Were you ever taken in by the Western preachers of peace who hectored India for refusing to reprimand Russia after its invasion of Ukraine? If so, you ought to familiarise yourself with the plight of Armenia—an unlikely post-Soviet democracy in the South Caucasus whose survival is being imperilled by the mercenarism of our Occidental missionaries of international order. Their impulse to punish Russia for waging war against Ukraine has prompted them to reward Azerbaijan, a spectacularly corrupt hereditary dictatorship at war with Armenia.
The European Union “is turning to trustworthy energy suppliers. Azerbaijan is one of them,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, declared in July. Weeks after she flew home, Europe’s newly emboldened partner proceeded to slaughter more than 200 Armenians in a fresh episode of a protracted pan-Turkic campaign to coerce Armenia into complete submission. There was much noise in the West, but no meaningful intervention was staged to aid Armenia, a state that—for all its ills—ranks as less corrupt on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index than at least five EU states and eight NATO members.
“Universal” principles are for the weak: Cold self-interest disguised as altruism governs the West’s own conduct on the international stage. Europe has decided, autonomously or under American pressure, to emancipate itself from Russian sources of energy. And it has chosen Azerbaijan as an alternative supplier. It does not matter that Azerbaijan is also waging its own revanchist war against a sovereign neighbour—or even that it is more despotic, illiberal, and repressive than Russia. What matters is that Azerbaijan is not Russia. It does not matter that Armenians have endured centuries of mass murder, death marches, forced conversion, and deportation and displacement from their natal lands by the Turks and the Azeris—the word genocide was, in fact, invented by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to convey the scale of the concerted liquidation of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey between 1915 and 1921. What matters is that Armenian lives do not much matter.
A troubled history
A historically alert person may detect in the indifference to Armenian life the residues of an ancient prejudice. Armenians, escaping oppression and pogroms over the centuries, dispersed across the world. They received a warm welcome in many parts of Asia, and they repaid that welcome with a disproportionate contribution to their host societies: India, with which Armenia has had relations for nearly 2,000 years, is among the nations enriched by the Armenian diaspora.
In other places, however, Armenians’ ingenuity and adaptability bred contempt for them. They were branded “eastern Jews” and treated with suspicion and scorn. A minor unpleasant personal experience with an individual in the 1920s drove George Orwell to generalise that he “saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian’.” Memos by British Foreign Office officials of the time such as D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne hiss with a deep racist hatred of Armenians. Having incited the Armenians to fight the Soviets with false assurances of support, the British abruptly abandoned them. As early as 1920, Osborne’s boss, Lord Curzon, admitted privately that “we intend to do as little as we can for Armenia”.
This tradition of apathy, disdain, and betrayal helps clarify why Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, felt sufficiently confident last week to brag openly that he had “started the Second Karabakh War.” Aliyev was alluding to the 44-day war in 2020 over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The region, inhabited by Armenians for longer than a millennium and replete with their monasteries, sought to join Soviet Armenia in the aftermath of the Red Army’s invasion. On 4 July 1921, the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union voted to approve the merger. The next day, however, disregarding demography and democracy, Joseph Stalin gifted Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
Then, in 1988, nearly seven decades after Stalin’s ukase, the local Armenians held a referendum to secede from Azerbaijan. The vote went largely unrecognised, and hundreds of Armenians were massacred in the Azeri cities of Sumgait and Baku. And so, when the USSR finally disintegrated, Karabakh found itself inside the Soviet-drawn frontiers inherited by Azerbaijan. A vicious trench war erupted in the mountainous terrain. Armenia, plunged into literal darkness by acute power shortages, captured Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjoining lands. It was the first major Armenian victory on its own soil in a thousand years.
An international forum called the OSCE Minsk Group was convened in 1992 to enable the belligerents to negotiate a final settlement. Its progress was impaired by routine outbreaks of hostilities until its was undone completely by Azerbaijan when it commenced a full-blown war in September 2020.
Unlike Armenia in 1991, however, Azerbaijan in 2020 did not fight solo: Its troops were trained, equipped, and superintended by Turkey—a member of NATO—which also trafficked a thousand Syrian mujahideen on its payroll to serve as cannon fodder. “One nation, two States” was their official motto. The murderous pan-Turkism that animated the joint enterprise against Armenia, the world’s oldest Christian State, acquired an explicitly religious gloss with the participation of fighters from Pakistan, which does not recognise Armenia, in the cause of the ummah.
