How a Historical Genocide Perpetuates Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh
In October 2020, just days after Azerbaijani and Armenian forces once again clashed over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan tweeted that Azerbaijan and Turkey had “set themselves the task of bringing to completion the Armenian Genocide.” Why, I wondered when reading the tweet, was a century-old episode of history still relevant in the territorial conflict between Yerevan and Baku?
The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh in Armenian) began in 1923 when Soviet leaders placed the Armenian-majority oblast in Azerbaijani control as part of Stalin’s “divide and rule” policy. With ethnic tensions suppressed during the Soviet era, nationalism re-emerged in the early 1990s when Armenian separatists regained control of the territory in the bloody First Nagorno-Karabakh War. A delicate cease-fire brokered by Russia in 1994 remained fragile for over two decades, with tensions and border skirmishes flaring up every few years and Azerbaijan warning of retaliation.
In 2020, an economically-revived Azerbaijan launched a fierce aerial attack on the region, devastating Armenia in just 44 days during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a chaotic U.S. election, and an increasingly-divided Armenian government. A second Russian-brokered peace deal in early November forced Armenian troops out of large parts of the territory while effectively legitimizing Azerbaijani territorial gains. As street celebrators chanted Azerbaijan’s national anthem in Baku, frustrated Armenians stormed the government headquarters in Yerevan to protest against the agreement, accusing Pashinyan of treason and betrayal. In early August 2022, Azerbaijan launched a renewed drone operation in the region in response to the death of an Azerbaijani soldier, capturing several new villages.
Following Azerbaijan’s 2020 attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish President Erdoğan exclaimed that Ankara would stand with its “Azeri brothers …on the battlefield or the negotiating table.” Indeed, Turkey has helped train Azerbaijani armed forces, supplied drones and F-16 fighter jets, and even sent up to 1000 Syrian mercenaries to the region. In addition to Ankara’s close ethnic and cultural ties with Azerbaijan and Baku’s role as a major energy consumer, experts cite Erdoğan’s desire to increase Turkish influence in the Caucasus over the Russia-sponsored OSCE. A recent photo of Erdoğan posing with a map of the ‘Turkish world’ that included Armenia (and most of Russia) stoked Armenian fears that Turkey seeks to “restore the Ottoman Empire.”
As Roxanne Makasdjian, Director of the Genocide Education Project, told me, the Baku-Ankara connection has an even more cynical origin: a desire to de-legitimize the Armenian state by denying the Armenian Genocide. For years, Makasdjian has faced rigorous Turkish lobbying to leave the genocide out of U.S. history textbooks. To this day, Turkey adamantly denies responsibility for the Ottoman Empire’s systematic cleansing of over 1.5 million Armenians. The so-called “sick man of Europe” had faced colossal losses in WWI, resulting in the nationalist Young Turks government using the well-off Armenian community as a scapegoat. Beginning in 1915, Ottoman officials death-marched entire Armenian villages into the Syrian desert and carried out a campaign of eradication and terror via rape, public executions, slavery, and forced conversion.
Born eight years later out of the ashes of WWI, the Turkish state sought to forge a new national identity and separate itself from past crimes, as well as escape potential reparations and territorial concessions. Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code continues to criminalize any acknowledgment of the genocide, with numerous historians and journalists including Taner Akcam and Hrant Dink being jailed or murdered for discussion of the topic. Although President Erdoğan issued a historical apology to Armenians in 2014, Turkey continues to frame the deaths of 90% of the pre-war Armenian population as “collateral damage” in which both Armenians and Turks suffered. After President Biden officially recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2019, Ankara recalled its ambassador and threatened to close the American airbase in Incirlik. Even now, numerous Turkish Studies programs at prominent U.S. universities receive grants from the Turkish government for academic publications that seek to sow doubt about the events of 1915.
But how do these two events — the Armenian Genocide and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh — conjoin?
