Category: 2023

June 14 2023

Footage alleged to show injured Armenian soldiers being captured by their Azerbaijani counterparts will remain on Facebook, after Meta’s Oversight Board decided to uphold an earlier decision by the company.

The video, which was published on Facebook in October 2022, was not removed from the platform at the time despite violating Facebook’s Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime Community Standard. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, cited the video’s newsworthiness and argued that public interest in seeing the content outweighed the risk to the captured soldiers’ safety and dignity. 

Meta’s Oversight Board launched an investigation into the case in March of this year. 

The video was not widely shared following its publication on the platform, and it remains unclear whether it remains on Facebook or has since been taken down.

According to Meta, the video was published on a page which identified itself as documenting Azerbaijani war crimes committed against Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and appeared to show prisoners of war being captured.

‘The video shows people who appear to be Azerbaijani soldiers searching through rubble. The video has been edited so that their faces cannot be seen. They find people in the rubble who are described in the caption as Armenian soldiers. Some appear to be injured, others appear dead. They pull one solider [sic] from the rubble, who cries out in pain. His face is visible and he appears injured’, the description of the video by the board read.

The video reportedly ends with an unseen person berating an injured soldier sitting on the ground in Russian and Turkish.

The video was published less than a month after the September 2022 Two-Day War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which took place within Armenia, and resulted in Azerbaijan gaining territories and the two sides losing around two hundred soldiers in total.

In the weeks following the conflict, footage appearing to show Azerbaijani soldiers committing war crimes appeared online, including the mutilation of female soldiers and the execution of a group of Armenian soldiers.

Graphic evidence of war crimes in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict has in recent years frequently been published online, especially on platforms such as Telegram, which exercise little control over the content published. In some cases those posting celebrate the pictured actions, while others share the footage to discredit the other side. 

A number of Telegram channels were created during the September fighting, sharing images and video of dead and wounded Armenian soldiers, as well as Armenian prisoners of war. 

Tuesday’s decision by Meta’s Oversight Board found that Meta ‘correctly applied the newsworthiness allowance’ in deciding to allow the video to remain on Facebook, while adding a ‘mark as disturbing’ warning screen to it. 

‘These decisions were consistent with Meta’s values and human rights responsibilities’, the decision reads.

The text of the decision also notes that it sets a precedent for Meta, raising ‘important questions’ about Meta’s content moderation in conflict situations, particularly in relation to revealing the identities and locations of prisoners of war. 

While the decision notes that such footage could expose those pictured to immediate harm, it adds that it can also contribute to public debate and raise awareness of ‘violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law’. 

‘It can also build momentum for action that protects rights and ensures accountability’, the board stated. ‘Meta did not have evidence that videos of this kind were producing […] negative effects but did see evidence that international organisations were using such videos to increase pressure on Azerbaijan to end mistreatment of prisoners of war.’

The Board’s decision was largely welcomed by Armenian media experts. Some, however, expressed concerns about the psychological effects of such content and its use in ‘hybrid’ warfare. 

‘I still think that the video should not be allowed on the platform, as it constitutes information war against the Armenian society’, cyber security expert Artur Papyan wrote on Twitter. However, he described the board’s counter-arguments as ‘valid’ and deemed the judgement a ‘balanced’ one, especially in the context of similar cases in Ukraine and elsewhere. 

https://oc-media.org/meta-oversight-board-upholds-decision-to-leave-armenian-pow-video-on-facebook/

June 14 2023

https://en.mehrnews.com/news/202002/Two-Indians-wounded-in-Azerbaijani-shooting-Armenia

June 14 2023

There may be no regime more loathsome and deserving of U.S./European condemnation and punitive sanctions than that of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his crew of criminals and monsters.

Corrupt to the Core

• OCCRP, the international crime/corruption watchdog, named Aliyev its 2012 Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year.

His family has secretly amassed major “stakes in the country’s … banks, construction companies, [and] gold mines” and snapped up over $140 million in luxury residences abroad.

By 2021, Aliyev’s crime syndicate had covertly accumulated British property worth $700 million.

• The Azerbaijani Laundromatwas a $2.9 billion money laundering racket.  It bribed British, German, Italian, and various European officials to whitewash Azerbaijan’s repulsive reputation.
• In 2013, Azerbaijan surreptitiously bankrolled a propaganda junketto Baku for 10 Congresspersons and over 30 staffers from IL, NJ, NM, NY, OK, and TX.  Aliyev showered them with jewelry, rugs, and other goodies which the Office of so-called Congressional Ethics belatedly forced them to surrender.
• “Respected” American publications and Congress’ Azerbaijan Caucus — including shifty co-chair Henry Cuellar (D-TX), an FBI target — reportedly concealed Azerbaijan’s crimes.

State Sponsor of Terrorism

• Azerbaijan deployed thousands of terrorists/jihadis against Christian Armenians in the early 1990s, including Afghan Mujahedin, Chechens, and Turkey’s Grey Wolves,
• Azerbaijan had long befriended Osama Bin Laden. Baku’s Al-Qaeda cell belonged to the network that bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.  A dozen Americans and 212 others perished.
• Columbia University’s Peace-Building/Human Rights program and others have documented Aliyev’s using thousands of terrorist mercenaries in his unprovoked 2020 war against Armenian-populated Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagh (N-K) and Armenia. Turkey openly transported them from Syria and Libya.

The jihadis included one-time ISIS commander/war criminal Sayf Balud and miscellaneous murderers, rapists, and kidnappers.  Reportedly, Pakistan also sent terrorists.

