Signposting One other Genocide: The World’s Obligation to Act on Clear Warning Indicators
The dust highway resulting in Kut, a small Armenian village on the border with Azerbaijan, is uneven and somber as we drive down it at nightfall. I gulp, trying to swallow my worry, as we get nearer to the Armenian mountain on which Azerbaijani troopers have illegally positioned themselves. My colleague factors instantly in entrance of us: “There they’re,” she says. We’re so shut. I take a deep breath and revert to dialog, doing my greatest to feign power so I can converse with the households who courageous this actuality every single day.
As we enter this small farming village with lower than 200 inhabitants, holes paint home facades and shrapnel scatters the bottom. The top of the village welcomes us into his residence, with seven different members of the family sitting across the kitchen desk. They smile softly and converse weightily, their voices carrying a juxtaposing resilience and despair that fill and break your coronary heart concurrently.
As they converse, I consider Nune, an aged girl from Nagorno-Karabakh we interviewed a number of days earlier who was caught in an Armenian border village due to the continuing blockade of 120,000 Armenians by Azerbaijan. She effortlessly captured the scenes we had been witnessing in every residence we visited, with every desk that supplied greater than what the household had, and every set of eyes that spoke one thing deeper than a mouth. She mentioned, “Armenians have develop into this race that has one facet of its face that smiles and one other that sinks.”
It’s true.
One-hundred-and-eight years in the past the Ottoman Empire tried to systematically eradicate Armenians. One-and-a-half million Armenians had been killed, with many extra displaced. Whereas Armenians have been looking for justice for that genocide for over 100 years, a brand new try appears to be on the horizon. As we speak, Armenians are struggling violence by the hands of Azerbaijan, and the warning indicators of a renewed intent to destroy are all too obvious.
These indicators embody examples of state-sponsored discrimination, incendiary, divisive, and dehumanizing rhetoric from authorities officers, violence in opposition to the civilian inhabitants, eradicating their technique of survival, segregating them, making use of completely different and restrictive safety guidelines to them, and hiding the violence behind world occasions like Covid-19 and the conflict in Ukraine.
Over a century in the past we didn’t know the warning indicators of mass atrocity, however these patterns have been recognized for precisely this goal in order that we might help stop genocide from ever materializing. Sadly, too typically we see them, however dismiss them, solely responding as soon as it’s too late. For instance, the indicators of genocide have been readily obvious in Tigray, the place there may be now an ongoing ethnic cleaning. In Burma, there have been clear indicators of genocide years earlier than it escalated into the atrocities which have been formally deemed as such in the present day. It’s undoubtedly troublesome to precisely assess in every distinctive context what may assist stop such escalation, however a minimum of for the case of Armenia now we have some indication of what has labored and what may assist additional.
Maybe most useful for slowing down any escalation has been the European Union presence on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border. This civilian mission has 5 bases and strikes alongside the border, tasked with observing and reporting on the state of affairs on the bottom and contributing to human safety. Whereas it’s laborious to measure a counterfactual, there are sturdy indicators that their presence has helped, as fewer assaults have occurred since their arrival. Actually, lots of the incursions that have occurred have been at components of the border the place the observers had been absent. One concrete strategy to heed the warning indicators and contribute in the direction of guaranteeing this battle doesn’t escalate could be to enlarge the mission. Moreover, the EU would assist tremendously by putting observers in Nagorno-Karabakh in addition to on the Azerbaijani facet of the border.
Final month I participated in a fact-finding journey to Armenia with the College Community for Human Rights for a challenge I began with Harvard Regulation Faculty’s Advocates for Human Rights in collaboration with the Yale Loewenstein Undertaking. We traveled to Armenian villages on the border with Azerbaijan and spoke with folks there about their experiences. Throughout all of the interviews we carried out as a group, the recurring theme that was not possible to disregard is that worry and uncertainty fill the air in Armenia in the present day. It’s what folks breathe in every day, however what they wrestle to exhale. The discharge by no means comes. The fog is rarely lifted. They stroll by means of every day holding their breath, questioning when they are going to lastly be capable to breathe once more. The worry and uncertainty are suffocating. They’re palpable. And they’re our drawback. As human beings, now we have a accountability to do one thing. And for this battle, we are able to.
These fact-finding journeys shouldn’t simply be about discovering details. They need to inform motion. This battle continues to be at a stage the place prevention of additional large-scale atrocities is feasible, and that must be encouraging, particularly in opposition to the backdrop of the 108th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. We have now one other likelihood, as a society, to make “by no means once more” a actuality, and that may begin with taking these warning indicators severely, enlarging the EU mission, and displaying Azerbaijan that the world is watching.
Anoush Baghdassarian is a Visiting Skilled on the Worldwide Legal Courtroom. Her views are her personal. She has a J.D. from Harvard Regulation Faculty, a Grasp’s in Human Rights, and a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Holocaust/Genocide Research. She can be the co-founder of the Rerooted Archive, the oral historical past archive of the Armenian diaspora.
Views expressed on Harvard Human Rights Reflections are these of the person authors and don’t essentially replicate the opinions or positions of the Human Rights Program or Harvard Regulation Faculty.
