Persian and since 1813 the Russian Empire. The name Azerbaijan which has been chosen for the new Republic is also that of the neighbouring Persian province."
Regretfully, after establishment of the Soviet rule, under Stalin-Ataturk agreement, Armenian regions of Nakhijevan and Nagorno Karabakh were put under Azerbaijani jurisdiction against explicit will of their Armenian populations.
The newly-emerged political entity on the world map started its existence with war crimes following the footsteps of its bigger brother and with its support. In March of 1920 the entire Armenian population of Shushi, over 20,000 Armenians were massacred in 4 days by Azeri and Turkish soldiers. The Armenian city was destroyed and void of its Armenian nature. In the ensuing decades it was heavily populated by Azerbaijanis in a consistent effort to change the demographic composition of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh).
It would seem that Sovietization of the South Caucasus would have instilled good-neighbourly relations and created sound basis for peaceful coexistence. But no, policies of ethnic cleansing continued uninterruptedly in Azerbaijan. Just the tools were more "civilized."
Nakhijevan that had over 70 percent of Armenian population, saw its last Armenian leave the region in the middle of 1970s. The administrative borders of Nagorno Karabakh were constantly and deliberately sliced out under different pretexts. And once the peaceful demonstrations started in Nagorno Karabakh, the "natural" response by the Azerbaijani leadership was to resort to ethnic cleansing that targeted Armenians living in the city of Sumgait in February 1988, in Kirovabad (today called Ganja) in November 1988, and in Baku in January 1990.
While the Azerbaijani population of Armenia willingly left the country with the strong encouragement of the leadership of Soviet Azerbaijan, some of them exchanging their houses with Armenians from Baku and most of them getting compensation for the property, the Armenians were rescued by Soviet Army that had to be used internally for the first time in Soviet history to save the Armenian population from extermination.
After gaining independence in 1992, Azerbaijan resorted to full blown war in order to suppress the right of the Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh to live in their own home without any foreign subjugation.
Those that had instigated and carried out the massacres of Armenians in Azerbaijan are being glorified in that country. The Azeri officer that had beheaded an Armenian officer in sleep with an axe during a NATO-sponsored seminar in Budapest in 2004 was glorified and rewarded heavily by Aliyev for his "heroism." The examples of those committing war crimes and being glorified during the April 2016 war and the recent 44-day war are abundant.
The provocations and threats are carried out on a daily basis. The war-mongering from the Azerbaijani side never stopped during the last 30 years while the negotiations were still going on. Truly a solid block in building good-neighborly relations with Armenians and Armenia.
We believed that the world has changed. The international legal system has evolved, many deterrents are put in place. After all, it is the 21st century. But no, it has not changed much in our part of the world. The geopolitical remapping of the region continues with Turkey with its neo-Osmanic aspirations jumping onto the wagon.
In the beginning of the 20th century the whole Armenian population of the Western Armenia, over 1,5 million people, was annihilated in Ottoman Turkey under the guise of World War I, with the silence and indifference of the world powers of the time that were too busy to ascertain their positions on the map being re-charted.
The international community said "Never again" and the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide was adopted. Multiple organizations were created on regional and global levels and substantive efforts have been undertaken to prevent crimes against humanity and not to allow impunity by establishing international courts.
Yet the world was silent 7 months ago and not much discourse is going on to condemn the aggression by Azerbaijan and its affiliates in Nagorno Karabakh and its continued antagonistic stance even today.
The Armenian genocide was committed under the guise of World War I when all major powers were busy fighting and were deaf to the outcries from all humanists that extermination of a whole nation is being carried out in broad daylight. The recent aggression by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) and its people with the support of Turkey went merely unnoticed as the world was too busy fighting Covid-19 pandemic domestically and not much attention was devoted to actual genocidal policies being carried out in the 21st century in our neighborhood. Coincidences?
Notably, two extremely dangerous precedents were created as a result of the latest war: first, an attempt to resolve conflicts by use of force and mass atrocities, and, second, recruitment, transfer and deployment of foreign terrorist fighters and jihadists into South Caucasus and creating a terrorist hub in our region at a time when the fight against terrorism is declared a global threat.
If the world does not wake up to the fact that by their silence, lack of unconditional condemnation, artificial equalization of the sides they are actually encouraging the genocidal policies being carried out by our neighbor and allowing impunity to prevail through political expediency, they would see this virus spread all over the world destabilizing it and nullifying all efforts exerted to build a peaceful and stable world.
The parallels between the events 100 years ago and September-November 2020 are striking. The actors are the same, the signature and methods are the same though with a heavy use of modern military and information technologies, the purpose of creating a pan-Turkic world is the same, the conditions are similar, the world reaction, tragically, is almost the same.
Notwithstanding, I truly believe that the world is slowly, but awakening, and impunity will not be tolerated. All those countries supporting Azerbaijan and Turkey in their neo-Osmanic aspirations for whatever reason have to realize that they are also culprits in crime.
Yes, I agree with the author of the opinion piece that peace is difficult without change of mindset. I would add that it would be impossible to build trust, the foundation for peace, with a neighbor that is "preaching" peace while dripping with blood and holding yatagan in the hands.
The writer is Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to Malaysia and Indonesia