Author: Emil Lazarian

As night fell over the University chapel last Thursday, about 50 students, faculty, and community members gathered to commemorate the lives lost during the mass exodus of over 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the breakaway state of Nagorno-Karabakh following Azerbaijan’s recent invasion. Until this month, upwards of 120,000 Armenians lived in the contested region and their departure in the face of fears of ethnic cleansing has been referred to as a cultural genocide.

On Sept. 19, Azerbaijan launched a military attack into Nagorno-Karabakh, known by ethnic Armenians as Artsakh, and took control of the region, following three decades of territorial conflict and a months long Azerbaijani blockade. As of late September, over 80 percent of the region's inhabitants had fled their homes, and the government of Nagorno-Karabakh announced that it would dissolve itself by January 2024. While Azerbaijani officials have denied reprisal against Armenians, Armenians have fled in the face of longtime violent anti-Armenian rhetoric and policy from the Azerbaijani government.

The vigil was organized by the Princeton Armenian Society (PAS) “in remembrance of those who sacrificed their lives for the freedom and self-determination of the land’s Armenian population,” according to the flyer for the event. It marked an important moment in the relatively new society's efforts to serve Armenian interests on Princeton's campus.

At the event, PAS Co-President Hayk Yengibaryan ’26, spoke about the cultural importance of Artsakh. Yengibaryan shared that Artsakh was an Armenian cultural and religious hotbed, the site of the first Armenian school in the early 400s, and the birthplace of the Armenian alphabet.

“This vigil was to come and commemorate not only the rich history of this region, but also all the fallen soldiers, the innocent civilians, the women, the children, the fathers, the sons, the daughters, and everyone who passed away due to the attack,” he said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. 

Yengibaryan is an associate Sports editor for the ‘Prince.’

Among the attendees to the event were University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, representatives who spoke on behalf of Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ-06) and Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ-04), and the University’s Orthodox Chaplain Father Daniel Skvir ’66 who led a closing prayer

PAS Co-President Katya Hovnanian ’25 said at the vigil that the seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh marks “the second darkest moment” in Armenian history, following the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire following World War I. 

“Our diaspora is bonded by this trauma — the Armenian Genocide — that happened over a century ago, and that was recognized just recently by the United States and 33 other countries,” she said. “That trauma brings us together, but it’s also such a tight knit community. It’s like this vast network, and we’re all truly brothers and sisters.”

Since 2015, the Princeton Armenian Society has represented the Armenian diaspora community on campus. After its founding, the PAS experienced a period of inactivity from 2018 to 2020. 

“When I was a freshman here in 2019, I thought I was the only Armenian student on campus, which wasn't true,” Lena Hoplamazian ’24 said. “It wasn't until [Hovnanian] came in 2021 and kind of rebooted the Armenian society that there actually was any type of student organizing or community on campus.” 

Born in New York City, Hovnanian grew up in Armenia and participated in the protests during the peaceful 2018 Velvet Revolution which displaced a longtime political leader, thus, in Hovnanian's opinion, bringing “democracy to Armenia.” In 2020, during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, a 44 day conflict in which Azerbaijan regained control of most of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven thousand soldiers and civilians were killed, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that Hovnanain ran delivered humanitarian aid to displaced Armenians, along with serving other global causes like helping survivors of a port blast in Lebanon. 

“Then I come to college, and I’m completely in a frenzy. I just witnessed the most atrocious event in Armenia’s history, and no one on campus seemed to be aware of it,” she said. “Very few [Armenians] were here, and we didn’t feel like our voice was supported just because we were so few.” 

Hovnanian said that PAS “tried [their] best to get dinners every week to talk about Armenia, its history, and its culture,” and brought the Ambassador of Armenia to the United States, Lilit Kamo Makunts, to speak on campus. Members attribute PAS’s growth to the leadership of Hovnanian and Yengibaryan in the past year. 

Yengibaryan was born in Armenia’s capital city but grew up in Los Angeles, home to the largest Armenian population in the United States.

“When I came in as a first year student, I was wanting to get involved right away because I was coming from a city where there were so many Armenians and there were constantly events and advocacy happening,” he said. 

