BY MICHAEL VAKIAN
In the White House’s formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2021, the Biden administration committed to “preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring.” However, through providing military aid to Azerbaijan, the United States has been complicit in Azerbaijan’s attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), a region with a majority-Armenian population of approximately 120,000 as of September 2023.
Since that historic statement of genocide recognition, the U.S. administration has fallen well short of keeping its promise to the Armenian people, violating international law and basic human rights standards in the process.
I am a 20-year-old Armenian-American from Tarzana, California. I attended the same small Armenian school from preschool through high school, where we spoke Armenian. Growing up, I was always deeply connected to my Armenian heritage and often told about the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Turks, including how my great-grandfather was orphaned at the age of six and relocated to Beirut, Lebanon.
The current conflict involving Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan stems back more than a century. The region known as Nagorno-Karabakh was part of ancient Armenian kingdoms and has been predominantly inhabited by Armenians since the late 11th century. In 1920, Armenia was Sovietized. Three years later, the Soviet Union arbitrarily granted Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan despite its overwhelming Armenian majority. In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh voted to gain independence from Azerbaijan, leading to a full-scale war between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A ceasefire was brokered in 1994, leading to Nagorno-Karabakh assuming de facto independence.
In September 2020, Azerbaijan reignited the conflict with attacks on the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Backed by military support from Turkey, Azerbaijan captured significant territory. A temporary ceasefire was brokered in November 2020, but Azerbaijan continued its offensive thereafter until it ethnically cleansed the region of Armenians by September 2023.
The attacks by Azerbaijan against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh constitute war crimes. Former Armenian prisoners of war described torture and ill-treatment such as being beaten for hours, having their hands burnt with cigarette lighters, being poked with metal rods, and being denied food for multiple days. Gruesome tactics also included execution of civilians, beheadings, and bombings. Despite this, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev dismissed accusations of war crimes as “fake news,” attributed to biased narratives by Western media.
Azerbaijan’s attacks have involved the deliberate destruction of historic Armenian cultural sites, including churches and monuments. In 2023, there was a 75% increase in destroyed cultural sites and a 29% increase in sites classified as “threatened.” The Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, a prominent historical landmark, was shelled twice, injuring three individuals seeking refuge inside. An Azerbaijani military truck destroyed a stone cross in the village of Arakel. Stone crosses, known as “khachkars” in Armenian, are iconic of the Armenian Christian faith and are protected by UNESCO. Countless examples of graffiti and vandalism also occurred, including of churches and gravesites.
These actions reflect Azerbaijan’s deeper motivation: wiping out the Armenian race and eliminating any remaining signs of Armenian culture in the region. Azerbaijani President Aliyev has shown this intention by referring to ethnic Armenians as a “virus” and stating, “we will chase them away like dogs.”
A Critique of U.S. Complicity
Military and financial aid from the U.S. contribute to the human rights and international law violations currently being committed by Azerbaijan against the Armenians. The 1992 Freedom Support Act’s Section 907, which prohibited direct U.S. aid to the government of Azerbaijan, was waived in 2002 by President George W. Bush to provide security assistance. Since then, the U.S. has given around $164 million to Azerbaijan for “counter-terrorism” support. This means that American funds appropriated for counterterrorism are instead being used for inhumane acts.
U.S. complicity in the Azerbaijani genocide against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karapakh violates international law. In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime and Genocide (CPPCG) enacted a legal framework for the prosecution of genocidal acts. Its criteria for genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
With an Armenian death toll of thousands from the September 2020 attacks until this writing, Azerbaijan’s actions meet the first two criteria, namely killings and bodily and mental harm. As for the third condition, Azerbaijan has blocked essential goods to Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools, and forced Armenians to evacuate from the region. Azerbaijan thus meets at least three of the five CPPCG’s criteria.
Article III of the CPPCG established “complicity in genocide” as a punishable offense. The 1987 Genocide Convention Implementation Act incorporated the CPPCG into U.S. law, making U.S. complicity in genocidal actions illegal under both international and federal law. Aid to Azerbaijan also constitutes a violation of the Leahy Law, legislation that prohibits the providing of military assistance to foreign military groups that are credibly involved in gross violations of human rights.
Public sentiment in the U.S. does not support such complicity. A majority of Americans, 65%, believe that defending human rights globally should be a goal of American foreign policy, according to the University of Maryland Critical Issue Poll.
American leaders have been apprised of human rights violations in Nagorno-Karabakh. On September 14, 2023, Yuri Kim, then the U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, condemned Azerbaijan’s aggression before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. However, the U.S. remained silent as Azerbaijan launched another military offensive five days later.
On July 12, 2023, President Biden remarked, “Faced with a threat to the peace and stability of the world, to democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself, we did what we always do: The United States stepped up,” referring to support of Ukraine against Russian attacks. However, the White House’s reluctance to defend Armenia demonstrates that it only steps up to uphold democratic values when it furthers its geopolitical interests. Supporting Ukraine offers geopolitical benefits, including preventing Russian territorial expansion and upholding Ukraine’s exportability of natural gas, that are not present in intervening in the ethnic cleansing of Armenians.
With the Caucasus region rife with geopolitical instability, Armenia remains the only beacon of democracy amid despotic corruption in neighboring countries like Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. The U.S.’s failure to intervene shows it is selective in choosing which democracies to defend.
