Who speaks of the Armenians?

Britain is in bed with Putin's friends

‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler’s chilling phrase, spoken a week before he launched a Europe-wide war and campaign of genocide, is written on the wall of the Tsitsernakaberd, the Genocide Museum in Yerevan. It’s a harrowing experience, telling the story of the estimated one million Armenian Christians murdered in the last days of the Ottoman Empire – shot, stabbed, hanged or driven to die in the Syrian desert. 

The modern history of the Armenians is unimaginably tragic, and in many ways mirrors the story of the Jews. A religious minority living across competing empires, both had been noted for their keen interest in education and literacy and a determination to preserve their religion despite the pressure to conform.

Excluded from many positions on account of their faith, both groups came to carve a niche as merchants, building up the trade and cultural networks of their region and earning both wealth and resentment. As the great empires crumbled, both would suffer horrendously in the 20^th century, and in many ways the genocide of Armenians - as well as Anatolian Greeks and Assyrians - served as a template for the Holocaust. 

In other ways, however, the subsequent stories differ. The nation responsible for the Shoah came to be weighed down with a deep sense of guilt and shame, and that genocide would form part of the origin story in a new stage of western civilisation. Europeans, rightfully, view that mass murder as the culmination of centuries of persecution and prejudice, and an aversion to repeating that crime still directs our political instincts. Only last year, Germany’s vice-chancellor declared the protection of the Jews to be the country’s historic mission.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, in contrast, is still denied by its perpetrators; indeed, politicians praise the men responsible and even make scornful jibes about the victims. The issue for Armenians is not so much about ‘closure’ as a fear that the same undercurrents of hatred are still brewing and will inspire further violence, a fear in part realised last year when Azerbaijan, Turkey’s ally, carried out what human rights groups called the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of over 100,000 Armenians.

The current conflict between the two nations goes back to the dying days of the Soviet Union. Even as Gorbachev still hoped that the union of brotherly love would hold together against the forces of nationalism, the socialist republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan were sliding to war. As with many parts of the former Russian, Ottoman or Habsburg Empire, a former patchwork of religious and linguistic communities fell apart; hundreds of thousands fled from each side.

In Yerevan one middle aged man, a local historian and engineer called Robert, described how his hometown had been 20 per cent Azeri; when Armenians fled from attacks in Azerbaijan, in particular the Sumgait pogrom, Azeris across Armenia started packing their bags and making the reverse journey. It was agreed that they could not stay, Robert said, but ‘we made a safe passage for them’ to leave. He expressed pride that no one was hurt, but centuries of inter-communal living were over, and people would not grow up together any longer. As with all instances of violence, there was humanity as well as horror, and during the attacks in Sumgait, dozens of Azeris hid Armenian neighbours, friends and even strangers.

What is today the Republic of Armenia, but which is historically Eastern Armenia, had been ruled first by Persia and then, from the early 19^th century, by Russia; like many former imperial lands riven by conflict, this region had once been a mosaic of different ethnic groups. While Constantinople had been the hub of Armenian intellectual life - home to around 300,000 - and Armenians constituted a plurality in six eastern Turkish provinces, they were also widely spread across both the Ottoman and Russian empires.

Among the historically Armenian regions was Nagorno-Karabakh, literally ‘Mountainous Karabakh’, which became the focus of fighting between the two countries from 1988. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War ended with Armenia in control of the region, along with a corridor linking it to Armenia proper; although the statelet of Artsakh was never integrated, it was essentially dependent on Yerevan.

Azerbaijan, however, bided its time and in October 2020, while the rest of the world was down and distracted by Covid, launched an attack. Several thousand lives were lost in a 44-day war and today a cemetery overlooks one of the main roads into Yerevan lined by small Armenian tricolours to mark the grave of each young life terminated.

During that short war, Azeri soldiers had allegedly filmed themselves committing war crimes on captured Armenians – some were killed in cold blood, others mutilated – and sent around Telegram before being deleted (Azerbaijan has denied this). Armenia is in the process of bringing cases to the International Criminal Court, which Azerbaijan doesn’t recognise, but which if successful risks Azeri leaders being arrested if they visit Europe. A number of Armenians also simply disappeared, their families receiving no word of their whereabouts, despite repeated pleading. Today the number of missing totals more than 200, but Baku refuses to say whether they are alive or dead.

