Joachim Hagopian
Since December 12th, 2022, now over eight months ago that Azerbaijan placed a blockade on the 3-mile long Lachin Corridor connecting the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh to Armenians) with the Republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan used as its phony excuse eco-protestors blocking the entry to the Lachin Corridor over illegal mining in Artsakh with Russian complicity. Despite the Russian peacekeepers present at the border, the local commander stated he had neither the authority nor direct orders from Putin to forcibly reopen the corridor. My immediate response is this so-called leader of the Russian peacekeeping force is committing gross dereliction of duty passively permitting starvation to be weaponized genocide against the 120,000 ethnic Armenians living in Artsakh. Azerbaijan effectively cut off all residents’ supply of food, medicine, fuel and basic survival necessities as well as free passage of ethnic Armenians’ travel to and from Armenia and Artsakh. Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) wrote in a 28-page report released on August 7th:
Russia, responsible for peacekeeping in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the US, promoting current negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, are state parties of the Genocide Convention. … They have a privileged position to prevent this genocide. Their intense confrontation due to the Ukrainian conflict should not transform the Armenians into collateral victims.
Under growing pressure from the International Committee of the Red Cross, a couple months into 2023 emergency supplies were finally allowed into Artsakh’s largest city Stepanakert by the International Committee of the Red Cross. However, again by mid-June Azeri authorities once again began sealing off entry points and ever since mid-July, Armenians in Artsakh have been denied even emergency humanitarian aid. Increasingly, they have been cut off from the rest of the world without electricity, food and medicine. Luis Moreno Ocampo detailed his contention that Azerbaijan is presently committing genocide against the Armenian population in Artsakh through its willfully protracted closure of the Lachin Corridor, deliberately creating such dire conditions fast leading to starvation by blockade. According to Ocampo:
Under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention, [Azerbaijan is] deliberately inflicting on the [Armenian] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction… Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.
As of Wednesday August 16th, the Human Rights Defender’s Office just reported that 40-year old Stepanakert resident “K. Hovhannisyan died due to chronic malnutrition, protein and energy deficiency.” The ultimate endgame outcome of genocide is now official. Armenians are once again falling victim to genocide 108 years after last century’s first genocide begun in 1915, killing a million and a half up to one-third of all Armenians, many due to imposed mass starvation. The genocide started by Turks as Armenians’ hostile Islamic neighbor to the west appears to now be resumed a century later by the Azeris as Armenians’ hostile Islamic neighbor to the east.
The Human Rights Defender Ombudsman wrote on social media:
The catastrophic consequences of the ongoing 8-month-long blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan are more than noticeable in the public health sector, which primarily affects the health situation of the most vulnerable groups of the society – children, pregnant women, people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities and older persons.
Former ICC prosecutor Ocampo is urgently calling on the international community to include the United Nations Security Council as well as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to collectively pressure Azerbaijan to immediately lift its corridor blockade or the Baku government spearheaded by longtime dictator Ilham Aliyev warrants prosecution for genocide at The Hague’s International Criminal Court (ICC). On July 30th, Blinken allegedly spoke with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, and per the US State Department website:
Secretary Blinken underscored the urgent need for free transit of commercial, humanitarian, and private vehicles through the Lachin corridor, and emphasized the need for compromise on alternative routes so humanitarian supplies can reach the population of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Of course, two days after Ocampo’s report, on August 9th Aliyev’s assistant Hikmet Hajiyev told AP:
It is biased and distorts the real situation on the ground and represents serious factual, legal and substantive errors.
Another Associated Press article posted on Tuesday August 15th reports that on Wednesday August 16th the UN would hold an emergency meeting at the behest of Armenia emphasizing that Artsakh presently faces growing hunger and “a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe.” Armenia’s UN Ambassador Mher Margaryan had sent an urgent letter requesting the emergency meeting to the US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield as this month’s Security Council president. Margaryan wrote:
The deliberate creation of unbearable life conditions for the population is nothing but an act of mass atrocity targeting the indigenous people of Nagorno-Karabakh and forcing them to leave their homeland. [This presents] an existential threat to them, [asking the Security Council] to prevent mass atrocities including war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Mher Margaryan accused Azerbaijan of repeatedly violating the armistice brokered by Russia after the six-week war ended in November 2020. Azeri forces deployed Israeli made drones to prevail on the battlefield whereby a large section of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave was ceded to Baku government, leaving only Artsakh’s capital Stepanakert and the corridor connecting it with the outside world and Armenia. Another major flareup occurred in mid-September 2022 when Azerbaijan brazenly violated both the 2020 ceasefire agreement with Russia and Armenia and the Republic of Armenia’s national security and sovereignty with direct attacks on Goris, Sotk and Jermuk, towns inside Armenia proper, resulting in the loss of several dozen soldiers on each side. Azerbaijan has a consistent pattern of breeching signed agreements and breaking international humanitarian law. Finally, the Armenian UN ambassador urging the Security Council meeting asserted this week specified that Azerbaijan has also defied UN’s highest court tribunal, the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) orders specifying:
[The Baku government should] take all measures to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions.