Why the Armenian Plight is Overlooked
Today, protests against genocidal conduct run rampant throughout the U.S. and much of the world. Demonstrations calling for an Israeli ceasefire in its bombardment of Gaza since October 2023 have taken place in more than 100 American colleges. In stark contrast, and despite recurring atrocities against the sovereignty of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani atrocities remain overlooked.
Propaganda by the Turkish state plays a role in downplaying the rights and needs of Armenia as a nation and as an ethnicity. Some 100 years later, the modern Turkish Republic still refuses to acknowledge the genocide committed by Ottomans. An article on the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign affairs website describes Armenian claims of genocide as “infusing history with myth” and claiming the Armenian portrayal is “one-sided and steeped in bias.” This narrative is promulgated by the Turkish government today despite numerous letters, reports, and treatises written by Western diplomats, such as American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who served in the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, newspaper articles, photographic evidence, and countless eyewitness accounts further contradict this narrative.
For non-Armenian U.S. citizens, the manufactured uncertainty around this issue can make it difficult to take a stand in defense of Armenian subjugation. Media failure to dispel misconceptions about the events of 1915 perpetrated by the Turkish government have helped keep the Armenian genocide shrouded in the darkness of World War I, as today’s public focuses on equally tragic human rights violations in other countries.
Dr. Bedross Der Matossian, professor of Middle East History and Politics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, summarized similar media issues with the Azerbaijani attacks on Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. He observes, “the Azeri lobby is very strong….it’s able to control through its PR forums, the public opinion within Europe and United States through articles being published.” Der Matossian detailed the issue of “both sidesism” present in the scant media coverage on the Nagorno-Karabakh situation, typically describing a war between two opposing nations, rather than deliberate Azerbaijani attempts to seize control of the entire region.
A lack of education on the Armenian genocide has also contributed to the Armenian cause being overlooked historically. Tereza Yerimyan, the Government Affairs Director at the Armenian National Committee of America, explains the impact of this lack of education:
The Armenian Genocide particularly, is a part of American history. It’s a part of world history, and yet it’s not taught in those curricula in high school. Think about not being educated on World War I and II, right? It’s significant parts of our country’s history that are being omitted. That creates an opportunity to overlook what’s taken place, and then to overlook the patterns, both in history and today, that are consistently repeated.
The Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh endured or perished from atrocities similar to those the Ottoman Turks perpetrated during the 1915 Armenian Genocide. History has repeated itself, with a virtual blackout of media coverage and an anemic global outcry about the Armenian manslaughter. This shadow Armenian struggle has been subsumed by other assaults, from Russia and Ukraine to Israel and Palestine. Geopolitical interests are to blame, with Israel and Ukraine being key allies of the United States. Those conflicts have had the full attention of the government and the mainstream media. That has caused the public to listen and react.
Call to Action
To address the current atrocities, informed citizens must advocate for governmental reform. Egregious human rights violations by Azerbaijan against the Armenian community in Nagorno-Karabakh are illegal and not to be tolerated. Our government is complicit because it provides military and financial aid to Azerbaijan. In doing so, the U.S. contributes to Azeri violations of international law and violates the terms of the waiver of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Unethical and undemocratic, this behavior reflects a government detached from the will of its citizens. Taxpayers have the power, and the moral obligation, to demand that our tax dollars not be used to commit these barbarities.
Here are several ways to do this:
- Raising Awareness: Educate others to foster significant change. The general public’s lack of knowledge about the Armenian cause is a major shortcoming. Mainstream media coverage is limited, and few public figures speak out. All American citizens concerned about human rights should educate friends, family, colleagues, and parishioners.
- Participating in Armenian Advocacy Groups: Support nonprofits like Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Armenian Relief Society (ARS), Hayastan All-Armenian Fund, The Genocide Education Project, Armenian Youth Federation (AYF), Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) and the Armenian Assembly of America. Increased public outcry can attract legislative attention.
- Participating in Legislative Change: Vote for legislators who oppose funding human rights violations. Support bills like the Armenian Protection Act of 2024, which would rescind the waiver of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Electing pro-Armenian congressmen is crucial.
- Opposing COP 29 (Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC) in Azerbaijan: Protest Azerbaijan hosting the UN’s Climate Change Conference, highlighting its human rights violations. Contact the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat (secretariat@unfccc.int) and engage in local protests. Tereza Yerimyan summarizes the issue: “Not only did they (Azerbaijan) not get punished or sanctioned for what they did, but they received an additional reward by hosting COP 29. What does that say about humanity? Not much.”
- Writing Opinion Pieces: Share personal stories in local papers to raise awareness. It’s urgent that descendants of those affected by the Armenian genocide record firsthand accounts. Media visibility helps mitigate false propaganda from Turkish and Azerbaijani media.
The U.S. is complicit in modern-day genocidal acts against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. As a global champion of democracy and the rule of law, the U.S. must immediately cease all financial and military aid to Azerbaijan and hold its government accountable for human rights violations. Given the Biden administration’s 2021 promise, meaningful action and unwavering support are necessary to honor past commitments and prevent a repetition of the 1915 atrocities.
Michael Vakian is a 20-year-old student at the University of Southern California, hailing from Tarzana, California. Growing up in a close-knit Armenian community, he attended A.G.B.U. Manoogian-Demirdjian School from preschool through high school and is a lifelong member of Homenetmen Massis. An aspiring law student, he aims to bring awareness to critical global matters, particularly those affecting the Armenian community.
