Author: Alex Jidarian

With catastrophe and crises erupting all over the planet every week like never before, the ongoing horror in Artsakh, the Armenian enclave Stalin a century ago unethically handed over to Azerbaijan as Nagorno-Karabakh for authoritarian divide and conquer control, was hit on Tuesday last week with an Azeri “lightning strike” invasion against the heavily outmanned, outgunned Artsakh separatist militia, forced to surrender 24-hours later with another Russian brokered ceasefire. On the day a truce was brokered, Putin declared:

Peacekeepers are working very actively with all parties involved in this conflict. They are doing everything to protect civilians.

However, for one civilian, Russian peacekeepers apparently didn’t do enough. During the subsequent mass exodus of Armenians leaving Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian civilian Ruben Vardanyan, a billionaire investment mogul never made it out. Vardanyan, who up till last year was a Russian citizen and until February this year held a ministerial post within the Republic of Artsakh was arrested while attempting to travel the 3-mile Lachin corridor to the Republic of Armenia. Taken into custody by Azeri authorities, he was swiftly transported to a Baku prison and is now facing charges of financing terrorism. Per RT:

[Vardanyan’s] wife, Veronika Zonabend told journalists her husband was ‘taken prisoner’ alongside ‘thousands of other Armenians’ who were trying to leave the region. Azerbaijani authorities reported taking a senior leader of ‘Armenian separatists’ into custody at the Lachin checkpoint.

Over 200 Armenians were killed and 400 more injured. Even Russian peacekeepers returning from an observation post were fired upon by Azerbaijani troops, killing the Russian soldiers in their vehicle. On Thursday September 21st, the Kremlin reported Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev contacted Putin to apologize, claiming those responsible will be punished.

The three decade long Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev, who inherited his job upon his tyrannical father’s death in 1993, is now forcing Armenian families to either leave their ancient sacred homeland since the Bronze Age (many centuries prior to Azeri people even inhabiting this earth), or be subject to Azerbaijan’s deadly, genocidal rule should they choose to stay. As a result, the 120,000 Artsakh population must leave their home that’s been under siege, inhumanely cut off from food, fuel and medical supplies for the last ten months after Azerbaijan closed the 3-mile Lachin corridor on December 12th, 2022, separating Artsakh from its lifeline the Republic of Armenia. Artsakh Armenians are now forced to flee their homeland for their own safety, as thousands upon thousands are sadly leaving to start a new life in Armenia.

A Wednesday September 20th Moscow Times article cited two Russian independent news outlets Meduza and Vyorstka, reporting:

The Kremlin has ordered media and lawmakers to blame Armenia for Azerbaijan’s latest attack on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This reflects the cooling off of the once close diplomatic relations shared between the Russian Federation and Republic of Armenia since the Soros “velvet revolution” induced Armenian coup that brought Armenia’s President Nikol Pashinyan to power in Yerevan in 2018. Sadly and tragically, with Russia and Armenia’s falling out, the citizens of the breakaway Artsakh Republic have been hung out to dry by both nations and leaders. This schism backed by officialdom’s recognition that Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to the Baku government, overruling Artsakh Armenians declaration of independence in 1991 as an autonomous republic, vulturous Azerbaijan seized the moment last week. And so, Armenian families that have called this mountainous region their ancient ancestral homeland for millennia, for the first time in their history, now find themselves displaced refugees this week. They can thank the Soviet genocidal dictator Josef Stalin exactly one century ago for this grave and gross travesty of cruel justice.

In early September a feeble plea by the UN Security Council emergency meeting called for the Azeris to reopen the Lachin corridor, and in August a former International Criminal Court prosecutor’s report asserted that another Armenian genocide is already in progress with the willful starvation of Armenians allowed to unfold, with all food, fuel and medicine supplies cut off since last December by Azerbaijan. Despite Moscow deploying 2,000 Russian peacekeeping troops stationed on the Azeri-Artsakh frontline border, given Putin’s orders to passively stand down and allow this humanitarian crisis to grow worse the last ten months, in the end, the smug, opportunistic Aliyev knew the rest of the world would simply remain impotent while Baku’s military invasion of Artsakh last week would finish off any last Armenian resistance attempting in vain to defend their historic mountainous region against the advancing, well-armed Azeri aggressors… another sad and tragic ending for yet more persecuted Christian Armenians for simply being born in the wrong place and the wrong time.

