The Hitavada: No reports on harm to Garabagh Armenians after Azerbaijan's anti-terrorist mesaures

The Indian newspaper The Hitavada published an article on the Armenian narrative of the "genocide" in Garabagh. Caliber.Az reprints the piece.

"It is a tragedy, but it is not a genocide. In a single week, almost all of the 1,20,000 Armenians who lived in the enclave in western Azerbaijan called Garabagh have fled across the border into Armenia. Most say they don’t expect ever to go home again. Yet there’s something odd about the scene at the border-crossing point. They arrive in their own cars, piled high with their belongings, and claim that they have been ethnically cleansed, but they don’t tell tales of horror and there’s nobody chasing them. Indeed, the Azerbaijani government officially says that they are welcome to remain, and it has allowed a UN fact-finding mission to see what has been happening in the enclave. There have been no credible reports of harm coming to Armenian residents of the breakaway republic since the 24-hour war ended in an Armenian defeat on September 20. The Armenian-only ‘Republic of Garabagh’ will officially cease to exist at the end of the year, but the Azerbaijani regime stresses that the residents continue to have the legal status of Azerbaijani citizens.

Thirty years of hot and cold war is bound to have made the ‘refugees’ nervous, but isn’t this mass exodus a bit premature? Not if you listen to Nikol Pashinyan, the Prime Minister of Armenia (the actual country, not the enclave within Azerbaijan that has now been reclaimed by that country). 'This is a direct act of ethnic cleansing, something we had long been warning the international community about,' said Pashinyan.

Others go even further, using the word ‘genocide’. Luis Moreno Ocampo, for one: the former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has just written a piece in the ‘Washington Post’ condemning 'the Armenian genocide of 2023.'

There’s no killing going on in Garabagh – but there are resonances. Pashinyan has to go with what he’s got, so he says ‘ethnic cleansing’ and leaves it to ‘useful idiots’ elsewhere (like Moreno Campo) to say ‘genocide’. But saying it doesn’t make it true.

When Moscow’s rule weakened local clashes began and grew into a full-scale ethnic war. Some 1,86,000 Azerbaijanis had fled from Armenia by the ceasefire of 1994. Not only were all 48,000 Azerbaijanis living in Garabagh driven out. So were at least half a million Azerbaijanis from all the areas around Garabagh. That illegal state entity was never recognised by any sovereign state, not even Armenia, although the latter helped it a lot with arms and money in the early days.

All the Armenians of Garabagh are leaving without even waiting to find out if the victors will keep their promise to treat them like any other Azerbaijani citizens," the article says.