Artsakh Emergency
Azerbaijan has launched a full-scale genocide against indigenous Armenians.
Content warning for Armenians: upsetting imagery and discussions of genocide
After months of brutally starving the ~120,000 indigenous Armenians residing in Artsakh (“Nagorno-Karabakh”), Azerbaijan has begun to launch rockets at, shoot down, and ethnically cleanse Artsakh’s civilian population with the express goal of ridding the land of its traditional custodians—Armenians.
The Blockade
On 3rd December, 2022, an Azerbaijani-instigated military blockade was initiated at Berdzor (“Lachin”) Corridor, the only road connecting Artsakh, Armenia’s easternmost region, to Armenia and the rest of the world, under fabricated pretenses of “environmental activism”. This escalated to diminishing supplies, food, and medical care, reaching a fever pitch recently with starvation-related deaths and lost pregnancies whilst Azerbaijani soldiers shot livestock and kidnapped Armenian soldiers. Russian “peacekeepers” were prevented from imparting help, or were oft-times seemingly unbothered to, all but sitting by and twiddling their thumbs as their supposed “ally” and “fellow Christian-majority nation” hovered on the brink of a genocidal attack.
It is no longer hovering.
1915 never ended.
Historical and Geopolitical Background
In the early 1900s, up to 1.2 million Armenians were brutally massacred by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire (a region Armenians are indigenous to and ethnic Turks are not). This took place alongside the murder of up to a million Greek-speaking Anatolians, including 350,000 Pontians (my father’s people), and some 300,000 Assyrians—all equally indigenous to that Asia Minor peninsula.
During Soviet times, when dictator Joseph Stalin endeavoured to get in good with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the “founding father” of the Republic of Türkiye following Ottoman dissolution, he [Stalin] arbitrarily pawned over historically Armenian southern and eastern regions of Nakhichevan and Artsakh to Azerbaijan in order to establish direct Azerbaijani SSR borders with Türkiye.
Under Azerbaijani control, extensive Azeri-led pogroms—genocides—were perpetrated against the Armenian population of Azerbaijan, leading to an almost complete extermination of indigenous Armenians across Nakhichevan and most of Azerbaijan in the 1980s–1990s.
In 2020, Azerbaijan’s despot Ilham Aliyev violated the UN ceasefire and launched a full-scale 44-day war against the Artsakh region of Armenia, killing almost 4000 Armenians and taking an estimated 40 prisoners of war. This was ended with a useless “ceasefire” which Azerbaijan continuously violated.
This tyrannical settler-colonial nation wherein activists and freedom fighters are consistently killed asserts false, ridiculous ownership of ancient lands which lay peopled and civilised thousands of years before their Turkic ancestors arrived. Lands touched to the roots by Armenian hands. And now, unchecked by so-called Russian “peacekeepers” and assisted by Türkiye and Israel—fellow colonisers and terrorisers of indigenous SWANA, Azerbaijanis are slaughtering, raping, and driving 120,000 indigenous Armenians from their millennia-old home. In the name of what? Pan-Turkism? Domination? Land?
The price of your precious oil is blood, West. The price of your precious oil is an ancient culture and people. The price of your precious oil are children.
Act!
See my LinkTree for the Humanitarianism tab. There you’ll first and foremost find a link to information about Artsakh/Armenia.
If possible, donate to or support in some way @all_for_armenia (website) who are doing lifesaving grassroot work in Artsakh, and visit accounts of @yerazadcoalition (LinkTree), @bridgingtheborders (LinkTree with donation link), and @tired.armenianjew for resources and information, but DO NOT expect emotional labour during this horrific time. DO NOT demand ANYTHING of Armenians. DO NOT DARE speak foully to Armenians—send all your “concerns” to me if you can’t help yourselves.
NON-ARMENIANS: share this publication and amplify Armenian voices on social media.
I’m tired of silence and I’m done with begging sweetly for Western attention for Anatolia and the Caucasus and “The Middle East”—my homes as an indigenous Pontian-Laz-Homshetsi Anatolian on my father’s side.
Armenian siblings and friends, please stay safe if at all possible. Please stay alive.
I wish it was enough to simply tell Artsakhtsis that I’m out there.
~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