Their deeds on and off the battlefield—torture, beheadings, mounting the decapitated heads of Armenian civilians on the carcasses of pigs—would make ISIS blush with pride. Aliyev opened a museum in Baku, the Azeri capital, whose chief exhibits were the helmets of Armenian soldiers slain in war.
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When India helped
None of the powers that dispense lofty sermons on peace today lifted a finger at the time. To its abiding credit, India was one of the few nations that offered Armenia tangible support in the form of arms in its moment of need. Three separate sources confirmed to me that Delhi had come close to airlifting a cache of sophisticated weapons, but the war had plunged Armenia into such disarray that the administration in Yerevan, operating without a command structure, was unable to figure out how to receive the materiel.
By the first week of November 2020, Azeri forces were punching into Shushi—the high mountainous linchpin of Armenian defence. Fearing a total rout, Yerevan effectively agreed to cede substantial tracts of territory as part of a humiliating armistice mediated by Moscow.
Azerbaijan wants more than disputed land and access to roads connecting it to the Azeri exclave of Nakhichevan. It wants to drive a corridor through the heart of Armenia’s southernmost province to create an unimpeded link between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Being “a defeated country”, Aliyev told his troops earlier this month, Armenia has no right to resist Azerbaijan’s demands. What makes him so certain? Well, as Aliyev helpfully explained, “The fact that Azerbaijan is right is not questioned by major international actors.”
Where Delhi must come in
Armenia is reacting to Baku’s bellicosity in contradictory ways. On the one hand, its government is preparing the population to accept its capitulation to Azerbaijan’s demands by arguing that doing so will herald peace and prosperity. History cautions against this course of action because concessions by Armenia, far from resulting in the recession of Azeri-Turkish aggression, have tended always to increase the appetites of its enemies. Nibbling away at Armenia’s periphery, Azerbaijan has already registered rhetorical claims to it its territorial core.
At the same time, Armenia is increasingly turning to India for its defence needs. Yerevan recently placed orders for an indigenously developed missile system and artillery guns.
Ordinarily, India should not interfere in the affairs of other nations or become a party to distant conflicts. But non-interference by Delhi in this particular clash is unlikely to persuade Armenia’s adversaries to keep out of India’s affairs. It would behove us to remember that the forces that seek Armenia’s annihilation yearn also to reduce India. To deny them total victory in Eurasia is to delay and foil their designs in South Asia.
Only Armenians can ultimately save Armenia. But it is in India’s interests to do more than transfer weapons to Yerevan. It should offer to train Armenia’s armed forces. Delhi could also send a high-level delegation to Yerevan to demonstrate to Ankara, Baku, and Islamabad that India is keenly interested in the security of the region.
The West’s decision to sacrifice Armenia on the altar of Azeri aggression is, apart from everything else, phenomenally stupid for two reasons: One, Azerbaijan does not have the natural resources to meet even a small fraction of Europe’s requirement; two, a quarter of the gas fields that are supposed to feed Azerbaijan’s future supplies to Europe is, in fact, owned by Russia.
India’s choice to stand with Armenia at least has the virtue of being smart.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. Follow him on Telegram. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
Editor’s Note: The Ambassador of Azerbaijan to India, Ashraf Shikhaliyev, has responded to the article. We are publishing the letter below.
Dear Mr Shekhar Gupta,
Editor-in-Chief, The Print,
BSZ Marg, New Delhi
Being a regular reader of “The Print” I was surprised, to say the least, to read a controversial and biased article titled “Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia matters as much as Russia-Ukraine. India must stand with Yerevan” published on “The Print” website on 22 November. Written by Kapil Komireddi, the article is not only shallow and biased but also written in the classical black PR genre. I am staggered how one person might be deceitful and misleading to the audience, falsifying the historical realities.
I am disappointed that an esteemed media house, “The Print”, has failed to check the falsification of facts, sweeping exaggerations, brazen camouflage of prejudices with half-baked facts, terribly twisted out of context. What I find the most obnoxious is that “The Print” didn’t publish a disclaimer below the article distancing itself from the opinion of the author, which regrettably made a reader think that “The Print” shared the author’s position. An opinion is an opinion only to the extent of corroborated facts. However, I am sorry to say that this article not only smacks of ulterior motives but also fails to stand any scrutiny.