UN experts have raised grave alarm over deteriorating conditions befalling the Artsakh residents facing:
Acute shortages of food staples, medication, and hygiene products, impacted the functioning of medical and educational institutions, and placed the lives of the residents – especially children, persons with disabilities, older persons, pregnant women, and the sick – at significant risk.
As scheduled the emergency UN meeting over the people of Artsakh took place on Wednesday afternoon August 16th. According to the US News & World Report:
At the council meeting, many countries urged Azerbaijan to immediately reopen the road, pointing to orders from the International Court of Justice… The Security Council did not issue any statement.
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield who chaired the Wednesday meeting told Associated Press:
There were strong statements in the council from everyone that the Lachin Corridor needed to be reopened, [adding that was] the main accomplishment.
Yeah, lots of grandstanding hot air. The Security Council “emergency meeting” didn’t even comment on or address the ongoing genocide but expressed nations’ feeble wish that a peaceful resolution to the conflict is reached. What was conspicuously absent is any substantial action plan having any enforceable teeth backing it up. It’s just the typical same old outcome when it comes to the United Nations, the Rockefeller funded globalist organization that’s always been covertly part of the NWO one world government agenda that now includes global genocide against humanity. So, what else do you expect?
Ilham Aliyev’s father Heydar Aliyev was the former head of the KGB in Azerbaijan, rising to political power both in Moscow and in Baku eventually as Azeri president in 1993 during the final months of his nation’s lost war against victorious Armenian separatists, up until his 2003 death, at which point by groomed birthright, his son Ilham slipped into his father’s dictator shoes. As the arrogant Azeri tyrant son following in daddy’s footsteps, this year marks Ilham Aliyev’s 20-year reign of terror heading one of the most corrupt, oppressive, worst human rights violator regimes on the planet. President Aliyev smugly told Euronews as recently as August 2nd:
People who live in Karabakh … they live in Azerbaijan. They should choose whether to live as citizens as [an] ethnic minority … or to leave. So this is their choice.
“Starve or leave” is hardly a choice as an enormous caravan fleet of company trucks contracted with the Red Cross sits idly by filled with emergency supplies outside the Nagorno-Karabakh’s Lachin Corridor checkpoint while passive Russian “peacekeeping” onlookers are complicit, watching the current day genocide unfold. For weeks dozens of trucks have been held up waiting to unload, providing life-sustaining relief to 120,000 “starving Armenians.” Relations between Moscow and Yerevan have been strained over this last year. Putin has not forced the Lachin Corridor to reopen, despite the obvious humanitarian crisis in Artsakh. In fact, after a month into the blockade on January 12, 2023, Aljazeera entitles an article “Russia blames Armenia for breakdown of Azerbaijan peace talks.” Annoyed over Armenia walking away from talks after Baku blockades Armenians’ vital supply line, during the entire eight plus months, Russia has yet to even press the issue, despite the first genocide casualty and this week’s Security Council meeting. It’s almost as if Russia has abandoned its longtime strategic ally.
Today’s literal reality of the “starving Armenians” rings very personal for me. My mother as a child never knew who the Armenians were several decades to her marrying one. But a full century ago my grandmother knew when she chided her young daughter, repeating a common expression at the time, prompting her to eat the food on her plate rather than become “a starving Armenian.” Generational trauma in genocide victim-survivors has been empirically confirmed by science, passed on genetically from one generation to the next. With my mother’s genealogy a couple generations back on her father’s side her Native American lineage and descended on her mother’s side from Mayflower Compact signatory Richard Warren of the Plymouth Massachusetts colony, I grew up with a reverence for Revolutionary War patriotism, American history, the Eastern woodland Indians of Western Massachusetts where I ran wild through the woods and caught footlong brook trout from our backyard stream flowing from the Wilbraham Mountains, my mother’s Great Lakes’ Ojibwa (Chippewa) tribe lineage as well as my father’s family’s Armenian roots in Anatolia in present-day Eastern Turkey. All these seminal influences have given me a lifelong predisposition and sensitivity to the grossest and most inhumane form of injustice – genocide, coursing through my veins on both sides of my family bloodline. Perhaps that’s why my journalistic focus especially these days is centering almost exclusively on the unprecedented genocide currently perpetrated by a relative handful of psychopathic elites determined to depopulate and in fact exterminate the human race.
