Opinion: Unwarranted attacks on Armenia proper have brought brutality, death and a threat of eradication to the Armenian people, once again. The U.S must condemn and halt support to Azerbaijan’s attacks if there is to be a more permanent ceasefire, at the least.
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Artillery and drone attacks inside Armenian borders near the tourist town Jermuk carried out by Azerbaijani forces over this past week have left more than a hundred servicemen and women needlessly slain, along with one civilian. The worst truth is that this has been boiled up with years of blood and will spill over for the foreseeable future.

The attacks were staged from the Nagorno-Karabakh region east of Armenia and west of Azerbaijan, the land still known to the Armenian people as Artsakh. This area was disputed for decades as both countries fought for control of the area after the fall of their then-conjoining Soviet Union. The area, historically Armenian, became an autonomous oblast within Azerbaijan territory (through Soviet orders), and a 2015 census showed that 99.7% of the region’s inhabitants were still indigenous Armenian. 

Artsakh has made formal bids to join Armenia since  1918. However, the bid in 1988 was met with pogroms of Armenians within Azerbaijan in 1990. Sporadic combat over the region has ensued ever since.

Though, the most recent attacks have no goal of control over disputed territory: Azerbaijan has begun shelling established Armenian cities and likely has plans for further invasion based on their motives and movement.

Armenians’ main fear stems from generational scars dealt to them over the last century. The genocide of their people, carried out by the then Ottoman Empire, beginning in 1915, left an estimated 1.5 million Armenian people dead, countless others scattered around the globe and historic Armenian territory shrunk. Descendant of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, to this day disputes the number of people lost in the senseless massacres and the systematic approach to it.

Inheritors of heinous history need to do what they can to condemn and repair that past (the U.S. is terrible at this, I know). Take Germany, which does nothing to hide the atrocities of the former Nazi party and has paid reparations to those affected by the actions of said party. Meanwhile, the Turkish government muddles the history of the genocide –– and reparations to descendants of those lost in the genocide were paid for by outside insurance companies –– which many turned out to be fraudulent.

The attitude of Turkey regarding the genocide is important to note as they fully support Azerbaijan in their attacks on Armenia. Not only are they allies, but they share some of the same anti-Armenian rhetoric. Only months after the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 (littered with war crimes and torture), Azerbaijan opened the Military Trophies Park, propping “cartoonish mannequins” of Armenian soldiers and other captured military equipment. Cultural Armenian sites like churches and graveyards in the territory taken by Azerbaijan during this war have been demolished. There is no strategic gain from actions like these, only the degradation of history.

The former mayor of Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, stated in a meeting in Bavaria, Germany, in 2005: ‘‘Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians. You, Nazis, already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, right? You should be able to understand us.’’ The current president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, Tweeted in 2015: “Armenia is not even a colony, it is not even worthy of being a servant.”

This conflict is no longer a territorial matter or a dispute of national birthright, and it most likely never was. This is the result of continued oppression and malice against a group of people on their sovereign soil by invaders justifying violence: an attempt at erasure of people from their indigenous land.

A view I’ve seen expressed online is that because Armenia is CSTO allies with Russia, they should not be helped due to the actions of their ally. I want to ask people holding this opinion what they would prefer a smaller country facing threats of invasion by their neighbors to do. Do they want Armenia to wag their finger at one of the strongest military forces in the world at this time? Without their support, Armenia leaves itself even more vulnerable to invasion. To me, that’s an alliance out of necessity and survival, with a lack of alternatives. The people of the country don’t deserve to suffer from the alliance they don’t completely support.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has condemned the aggression of Azerbaijan’s military, and representative Adam Schiff has introduced a resolution to congress to halt all aid and trade with Azerbaijan. I urge our politicians to stand with these sentiments; we can’t pick and choose which acts of unwarranted aggression to circumvent and which to condemn.