In the month before Yengibaryan submitted his application to Princeton, the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia hosted a talk with Khazar Ibrahim, the Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the United States. 

“I immediately was outraged about this event happening at a campus that I wanted to attend,” Yengibaryan said. “[In my application], I wrote about how if I come to Princeton, I may even challenge the powers at Princeton and [use] my academic freedom of speech to challenge things that I don't necessarily agree with.” 

Yengibaryan said that the University admitted six Armenian students into the Class of 2026 which has enabled them to restart PAS.  

“We were able to figure out how to get funding, start an Instagram page, start outreaching to students and kind of being present and putting ourselves out on campus,” he said. “We’ve been able to grow tremendously, and an event like this [vigil] is a top reason why. It goes to show how much we’ve grown in the past year and two months.”

This year marks the first year the organization has formed an executive board with a vice-president, treasurer, marketing, social, and outreach positions.

“We want everyone to feel like they have a role in our society, that they're doing something for the good of the Armenian cause, and spreading our culture and our history and our roots to so many other people on such a diverse and beautiful campus,” Yengibaryan said.

With ongoing conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the issue has been key in the organization's events. In September of last year, PAS collaborated with Armenian students from 15 other universities to write an open letter to “denounce Azerbaijan’s invasion of Armenia” in “defense of democracy.”  Since then, they’ve brought speakers on Armenian topics to campus, hosted an Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day Lecture in April, and have continued to collaborate with the University of Pennsylvania’s Armenian Students Association. 

“We have a lot of plans to continue to build off of this momentum, and one of the issues that we are trying to tackle as a society is actually within our Near Eastern Studies Department,” Yengibaryan said.

In their interviews with the ‘Prince,’ PAS members mentioned that Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies has no courses, programs, or professors who specialized in Armenian studies, in contrast to other leading institutions such as Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. 

In a guest contribution to the ‘Prince’ last year calling on Princeton to formally recognize the Armenian Genocide, Hovnanian described what she views as anti-Armenia bias in the history of Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies: 

“Princeton’s Near Eastern Department is notorious among Armenians,” she wrote. “In 1996, a New York Times article exposed links between large payments of the Turkish Government and the appointment of Professor Emeritus Heath Lowry, a genocide denialist, as the Chair of Princeton’s Near Eastern Department. Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, another notable historian of Turkey and Middle Eastern Studies, and a peer of Lowry at Princeton’s Near Eastern Department, refused to call the atrocities a genocide — he said there was a lack of evidence in the Ottoman archives.”

“As a leading institution, we feel that the school needs to address its Armenian presence on campus, and rightfully, hire faculty and teach Armenian courses,” she said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’

PAS member Mikaela Avakian ’24 is pursuing a certificate in Near Eastern Studies.

“It’s important to fill these academic [gaps] in regard to Armenian studies so that people can know what Armenia is beyond the Armenian Genocide, that we are not a country that’s merely gone through trauma, but that we’ve made real-time contributions culturally, politically, literally,” she said. 

Avakian added that as “an ancient kingdom, a New Republic, the first Christian Nation, and one of the ex-Soviet Bloc countries, there’s various academic angles from which you can approach Armenian studies.”

In the absence of Armenian studies, Avakian said PAS creates “an environment where talking about Armenian politics, Armenian language, Armenian culture is prioritized.” She inherited most of her knowledge of Armenia through personal research and her family’s stories of Artsakh, which she recounted at Thursday’s vigil: 

“I always took pride in the fact that my family, my ancestors, had cultivated a heritage and an identity around their land, a land that existed outside of the political imagination,” she said. “I've never been to Artsakh, but my memory is veneered with… images, tales and stories that keep me oriented to this land, to my ancestors’ land.” 

Avakian concluded with her grandmother’s words: “My child, keep your head high, stand strong. Everything will be as it should.”

“I am heartbroken and I know that I'm not alone in this heartbreak as such is the burden that weighs on the hearts of all Armenians, on the hearts of all that are gathered here in solidarity today,” she said. “Even still, even in the most trying of times, we must live with hope and prayer.”