A little bit of encapsulated history of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, or I should say ancient Artsakh Armenian homeland for millennia, at least since the early Bronze Age. In 301 A.D., Armenia became the world’s first Christian nation-state. The father of Armenia dates directly back to Noah’s grandson Japheth. The Armenians are an ancient people inhabiting eastern Turkey and the South Caucasus since the early days of Noah when his Ark landed on Armenia’s Mount Ararat. Armenians have called Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh their home since ancient times, long before Azerbaijanis were even a people on this earth. The Azeris are a nomadic eastern offshoot of their brethren Mongol Turks. Since the dawn of modern civilization, Artsakh has always been part of the Armenian homeland through multiple centuries of generational families, again long prior to any claim by the Azerbaijani people or nation.
Fast forward to shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution when the early Soviet Empire was expanding in the wake of World War I defeat of Germany and Turkey to incorporate Armenia and Azerbaijan as Outer Soviet States, abruptly ending the newly formed sovereign First Republic of Armenia established for all of two years from 1918 to 1920. That short-lived First Republic of Armenia was formed partially out of their spilled blood sacrifice and Western allied guilt for not intervening to stop the massacre of 1.5 million murdered, starving Armenians during the First World War at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. So, the November 1918 Armistice awarded independence to the Armenian genocide survivors with their own sovereign nation for all of a couple years before in 1921 Armenia and Azerbaijan that were already squabbling over contested lands like Artsakh were taken over and subjugated under ironfisted Soviet Communist totalitarianism.
Back exactly 100 years ago, of all people in charge of the newly formed “Soviet Outer Republics,” perhaps the biggest genocide offender in all of history, the young brash Bolshevik from another Outer Soviet State of Georgia, Josef Stalin served as the Commissar of Nationalities for the Soviet Union during the early 1920s. He intentionally planted the seed of conflict as part of his bloodstained legacy, still embroiling today in Armenia as well as Ukraine. The early 1930s saw dictator Stalin starving out millions of people living in Ukraine’s fertile breadbasket. In order to convince Armenians with their newly formed republic to accept Soviet rule as an Outer Republic of the Soviet Union, enticing and placating the Armenians to joining the Soviet Union, Stalin promised Artsakh would remain in Armenian hands and then to pacify the Turks, Stalin double-crossed the Armenians and designated Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. Thus in 1923, Nagorno-Karabakh became an autonomous administrative region of the Azerbaijan S.S.R., despite the fact that 94 percent of its population at the time was ethnic Armenian. Stalin and the Communist Bolsheviks were highly skilled at divide and rule, conniving to pit both sides against the other as their deceptively effective means of Moscow maintaining its third-party autocratic control. And under highly authoritarian Soviet Communist control, in submission, Armenians and Azerbaijanis co-existed for the next seven decades.
In 1988, the predominant majority of Artsakh residents voted in a referendum to make the autonomous oblast part of Armenia and submitted its demand to Moscow. But the growing internal conflicts brewing within the crumbling Soviet Empire left the region’s dispute unresolved, and in 1990 bloody war broke out between the soon to be independent nations in 1991 of Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan. During the course of the war that ended 30,000 lives, the Azeri minority in Nagorno-Karabakh fled to safer ground within Azerbaijan as did Armenians living in Azerbaijan. Ultimately defending what they knew to be their homeland since ancient times, Armenians possessed the fortitude and resolve to militarily defeat Azerbaijan in 1994 when Russia brokered a ceasefire, and in victory Artsakh declared itself a de facto independent breakaway region no longer formally part of Azerbaijan.
Unfortunately, the international community, including the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group over several decades, comprised of the US, Russia and France, completely failed to adequately resolve this longest running, festering Eurasian conflict. Though the vast majority of world nations publicly support ethnic Armenians fundamental right to self-determination in Artsakh, only Turkey maintains diehard support for Azerbaijan’s claim over the disputed region. Turkey remains the only fellow Turkic Azerbaijan ally in total solidarity with the Baku government, never formally recognizing its own 20th century genocide against Armenians nor normalized relations with Yerevan, closing off its shared border with Armenia in 1993. Yet technically, the global consensus allowed Stalin’s wrongful, toxic seed of conflict and moral turpitude to persist for an entire century.