Bolstered by the world feebly paying only lip service to this inhumane genocide-in-the-making or feebly looking the other way, Azerbaijan as well as Turkey harbor deep historic animosities and even hatred toward the world’s first Christian nation-state as their sworn enemy. A century ago, Turkey massacred 1.5 million Armenians in last century’s first genocide. Aliyev has vowed to wipe Armenians off the face of the earth in the past. As recent as September 26th, RT quotes the notorious human rights violator Aliyev claiming Armenians are “not even worthy of being servants.” Other hateful Ilham statements include:

We are also informing the world community, the world public that not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also present-day Armenia are our historical lands.

Few Armenians who value their life will remain in Nagorno-Karabakh, but they unfortunately remain in this madman’s crosshairs even as Republic of Armenia residents.

As a NATO member, fellow Islamic nation Turkey provided ample military aid and support to oil-rich Azerbaijan with overwhelming firepower in drones, artillery and US-made F-16 fighter jets during 2020’s September to November 44-day war. Right afterwards, Turkey’s Erdogan and Aziri Aliyev rubbed it in on December 10, 2020, proudly participating in their military victory parade, surveying their land grab while gloating over Azeris having taken control of more than 70% of Artsakh territory, leaving a broken, more isolated breakaway republic virtually defenseless in last week’s aggressive campaign.

So, it was only a matter of time before the next Azerbaijan attack on September 19th would be launched to finish off Artsakh. Seizing the celebratory moment yet again on Monday September 25th, 2023, Erdogan met with Aliyev at yet another onetime Armenian ancient homeland, one that’s been culturally erased and destroyed of all historic remnants of medieval Christian churches and enshrined artifacts by Islamic Azeris since today Nakhichevan also belongs to Azerbaijan as its autonomous exclave, where the Islamic duo again gloated over their latest conquest with another groundbreaking opening ceremony. A June 22, 2023 Mirror Spectator headline declared:

Report by Caucasus Heritage Watch Shows Near Total Destruction of Armenian Heritage in Nakhichevan

And now the same sad fate awaits Artsakh with thousands more Armenians forced to flee their ancient homeland. David Babayan, advisor to Artsakh Republic’s President Samvel Shahramanyan lamented in a Reuters article:

Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine-point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands. The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilized world.

On Sunday September 24th, the Baku authoritarian government finally opened the Lachin corridor after keeping it closed for nearly a year to allow hungry, malnourished, desperate Armenian refugees in Artsakh to board buses in a caravan to escape to the Republic of Armenia. Just one day later on Monday, already 6,650 residents and by Tuesday 28,120 had already somberly left their ancestral home for good. The Armenians of Artsakh fear severe repression and ethnic purging, motivating all or the vast majority to flee, undeterred by Azeri assurances guaranteeing their rights as “citizens of Azerbaijan.” Adding insult to injury, while Artsakh Armenians awaited rationed fuel to be able to depart their homeland, under suspicious still undisclosed circumstances, the fuel depot exploded on Monday night September 25th, killing 125 more Armenians and injuring nearly 300 of the fleeing refugees.

After the latest Baku invasion last Tuesday the 19th, the Washington Post on Monday September 25th concluded:

Moscow was unable to prevent the military operation by Azerbaijan, to protect the Armenians living in the region or to enforce the terms of the 2020 cease-fire, which called for maintaining a highway that connects [Artsakh capital] Stepanakert and Armenia. 

Not so much unable as unwilling. Clearly, with an axe to grind against Pashinyan, Putin wrote off the hapless Armenians of Artsakh as did Pashinyan, though he has his hands full suddenly taking in up to 120,000 refugees in his country with a struggling economy. Again, ordered to blame Armenia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defensively claimed:

We understand the emotional intensity of the moment, but we categorically disagree with the attempt to put the responsibility on the Russian side, and especially on the Russian peacekeepers, who are showing real heroism, performing their functions in accordance with the mandate that is in place.