Elisabeth Stewart is a News contributor for the 'Prince.'

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

We are currently living in the most multipolar and unstable period the world has seen since August 1914.  It took two world wars to undo the consequences of the last period. The rules-based international order as we know it today is being challenged, and for the first time in the 80 years since the end of World War II, wars are being fought that take no notice and don’t bother with the pretense of that order. The events that began unfolding in the countries of Azerbaijan and Armenia in September 2020 were the first unvarnished challenge to the legitimacy of that world order, and the Western world has not answered that challenge. 

While the history of the conflict goes back for centuries, its relevance for the West begins in 1994 following the collapse of the Soviet Union what is now known as the first Karabakh war ended in April 1994 with a negotiated ceasefire between the Azeris and the indigenous ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.  The ceasefire was followed by commitment from all parties to a mediated settlement under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mink Group. The terms of that ceasefire were to freeze the line of contact that would leave just under 20% of what was Soviet Azerbaijan’s territory under control of the local Armenians who were supported by the Republic of Armenia, pending a negotiated settlement on self-governance status, resettlement of refugees, and any exchange of territories.

Within the OSCE framework, Azerbaijan and Armenia along with three mediators composed of the United States, France, and Russia, proceeded to conduct many rounds of negotiations over the next 27 years. The lack of substantive progress led the conflict to take on the ominous status of a “frozen conflict”, with occasional clashes along the line of contact.  In September 2020 the situation changed.  On September 27,2020 Azerbaijan launched a war to retake Karabakh in what became known as the 44-day war or the second Karabakh war.  

Russia negotiated a ceasefire in November 2020, which was followed by nearly three years of clashes and blockades and an ineffective Russian peace-keeping mission. Azerbaijan justified the war as a resolution to the frozen conflict. It completed its conquest to take over Karabakh with a week-long campaign beginning on September 19 this year. At the conclusion of this crusade, Azerbaijan had established total control of the region of Karabakh and the expulsion of the entire Armenian population of 120,000 people.

The immediate consequence of the failure to respond to Azerbaijan’s rejection of its international commitments with the support of Turkey, a NATO member, and Israel, a NATO partner, have been earth shattering. First, it is the complete eviction of all 120,000 remaining Armenians in the region that has been populated by ethnic Armenians for more than two millennia. Azerbaijan committed an ethnic cleansing within essentially one week. The speed of the events was such that the Western powers did not have time to issue reactions through their bureaucratic processes before the ethnic cleansing was complete. 

Moreover, the very public support of a NATO state and NATO partner made any Western intervention a minefield.  With Turkish troops directly involved and Israeli weapons on the front line, both of those states had the power to block most any coordinated effort from Western powers to react.  For the first time, Western-aligned states were explicitly on the side of undermining an international conflict resolution process. 

The consequences of this profound failure to protect the rules-based international order will reverberate in generations to come. The September 2020 Azerbaijani military offensive against ethnic Armenians was executed summarily. Azerbaijan made no effort to seek international legitimation or had any concern that an international reaction would follow. The lack of Western response emboldened Russia to leverage the same pseudo-legalistic language used by Azerbaijan to legitimize its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

Russia did not drum up support for Armenians through the UN. It did not activate Russia’s own alliance structure under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). This alliance of six post-Soviet states — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan — formed in 2002 proved to be useless for Armenians. Russia did not even make a serious propaganda effort focused on the international community to identify a clear casus belli. In essence, Russia did not bother with a single step to legitimize its invasion. Even in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was done under the auspices of an intervention in a civil war, like the justification used by the United States for its engagement in Vietnam.

Every setback to the legitimacy of the institutions the West relies upon to provide peace and order increases danger.  The biggest danger is that state actors start bypassing the international system to pursue their goals.  Rules-based orders give us predictability. They create a sandbox, which limits the realm of the possible. If things cannot be confined within that sandbox, then we are increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). This VUCA world is dangerous in the age of nuclear weapons. 