Here I would like to add that although the policies of different countries are discussed in the newspapers every day, yet you would not find any article in the leading media of Azerbaijan containing insulting accusations against the leadership of India.
Below I would like to bring to your attention the glaring mistakes in the so-called “article”.
1. Instead of asking about the reasons why the world community have reacted differently at developments in the South Caucasus in 2020 and now in Ukraine, the author engages in repeating notorious and false claims about Azerbaijan. The answer to the question the author is enthusiastically seeking for is that Azerbaijan’s liberation of territories from the external aggression and military occupation was based on international law, and none of the countries that act in line with international law would condemn such actions. It is sufficed to recall several international documents on conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions of 822 (1993), 853 (1993), 874 (1993) and 884 (1993), that condemned the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and called for immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces.
2. The author also makes a reference to the so-called Armenian genocide hiding how it was Armenia which had rejected the Turkiye’s proposal to open respective archives of both countries and to have an open discussion on the events in 1915 in order to ascertain the facts and the number of victims on both sides.
3. The author fails to recognise that Armenians were purposefully settled by Tzar Russia in the South Caucasus not more than 200 years ago, after its victory in the Russia-Iran war (1826-1828) and Russia-Turkish war (1828-1829) and conclusion of Turkmenchay (1828) and Edirne (1829) peace treaties between respective countries.
4. Claim that the then member of Central Committee of RCP Joseph Stalin granted Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan has no basis. There are no documents that would provide hard evidence for that claim. The dominant discourse about Armenian history has always been about victimization and a habit to look at events through that lens. If we assume that the decisions taken in 1920-1921 (on territorial issues) were arrived at because of the facts on the ground, rather than through greater powers’ intention to victimize Armenia, then this has strong implications for how present-day conflicts are handled. Indeed, Karabakh was always part of Azerbaijan, and by the decision of Caucasian Bureau of Central Committee of RCP dated July 5, 1921, Nagorno-Karabakh was retained within Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
5. Talking without any justification of crimes of mass murder, the author failed to mention that Armenian military were targeting the cities Tartar, Barda, Ganja, Agjabedi and other towns of Azerbaijan, including the ones situated far away from the frontline, shelling the artillery and ballistic rockets in gross violation of international humanitarian law. Armenia’s occupation of internationally recognized territories of Azerbaijan has resulted in ethnic cleaning of around 800,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis, who were forced to leave their homeland; war crimes and massacres against Azerbaijani civilians in towns like Khojaly, which the Human Rights Watch described as the “largest massacre to date in the conflict”; Armenia planted over a million land mines in the occupied territories and refrains from sharing the maps of mine fields with Azerbaijan. In the period following the end of the Second Karabakh War after signing a Trilateral Statement by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russian Federation on 10 November 2020, Armenia continued its destructive and aggressive policy by illegally bringing through the Lachin road and planting the landmines in the territory of Azerbaijan. Although the war had ended in 2020, an inscription that they were made in Armenia in 2021 was found on a total of 2728 landmines, detected and neutralised in Kalbajar and Lachin districts, Karabakh region and the border area between Azerbaijan and Armenia. 270 Azerbaijani civilians and military personnel became victims of Armenian mines after the end of war on 10 November 2020.
6. The worst part after all twisted interpretations and falsifications is the conclusion by the author that India should transfer not only the weapons to Yerevan, which would undermine the process of establishing lasting peace in the region, but also to train Armenian armed forces, which he justified by virtue of being smart, defying every kind of logic.
In light of many more flagrant mistakes committed by Mr Kapil Komireddi in this article, I request you to publish on your website this letter in full as my right to reply for the sake of fairness, transparency and the noble principles of journalism.
Sincerely,
Ashraf Shikhaliyev
Ambassador of Azerbaijan to India
Author Kapil Komireddi’s response to the ambassador’s letter:
Ahraf Shikhaliyev, the Republic of Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Delhi, does a better job of discrediting his country’s revanchist cause than I ever could. His response to my article grants us a glimpse of the sinister basis of pan-Turkism. Shikhaliyev faults me for making a “reference to the so-called Armenian genocide”. Of all his grievances, this catches the breath because the atrocity which he dismisses as “so-called genocide” was the 20th century’s first calculated campaign to exterminate an entire people.