Meanwhile, pro-Western Armenian President Nikol Pashinyan, whose failure in 2020 to come to the military aid of his fellow Armenians in Artsakh, drew thousands of Yerevan protestors in the streets demanding his resignation. Speaking on Monday with Samantha Power, head of the CIA cutout US Agency for International Development (USAID) and a US State Department representative, Pashinyan regretted:

We tried to inform the international community that this ethnic cleansing was going to happen, but unfortunately we failed to prevent it.

Pashinyan felt abandoned by both Russia for not honoring its security agreement as well as by the Russian led six nation Collective Security Treaty Organization while Moscow officials blame Pashinyan for “recognizing Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Karabakh last fall” and embracing the West after placing Pashinyan in power in the 2019 coup. Yet you will never hear Pashinyan blaming the US for this pathetic sobering outcome, as the US also simply let it all passively happen. So, as a Western pawn, Pashinyan once in as Armenia’s leader, clearly pivoted to America, engaging just last week in joint military exercises with the US, with the objective to train his security forces to respond not to an external threat or enemy but to quell an uprising from the enemy within, his own angry Armenian citizens.

Pashinyan also joined the Rome Statute in accordance with the International Criminal Court that last year issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on the bogus claim of forcing deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. In actuality, the children were at risk of becoming sex trafficking victims. In this tit for tat blame game for the sad fate of the Artsakh Armenians, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized Pashinyan for “unacceptable [verbal] attacks on Russia” that were “inspired by the West,” intent on further damaging Moscow-Yerevan relations.

With a majority of more than 65,000 of the 120,000 total Artsakh population already having fled their homeland, on Thursday September 28th the now former Artsakh President Samvel Shahramanyan issued the decree ordering:

The dissolution of all state institutions and their branches by January 1, 2024. The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) ceases to exist.

Finally, aside from the historical context of Armenians again getting the short shrift, ethnically, geopolitically and religiously, overpowered by apparent eternal Muslim enemies on each side, the loss of Artsakh to Azerbaijan holds enormous geopolitical, even global significance as well. A land bridge between Turkey and Azerbaijan is established, without Armenia, Russia, Iran or China standing in the geographical way of a Pan-Turkism with inclusion of the 5 stans of Central Asia – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Turkish President Erdogan’s wet dream is reviving the Ottoman Empire glory days, and a coalescing emergence of this Turkic bloc with vast natural resources along the old Silk Road trade route from the western border of China, Xinjiang Province of the Turkic Islamic Uyghurs, to the Azeri province in northeastern Iran. Biden during last week’s UN General Assembly met for this very reason with the 5 Central Asian stans. This untapped potential power bloc economically as well as the geopolitical wild card, could pose problems for the West, China, Russia, Iran, as well as the little powerless landlocked Christian Armenia.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.

The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!).

STEPANAKERT, Azerbaijan, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh began a mass exodus by car on Sunday towards Armenia after Azerbaijan defeated the breakaway region's fighters in a conflict dating from the Soviet era.

The Nagorno-Karabakh leadership told Reuters the region's 120,000 Armenians did not want to live as part of Azerbaijan for fear of persecution and ethnic cleansing.

Those with fuel had started to drive down the Lachin corridor towards the border with Armenia, according to a Reuters reporter in the Karabakh capital, known as Stepanakert by Armenia and Khankendi by Azerbaijan.

Reuters pictures showed dozens of cars driving out of the capital at night towards the corridor's mountainous curves.

The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.

The Armenians are not accepting Azerbaijan's promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated.

"Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands," David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters.

"The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilised world," Babayan said. "Those responsible for our fate will one day have to answer before God for their sins."

The Armenian leaders of Karabakh said that all those made homeless by the Azerbaijani military operation and wanting to leave would be escorted to Armenia by Russian peacekeepers.

Reuters reporters near the village of Kornidzor on the Armenian border saw some heavily laden cars pass into Armenia. Armenia said 377 refugees had arrived by Sunday evening.

It was unclear when the bulk of the population might move to Armenia.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has faced calls to resign for failing to save Karabakh. In an address to the nation, he said some aid had arrived but a mass exodus looked inevitable.

"If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity," he said, according to an official transcript.

The situation could change the delicate balance of power in the South Caucasus region, a patchwork of ethnicities crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the United States, Turkey and Iran vie for influence.