First, increased Turkish involvement in Nagorno-Karabakh has correlated with growing anti-Armenian sentiment and violence in Turkey, both on an official and everyday basis. President Erdoğan threatened in July 2020 to “continue the mission our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus,” while former Prime Minister Tansu Çiler repeatedly called for the deportation of Armenians out of Turkey. Anti-Armenian demonstrations spread throughout Istanbul following the launch of Azerbaijan’s campaign for Nagorno-Karabakh, with protesters chanting “death to Armenians” and “we will descend upon you” while parading Turkish and Azerbaijani flags around Armenian neighborhoods and markers of the 1915 genocide. The Grey Wolves, a far-right militant group associated with the Turkish Nationalist Party who had previously released an “official threat” against Armenians, initiated a “Hunt for Armenians” mob in the Armenian town of Decines-Charpieu, France, while Turkish nationals set afire the Armenian Cultural Center in San Francisco in 2020.
Along with hate crimes and extremism in Turkey, Azerbaijan has exhibited significant anti-Armenian behavior in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh reminiscent of Ottoman policies. Recent photos circulated on social media showing Azerbaijani children dressed in military uniforms exploring Baku’s new ‘Military Trophies’ theme park, which prominently features displays of captured Armenian equipment, helmets of dead Armenian soldiers, and even grotesque wax models of Armenians. Azerbaijan’s well-reported state-sponsored campaign to dehumanize Armenians has created an atmosphere where crimes against Armenians are justified and even praised; in 2004, Azerbaijani soldier Ramil Safarov was promoted and hailed as a national hero for murdering an Armenian soldier in his sleep and touting “My job is to kill all Armenians.” In 2020, Azerbaijan was confirmed to have used white phosphorus gas and targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and residential areas, in its campaign for Nagorno-Karabakh.
Cultural erasure projects in Nagorno-Karabakh particularly elicit memories of the events of 1915 for many Armenians. On the 100th anniversary of its restoration from Ottoman oppression in 1920, Armenia’s Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi — a symbol to many Armenians of the “rebirth” of Armenia — was repeatedly bombed by Turkish-supplied drones. Just weeks later, President Erdoğan announced the renaming of Shushi’s main street from that of Aram Manukyan (founder of Armenia and hero of the Armenian Genocide) to ‘Ataturk Street’. The Grey Wolves simultaneously announced the opening of a Turkish school in Nagorno-Karabakh, while a swell of Syrian immigrants, incentivized by Turkey to relocate to the region, replaced expelled Armenian villagers. Fear that Armenia’s closely-tied Turkish and Azerbaijani neighbors seek to reject Yerevan’s claim to its land resonates strongly with Armenians, with Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian announcing recently that Turkish and Azerbaijani practices in the war “take back even the most modern-minded Armenian to the year 1915.”
Denial, especially in this conflict, is an inhibitor of reconciliation. As Marcello Mollica and Arsen Hakobyan argue in their research on genocide denialism, a lack of accountability for past crimes is a continued “assault on those who survived the genocide, as well as their descendants” and is itself “an integral part of genocide.” Although Armenia’s frustration with unreckoned grievances and fear of continued extermination are not unsubstantiated, this victimization narrative makes Armenia blind to its own injustices and prevents settlement efforts in the conflict. Several scholars have noted that “constant references to ‘massacres’, ‘atrocities’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Armenian people allude to the ‘evil’ nature of Azerbaijanis and Turks and encourage [Armenians] to maintain negative attitudes towards them.” This generalization of all Azerbaijanis and Turks as existential enemies leads to a lack of acknowledgment of possible crimes committed by Armenia, such as Yerevan’s 1992 massacre of at least 200 Azerbaijanis in Khojaly, further entrenching mutual animosity and distrust in settlement attempts. Whether fair or not, extreme victimization and the surfacing of past grievances perpetuate the conflict and ultimately prevent peaceful resolution.
Since the start of hostilities in 1990, a new generation of Armenians and Azerbaijanis has been shaped by violence, ethnic hatred, and a constant fear of displacement. To Armenians, the struggle over Artsakh brings back powerful memories of the loss previous generations endured in the Armenian Genocide. Paired with clear xenophobia in Turkey and Azerbaijan, the ability of Armenians and Azerbaijanis to live side-by-side diminishes with every new border clash or charged political address.
In a speech given shortly before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler infamously told his generals “After all, who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?” In fact, Hitler was known to have studied how the Ottomans carried out the Armenian Genocide, with German military advisors and future members of the Nazi party stationed in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Without recognition of past grievances and the overcoming of ingrained animosity, history, as Armenian student Kami Arabian warned me, is bound to repeat itself.
