The war in Artsakh
Azerbaijan - with the backing of Turkey, a NATO member that genocided
Armenians - is getting its Armenian war on again. And no one cares.
Yasha Levine
Oct 6
Never a boring day here in central Los Angeles. Historic heatwaves, record
homelessness, the pandemic, massive fires, clouds of pollution, and air so
foul it makes your lungs hurt. This past week brought another piece of
action into the neighborhood: the faraway war in the Artsakh Republic - aka
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Last week, Azerbaijan - with Turkey's backing - launched a surprise attack
on the Artsakh Republic, a contested mountainous region that ethnic Soviet
Armenians won control of following a bloody war between Armenia and
Azerbaijan - a war that broke out as the Soviet Union was starting to
collapse. The war has never fully ended and there have been periodic flare
ups and firefights for decades. But this time, the fighting's for real.
Sk Boz @skkboz
The first video ever seen of a cluster bomb hitting a civilian area. In
Nagorno-Karabakh city of Stepanakert, under Azerbaijani bombardment
yesterday. Horrifying.
October 5th 2020
56 Retweets56 Likes
For days, Azerbaijan has been hitting residential targets with artillery,
cluster munitions, and Israeli suicide drones. Meanwhile, Turkey - a NATO
member - has sent at least a thousands jihadi fighters to take part in a
ground invasion. These groups had been battle-hardened in the war in Syria,
and many of them have received American training, weapons, and money. To
make matters worse, Turkey - which carried the Armenian genocide a century
ago - has been making genocide threats again. Big genocidal bully Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has been vowing to cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians, no
matter the cost.
It's a volatile, fucked up situation. And I don't blame Armenians for taking
these threats seriously. Genocide happened before, and quite recently. You
don't have to remind Armenians that they're in a rough neighborhood,
sandwiched between two countries that would be happy to wipe them off map,
while a third - Georgia - would be just fine watching it happen.
View out the window.
________________________________________
We live right in the middle of California's giant Armenian community -
sandwiched between Hollywood's Little Armenia to the south and Glendale to
the north. The house next to ours is filled with Soviet Armenian immigrants.
Our own landlord - the one who's trying to illegally evict us - is Armenian,
too. Even our favorite go-to local store is Armenian. We're surrounded by
Armenians.
So we're seeing signs of the war in our own neighborhood.
The past few days, our hood's been filled with cars flying Armenian and
Artsakh flags. People are out showing support for their homeland. Last
night, a big convoy zoomed by our place at about 11 pm - mercs, beemers,
suvs - honking, revving engines, giant flags unfurled. They were probably
coming home from a protest that shutdown a nearby freeway.
I actually spent time reporting on this conflict from Nagorno-Karabakh back
in 2006 - and I was in many of the spots that are being bombarded right now
by Turkey and Azerbaijan right now.
It's nasty and intractable conflict that goes back, well, most recently,
about a century. It was a problem that the Bolsheviks put on ice once they
took power in the region. The Soviet Union's management of the nationalities
problem among its vast multi-ethnic population might not have been ideal,
but at least it kept a lid on tribal, religious, and nationalistic
infighting. Peace lasted about 70 years.
The weakening of the Soviet Union made the resumption of such hostilities
pretty much inevitable - and Armenia and Azerbaijan went for each other's
throats. From 1988 to 1994, tens of thousands were killed and more than a
million were cleansed from both Armenia and Azerbaijan - through a mixture
of pogroms, rapes, lynchings, expulsions, traditional military battles, and
territorial grabs. In the end, Armenia won a chunk of mountainous territory
that Armenians consider sacred to their national identity. And it has held
it against Azerbaijan, despite being poorer, lacking energy reserves, and
being surrounded on three sides by its enemies - including Turkey, Armenia's
genocidal arch-enemy.
During the Cold War America's cynical imperial planners must have been
salvinatingabout a future in which the Soviet Union would break up and its
nationalist republics would fight amongst themselves without end - keeping
the region weak, destabilized, and easily exploitable. Well...that's what's
happening here.
So how is America gonna respond to Turkey - a NATO member - sending in
planes filled with jihadis to wage a war against a country whose people it
had recently genocided? Chances are... it's not gonna do much!
The Armenian community here in America is big, has money, and generally has
a lot of political pull - which I guess is why our shitty neoliberal mayor
came out in support of Armenia against Azerbaijan. But the community doesn't
have a very good bargaining position as far as the interests of the American
Empire are concerned.
Fact is, the interests of the Armenian diaspora are in direct conflict with
America's major allies and partners: Turkey and Azerbaijan - and by
extension Israel, the EU, and a bunch of degenerate oil companies and
lobbyist groupies.
Turkey is the big one here. It's a member of NATO, holds about 50 American
nukes.