During the war, Azeri zealots chanted, “Jihad, jihad, jihad.”  In Baku?  No, in Washington, DC.

• The EU Parliament denounced (January 20, 2021) Baku and Ankara for using “foreign terrorists” against Armenians.
• The UN’s Working Group on Mercenaries condemned(November 6, 2020) Baku’s and Ankara’s hiring of jihadis.  Predictably, the UN probe has stalled, doubtless due to obstruction by the U.S. and others.
• The Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled (July 21, 2021) neo-con Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, potty-mouthed Victoria Nuland, about Turkey’s delivering terrorists to She refused to answer in open session.

That’s consistent with America’s scandalous and long-running downplaying of Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s state sponsorship of terrorism.

Sheer Evil

• Azerbaijan is unashamedly homicidal/genocidal.

Defense Minister Safar Abiyev (RFE/RL, August 4, 2004): “[In] 25 years there will be no state of Armenia … [Armenians] have no right to live in this region.”

Baku Mayor Hajibala Abutalybov to a Bavarian delegation (2006): ‘‘Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians.  You, Nazis, already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, right?’’

Nurlan Ibrahimov, a Baku soccer team’s public relations director (Facebook, October 2020): We must kill all Armenians — children, women and the elderly.”

• Azerbaijan has long been obliterating any evidence of Armenia’s three-millennia-long presence.

Using sledgehammers and dump trucks, Azerbaijani troops destroyed (YouTube: New Tears of Araxes) a huge ninth century Armenian Christian cemetery in Nakhichevan.  Stalin had cruelly assigned the latter Armenian territory (and Artsakh/N-K) to Azerbaijan in the 1920s.

Over time, Azerbaijanis murdered or expelled every Armenian in Nakhichevan.  Baku plans the same for Artsakh/N-K.

U.S. lawmakers, the EU Parliament, and others have decried the cemetery’s  destruction and the ongoing eradication and vandalism of many Armenian churches/monuments, to no avail.  The State Department’s reaction has been negligible.

Yet consider the uproar by American officials, media, and conservative Evangelicals whenever Jewish cemeteries or synagogues are vandalized/attacked/destroyed.

• Baku’s claims to nearly all of 3000-year-old Armenia are preposterous. No country/nation named Azerbaijan (a Persian/Iranian name) existed before 1918.  The region was ethnically/religiously mixed.  Some of its Muslims identified as Tartar/Turkish.  Only in the 1930s did these start calling themselves Azerbaijanis.
• During/after the 2020 war, Azerbaijani perpetrated voluminous and varied evils and crimes (besides those in/after 1988).

Warning: Often graphic and disturbing.

• Executions of captured Armenian
• Beheadings (video removed but available).
• Desecration of a dead, naked Armenian woman (videos removed but available).
• Armenian POWs are still imprisoned and tortured.
• Bombardment of Artsakh/N-K’s “hospitals, schools, local water supply.”
• Azerbaijan used banned white phosphorous and, reportedly, cluster
• Azerbaijan has illegally blockaded — food, electricity, gas, communications — the 120,000 indigenous Armenians of Artsakh/N-K. Baku has defied an International Court of Justice order to end the blockade.  Moscow slyly allows the blockade.

Azerbaijan Overrated

For about 30 years, Artsakh/N-K, with Yerevan’s help, outfought a better-armed, wealthier, and far more populous Azerbaijan.  Artsakh became self-governing, democratic, and largely safe from Baku’s savagery.

Only Turkey’s and Israel’s military participation, and Moscow’s deliberate passivity, turned the tide against Armenians in 2020.  It’s apparently Tel Aviv’s first martial campaign against a nearly all-Christian country.

Azerbaijan now aims to ethnically cleanse Artsakh and has seized chunks of Armenia.

Meanwhile, Washington and Europe needlessly kowtow to Baku, wildly embellishing its energy exporting value.

• Azerbaijan supplies a mere fraction (perhaps 3%) of the EU’s natural gas.
• Baku imports Russian gas and reportedly sells it to the West, thereby undermining Western sanctions against Russia.
• Russia owns part of Azerbaijan’s gas fields/pipelines. Aliyev is stuffing Putin’s pockets with Western cash.
• Azerbaijan has no choice but to send its gas westward due to binding contracts, existing pipelines, and lack of alternative markets.

The Right Path

I’ve shown elsewhere that the Caucasus’ swing country is Armenia.  Whichever direction it goes, so goes the Caucasus.

Russia’s stranglehold over Armenia and Artsakh remains.  But the West’s rejection of sanctions against the obvious aggressor, Azerbaijan, unmasks the duplicity behind its sponsorship of talks between Yerevan and Baku.

Moreover, Washington’s flouting of Section 907’s restrictions on aid to Azerbaijan brings further dishonor upon America.

If Armenians are wise they won’t agree to anything with Baku unless Yerevan gets rock-solid Western security guarantees, hi-tech weapons, and a long-term, armed international peace-keeping force in Artsakh.

Otherwise, given Azerbaijan’s blood-soaked, deceitful record, its signature on a “peace” agreement is worthless.

The author’s main focus is the Caucasus.  His work is archived at https://www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/David_Boyajian

Armenia – June 14 2023

“The Zangazur corridor is an issue with Iran, not with Armenia. Iran’s behavior upsets both Azerbaijan and us. Besides, the fees charged per wagon are very high. I hope we will solve the issue soon,” TASS says Erdogan said this upon returning from Azerbaijan.

 He noted that “if they approached this positively, today Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iran would be integrated with each other, both by road and by rail, and perhaps a Beijing-London line would be opened.”

Armenia – June 14 2023