The rise of VUCA at a time globalized economies upon which billions depend for food, water, fuel and basic goods, such unpredictability is frightening. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh is a humanitarian disaster. The fact that it has gone completely unopposed is a terrible precedent. Azerbaijan’s decision to wage war to resolve the frozen conflict sets an example for others that it will be nearly impossible to walk back without a unified front from the West. This precedent will continually be used to embolden the use of violence to resolve conflict, without regard to international norms and will make the entire world worse off in the process.

[The views expressed in this article are the authors and do not represent the views of the US Government or any company.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

https://www.fairobserver.com/world-news/new-armenian-ethnic-cleansing-is-bad-for-the-world/

The conflict has been happening for a long time, but the major trigger for a starter was the end of the Russian Revolution and the fall of the URSS. Nagorno-Karabakh is the victim of this whole situation, a territory where most of the population is Armenian, but it has a different country that controls it, Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a region with a lot of history. The area carries a meaning in its name, “The dark garden” and it settled many battles throughout the historical events of humanity. The place was part of the Armenian Kingdom in ancient times, but the territorial control has changed over the years, going through Arabic and Persian domination. And lastly, in 1813, the Russian Empire.

However, the Armenian and Azerbaijani conflict started way after that, with the Russian Revolution and the fall of the czarism. Nevertheless, with Russia (URSS) in control of the political decisions, it was established that Nagorno-Karabakh would have an autonomous government, but it would be still integrated with Azerbaijan. 

After the URSS collapse, the Armenians got a huge advantage in the conflict, and after 30,000 deaths the Russian government held a ceasefire in 1994. With the majority of the population being Armenian, they self-proclaimed a republic but without national recognition.

Years passed with cold conflicts, but the conflict resurfaced in 2020 when Azerbaijan took complete advantage of the war and wanted to dominate the territory, which made this battle extended until nowadays.

During 2020, the pandemic year, a new outcome happened for this warfare. With Azerbaijan’s advantage, there were 44 bloody days of conflict, leaving 6,500 deaths and an Azerbaijani victory.

 On September 19th, 2022, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive to put into practice what they classified as “anti-terrorism measures”, causing 400 deaths on both sides (Armenian and Azerbaijani). Still, in 2022, Azerbaijan began a new military project, called Lachine Corridor, a 5km area. This plan would be a way to supervise the communication of the Armenian Authority to its people. The Armenian citizens who live in Nagorno-Karabakh assert that the corridor is a way to receive medicine, food, and fuel, however, the Azerbaijani Administration denies this statement and affirms that the rival nation uses it for gunrunning.

Finally, on September 28th, Samvel Shahramanian the Artsakh leader of the self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, announced that from the 1st of 2024, all state institutions would cease to exist, meaning that the Armenian authority would be none in that region. Also, according to the leader’s words, the decision to dissolve the state was based on the “priority of ensuring the physical security and vital interests of the people.”

After so many attacks and the conceded defeat to Azerbaijan, more than 120,000 ethnic Armenians gathered what they could and fled. Azerbaijan claims that the population could stay as long as they accepted new conditions, however, the Nagorno-Karabakh representative said that “ethnic cleansing” could occur if they remained despite following the orders of the new government.

Turkey, Russia, and Israel are some of the countries that were slightly involved in this war. 

Azerbaijan has two allies: Turkey and Israel, who already had made their supportive thoughts public. The Israeli and Azerbaijani presidents met up, so Israel could show their support to the country and sell armament to them. However, Turkey has a bloody history with the Armenian people, through the story of humanity it is estimated that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Armenians have died in Turkey’s hands since 1915. Furthermore, Azerbaijan received military help from Turkey in 2020, with military drones and missiles; The president of each nation met up to show support since the Turkish leader congratulated the Azerbaijani president.

Armenia has an alliance with Russia, something that has weakened in recent times due to Armenia’s rapprochement with the USA, which did not please the Russian president, but also due to the Ukraine-Russia war. However, Russia has not stopped sending weapons or military peacekeeping forces to contain a war.

https://www.hercampus.com/school/casper-libero/ethical-cleaning-in-armenia-what-is-happening-since-the-azerbaijan-invasion/