This was followed up with another push last year, with the shelling of the Nagorno-Karabakh capital, Stepanakert, and the exodus of over 100,000 Armenians. Freedom House described it as a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which ‘included widespread human rights violations in various forms against the ethnic Armenian population, using prolonged tactics of intimidation and a blockade’. It declared that ‘Such actions made it impossible for the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh to live safely and in a dignified manner.’

Armenian civilians, scarred by the historical memory of 1915 and by more recent violence in Soviet Azerbaijan, fled west, saying farewell to their homes and churches. Desperately short of food and fuel, in one horrendous instance over 200 people were killed trying to fill up at an oil depot, which exploded. Today Stepanakert is a ghost town.

Almost no world leader said a word. ‘Who, after all, speaks of the Armenians?’

As with all such conflicts, Azeris will point to previous exoduses and past crimes, but their case is certainly helped by something they have and which Armenia does not: huge amounts of oil and gas, much of it produced by the London-based BP. Baku was one of the first great oil cities, and in tsarist days had a Wild West feel that attracted bandits like a young Joseph Stalin. Today Azerbaijan’s economy is dependent on the stuff, ‘a gift of the gods’ in the words of its president, and a significant amount of the proceeds are spent on public relations in the west, on greenwashing and sportswashing.

Among its extensive corporate sponsorship, Azerbaijan has supported the Labour Party’s annual ‘Diversity Dance’, where some of you will recall a sweaty Keith Vaz boogying down (my apologies for reminding you). It also spends a great deal of money on western politicians, among them New York mayor Eric Adams and his aides.

In 2021, just months after launching a war which cost several thousand lives, Azerbaijan was among the hosts of the European Football Championship. In September this year, it welcomed the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Although the majority of Azerbaijan’s GDP, and 90 per cent of its export revenues, come from oil and gas, Baku is currently hosting COP, the climate summit that has perversely come to be primarily used as a way to strike oil deals. Already, as the BBC reported, a senior official at the climate change conference has been caught doing just this.

At this ‘Cop of Peace’, as Azerbaijan has declared it, the country’s president Ilham Aliyev met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, cementing a lucrative friendship between the two counties. Former Prime Minister Theresa May was there as a guest, as was Tony Blair - but then, the former Labour prime minister has done paid work for Azerbaijan (of course he has).

As Dominic Lawson recently wrote in the Sunday Times, Azeri President Aliyev, who succeeded his father as president in 2003, is ‘the latest example of how autocratic petro-states are cloaking themselves in the sanctimony of the fight against climate change.’

What makes this all rather squalid is that ‘within half a mile of the drivers hurtling around the streets of Azerbaijan’s capital is the state security service headquarters. And languishing in its cells are — among many other political prisoners — several who were ministers of the former Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh, now unlawfully held hostage after being captured last year when Azerbaijan invaded the disputed territory.’

European leaders are well aware of this, but ‘when the European parliament approved sanctions against Aliyev and other Azeri government officials over their offensive against the Armenians, the European Commission refused to implement them, and its president, Ursula von der Leyen, flew to Baku, hailing the country as “a crucial energy partner” for the EU in its efforts to reduce reliance on Russian oil and gas.’

Yet, as Lawson pointed out, Baku has clearly been importing Russian gas to resell to Europe, and everyone in Europe knows it.

Aliyev enjoys warm relations with Putin; the Russian leader visited Baku in August, and they have bonded not just over their shared interest in selling fossil fuels to the west, but a worldview. Azerbaijan has an extremely poor human rights record, scoring just 7/100 on Freedom House’s index, compared to Armenia’s 54. As Pieter Cleppe wrote in The Critic: the country is ‘in the questionable company of the likes of Russia, Belarus and North Korea. On the sub-ranking of “political rights”, it scores zero.’

It is not just Armenians filling Baku’s prisons, as Cleppe noted, but ‘climate activists like Anar Mammadli, who has been arrested ahead of COP29 on what Amnesty International described as “bogus charges”. Human Rights Watch has deplored that there is an “escalating crackdown on critics and civil Society” in Azerbaijan, documenting in a new report how “criminal charges” have in many cases been used as a “pretext intended to punish and put an end to activists’ legitimate work.”’

Yet, ‘while Western Europe continues to happily import fossil fuels from places like Azerbaijan, it is also shutting down its domestic fossil fuel production… Surely, if one were to phase out fossil fuels, one would start with phasing out imports of fossil fuels from less than reliable authoritarian countries, rather than the domestic production, which also tends to happen in a way that is more respectful of the environment.’

You’d think so. Sadly and bizarelly, the story gets even worse, and more self-defeating for Europe’s future energy security - and Britain’s role is especially ignominious…

Read part two here