Increasingly, as Azerbaijan straddles close relations with Russia while embracing the West importing its vast oil and gas reserves, in recent years Baku has been allowed to have its brutal way with the Nagorno-Karabakh feud as demonstrated by the UN Security Council’s feeble Wednesday “emergency meeting” this week where nothing was resolved or even proposed to remedy the potential genocide from moving forward.
The lame Biden regime sent a message to Turkey with the huge manmade earthquake in February, then Washington neocons convince Recep Erdogan with an F-16 contract to backstab his friend Putin, breech agreement not to release Ukraine prisoners and acquiesce to Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership. Meanwhile, Washington succumbs to tolerating Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenians in deference to Baku’s elevated global status due its resource-rich energy prowess, paying lip service to “opposing” Azeri leader Ilham Aliyev’s genocide against Armenians.
Between the 1994 war and the 2020 war, the two opposing Armenian and Azeri forces clashed with frequent skirmishes and in April 2016, a mini- four-day war broke out with over a hundred dead on each side. In recent years oil prices have surged, enriching the Baku government enabling billions of dollars spent on advanced weaponry and the latest state of the art military equipment primarily from Israel. For at least 20 years Azerbaijan plotted and prepared to avenge its 1994 defeat. Through acquisition of drones, aviation and artillery that Armenia could not afford to match, Azerbaijan engaged in training special forces, jointly coordinating its war plan efforts with NATO member and fellow genocidal Armenian hater Turkey. By September 2020, Azerbaijan developed the air support and firepower to overwhelm the Armenian soldiers to finally win a war, regaining a sizeable chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh’s surrounding territory outside its city of Stepanakert.
Let’s take a closer look at the mastermind behind this latest Armenian genocide. Ilham Aliyev’s father Heydar Aliyev as former head of the KGB in Azerbaijan, rose to political power as Azeri president in 1993 during the final months of his nation’s lost war against victorious Armenian separatists, up until his 2003 death, at which point by groomed birthright, his son Ilham slipped into his father’s dictator shoes. Ilham Aliyev’s hateful rhetoric and zest to eradicate Armenians from the face of the earth went kinetic, unleashed during the six weeks of the Second Karabakh War in late 2020, dehumanizingly referring to Armenians, Aliyev stated:
They have neither conscience nor morality. They do not even have a brain.
Aliyev also boasts how his Azerbaijani army has become powerful enough to eliminate “brainless” Armenians. Falsely laying claim to Nagorno-Karabakh as “historic Azerbaijan,” in speeches he repeatedly makes reference to both Nagorno-Karabakh and the Republic of Armenia as the rightful homeland belonging to his people:
We are also informing the world community, the world public that not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also present-day Armenia are our historical lands.
A May 1st, 2015 article in the Forward explicitly states:
Ilham Aliyev has on numerous occasions sworn to ‘wipe Armenia off the face of the earth.’
Make no mistake, all these highly alarming statements are the violent words of a dangerous, genocidal, bloodthirsty maniac who in real time is now executing his ambitious “final solution” plan against the Armenian people. With energy such a high priced premium in today’s volatile, destabilized world, and Azerbaijan’s oil and gas wealth used to strengthen Aliyev’s fighting force, thoroughly conditioned to dehumanize the Armenians as its targeted enemy, Aliyev and Erdogan are happy to finish the job begun by their forefathers the Ottoman Turks over a century ago and fulfill Aliyev’s brutal quest for Armenian extermination. With the world in crisis, Aliyev’s convinced he can get a pass from the rest of the world. Standing up for the Armenians fighting for their ancient homeland is standing up for all of humanity in our epic war against evil.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!).
The Armenians were the victim of, in my opinion, one of the only true genocides in history, and it was arguably the very worst. It is good that this article raises the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, but let’s not call it genocide. There is always the option of an airlift to the enclave. It’s easy to blame Russia on this one, but it has it’s hands full in Ukraine. But once it achieves full victory in Ukraine–and it unquestionably will sometime in 2024–look out for a major uptick in Russian involvement in the Middle East. I seriously doubt American troops will remain in Syria or even Iraq, and the final settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict should ensue. Russia has control over Azerbaijan’s oil flow, and the latter needs to be included in the Eurasian community. But let’s be realistic–it may be necessary to relocate Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper, in exchange for territorial concessions from Azerbaijan. Otherwise, the issue will continue to fester regardless of what the outside world does or doesn’t do.