Last week's Azerbaijani victory appears to end one of the decades-old "frozen conflicts" of the Soviet Union's dissolution. President Ilham Aliyev said his "iron fist" had consigned the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karabakh to history and that the region would be turned into a "paradise".

Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 wounded in the Azerbaijani military operation.

Nagorno-Karabakh lies in an area that over centuries has come under the sway of Persians, Turks, Russians, Ottomans and Soviets. It was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. In Soviet times it was designated an autonomous region within Azerbaijan.

As the Soviet Union crumbled, the Armenians there threw off nominal Azeri control and captured neighbouring territory in what is now known as the First Karabakh War. From 1988-1994 about 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people, mostly Azeris, displaced.

In 2020, after decades of skirmishes, Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, won a decisive 44-day Second Karabakh War, recapturing territory in and around Karabakh. That war ended with a Russian-brokered peace deal that Armenians accuse Moscow of failing to guarantee.

The Armenian authorities in the region said late on Saturday that about 150 tonnes of humanitarian cargo from Russia and another 65 tonnes of flour shipped by the International Committee of the Red Cross had arrived in the region.

With 2,000 peacekeepers in the region, Russia said that under the terms of the ceasefire six armoured vehicles, more than 800 small arms, anti-tank weapons and portable air defence systems, as well as 22,000 ammunition rounds, had been handed in by Saturday.

Space for 40,000 people from Karabakh had been prepared in Armenia. Azerbaijan, which is mainly Muslim, has said the Armenians, who are Christian, can leave if they want.

Pashinyan blamed Russia publicly on Sunday for failing to do enough for Armenia which he said would review its alliance with Moscow.

"Some of our partners are increasingly making efforts to expose our security vulnerabilities, putting at risk not only our external, but also internal, security and stability, while violating all norms of etiquette and correctness in diplomatic and interstate relations, including obligations assumed under treaties," Pashinyan said in his Sunday address.

Russian officials say Pashinyan is to blame for his own mishandling of the crisis, and have repeatedly said that Armenia, which borders Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia, has few other friends in the region.

As Goorjian's new film comes to an end, a title card comes on screen that reads, "Dedicated to my grandfather." Amerikatsi is already based on true events, taking place in a tense post-WWII era, but Goorjian takes it a step further and uses personal memories to help weave a heartwarming, sometimes tragic tale. "Many Armenians who came to America, who survived the genocide, they reacted in different ways," Goorjian told MovieWeb, continuing:

"My grandfather went the route of wanting to just shut that off and have his children grow up to be American. And I remember as a child, that he would never talk about the genocide, he only would tell me, 'You need to be happy.' The Bobby McFerrin song, [my grandfather] used to say that before Bobby McFerrin used to say, 'Don't worry, be happy.' And he always reinforced that to me. So in a way, I dedicated to him because the character Charlie is really who he was."

Amerikatsi is also a special project because of its timing on the production end. These are strange times we're living in, given the global pandemic. And as Goorjian told us, they began shooting his movie in March 2020. "Five days into shooting, and we had to lock down," he said. "And I ended up getting stuck in Armenia for about seven months. Myself and my cinematographer were from the States; most of the crew and cast were all based in Armenia. But yeah, we were there. It was crazy."

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In Amerikatsi, Goorjian plays the imprisoned American who ultimately forms an unlikely bond with a guard living nearby. Tigran is his name, and he's played to perfection by Hovik Keuchkerian. While discussing the complications presented by the pandemic, Goorjian noted how, in real life, Keuchkerian's mother fell ill with the virus in Madrid. All his scenes were eventually shot, but it sounds like it took some time. Goorjian continued to detail the shooting-during-COVID experience:

"We were in lockdown for a good two months. And then the government said, 'OK, we'll let you shoot just the scenes in the cell because it involves just you and a few crew members.' So there's not too many people around. And I remember that day, you know, after two months of everybody waiting to see what's going to happen, that was one of the most the happiest days on set I've ever experienced. People were so just thrilled to get to do something."

"And so, shooting all of those sequences was challenging, of course, but I mean, the pandemic actually made the film a better film in the long run," added Goorjian. "All of the challenges that it threw our way, we did our best to — like [my character] Charlie — just find the opportunity within it."