In 1914, Turkey was home to two million Armenians. Four years later, fewer than 200,000 remained. In the intervening period, at least 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks. The fact that Armenians and Armenia exist today is a tribute to their tenacity. If it were up to Turkey and its myrmidons, there would be no Armenians left. The persecution of Armenians by Turkey was so protracted that, just over a hundred years ago, all the citizens of Armenia’s compact capital, Yerevan, lived inside a single square-mile and the largest piece of permanently tenanted real estate in the city was its graveyard.
The horrors against Armenians inspired the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin the word genocide. Before that, however, they inspired Hitler, who regarded Turkey’s “extermination of the Armenians” with impunity as a model for his own plans to deport and massacre Europe’s Jews. Turkey’s butchery convinced the Fuhrer, as he admitted, that certain ethnicities can be treated as “mere biological plasticine”. The genocide of the Armenians by the votaries of Turkic supremacism is not a dispute. It is a historical fact. Those who refute it tell us who they really are.
Ambassador Shikhaliyev’s invocation of international law and UN resolutions, which are more complex than he would like us to believe, is difficult to reconcile with his country’s decision to stand with Pakistan on Kashmir. Has he seen the 1948 UN resolution calling Pakistan to vacate the portion of Kashmir it occupied? Azerbaijan just waged a war of aggression against Armenia in violation of international law and the UN charter, and the president of Azerbaijan bragged about it in a speech threatening more aggression against Armenia. Azerbaijan’s soldiers beheaded and summarily executed Armenian soldiers and civilians. The government of Azerbaijan is not an upholder of the law. It is a lawless aggressor.
Ambassador Shikhaliyev, aghast at my frank portrayal of Azerbaijan’s kleptocratic ruling family, assures us that no newspaper in Baku would publish anything so critical of the Indian leadership. He should read the Indian press, including my own commentary in ThePrint, if he wishes to see criticism of Indian politicians or simply grasp the distinction between democracies—however flawed—and dictatorships.
The ideology espoused by the ambassador and the regime he serves is poisoning his own country. Consider Akram Aylisli. The greatest and most revered Azeri writer alive, Akram Aylisli was once lavished with state honours, prizes, and medals. Then, a decade ago, he published a novella called Stone Dreams in which he wrote with great feeling about the pogroms of Armenians in the 1980s in the Azeri cities of Baku and Sumgait. The regime swiftly destroyed Aylisli. His honours were rescinded and his pension cancelled. Aylisli, now persona non grata, lives in detention.
Contrast this with the treatment accorded to Ramil Safarov, an Azeri soldier who hacked to death a sleeping Armenian lieutenant with an axe at a NATO-run training programme in Budapest in 2004. Safarov was convicted of the murder and extradited to Baku in 2012—the year in which Aylisli’s Stone Dreams was published—to serve the remainder of his sentence. But rather than punish him, the Azeri government feted Safarov as a hero. He was given eight years of backpay, a new flat, and promoted to the rank of major.
In accusing my piece of belonging to a “classical black PR genre”, the ambassador is imputing to me habits perfected by the Azeri State, which is notorious for corrupting Western politicians. Every time I write about its deeds, there is a flood of aggrieved letters and formal complaints—a tactic intended to overwhelm and exhaust publications into backing away from scrutinising Azerbaijan’s conduct—and rebuttals written by hacks at mercenary Western think tanks financed by Azerbaijan which are then shopped around to newspapers by expensive Western PR firms on Baku’s payroll.
Ambassador Shikhaliyev’s egregious genocide denial paves the way for the risible claim that Armenians are aliens settled in the South Caucasus by Nicholas I of Russia 200 years ago. A State that denies genocide and claims in earnest that one of the world’s most ancient civilisations—and its oldest Christian nation—is a hoax contrived into existence in the 19th century wants to seize control of a territory that has continuously been inhabited by Armenians for thousands of years. What will be the fate of Armenians if the ethno-supremacist champions of pan-Turkism are granted sovereignty over them? History is replete with answers. The West ignores them. India should not.
Views are personal.