@SecBlinken, @BBolgesi @KremlinRussia_E @EmmanuelMacron

The third president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, addressed US President Joe Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French President Emmanuel Macron with an open letter.

“Open letter

H.E. Joseph R. Biden Jr, President of the United States of America

H.E. Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation

H.E. Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic 

Your Excellencies: 

A few days ago three-year-old Leo and six-year-old Ghita died of suffocation in one of the villages of Mardakert region, Republic of Artsakh. They went out of home in search of their mother, who had earlier left for the city on foot in search for food. 

The siege of Artsakh has been ongoing for seven months. Now it started claiming lives – of both the elderly and children, of common people, whose only guilt is being born on the land of their ancestors and the love for life. We appreciate all those influential states and international organisations who have so far spoken out without ambiguities of the present situation. Such statements are crucial for the people of Artsakh who are fighting for life. However, unfortunately, such statements alone did not save the lives of little Leo and Ghita. It’s most appalling that words alone may fail to save the lives of many more children and the elderly – not in the virtual future, but literally next morning. 

Today the physical survival of 120.000 Armenians in Artsakh is very literally endangered. With each of you we have had many opportunities in the past to talk about what happened to Armenians in 1915, as well as the very consequences of the Armenian Genocide. Now, 108 years later, we are facing the immediate danger of the repetition of the same gruesome events, albeit carried out in modern methods. 

Your Excellencies, Presidents: 

I appeal to you first and foremost as Presidents of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing countries, as leaders who have first-hand knowledge of where the Nagorno Karabakh peace process has taken us by 2018. It’s in that year that our society has made an emotional choice and transferred reins of power to a politician who had no idea of what statehood was. I fully realize that many considered that as opportunity to try and resolve the issue of Artsakh by leveraging on that individual’s unreasonable steps that had nothing to do with the real interests of our country. Yet, as a matter of fact, the conflict has not been resolved, and the associated problems have deepened, whereas that very individual no more has the vote of confidence of our people to recognize Artsakh as part of another state. Neither he has any vote of confidence on behalf of the people of Artsakh to singlehandedly decide their destiny. 

I am appealing to you as leaders of countries where you have unquestionable institutional memory pertaining to the issue of Artsakh. Today, in contrast to the incumbent Armenian authorities, there are serious professionals and experts about the Nagorno Karabakh peace process in various institutions of your respective countries, who have knowledge about all nuances and are well aware of all prior phases of conflict resolution.

I am appealing to you as your former counterpart, as someone whose objectives and principles are well known to you. I resorted to this genre given my lack of direct access to you. We exchange no official visits or one-on-one formats, channels of communications through political party formats are either weak or missing, since the relevant opposition party officials have been either persecuted or simply jailed in our country.

I am appealing to tell you what has been happening in Artsakh is a direct route to a terrible catastrophe. 

I am appealing to ask you to give a chance to life to the people in Artsakh. It’s a great personal tragedy for me that years ago we used to negotiate settlements by which the people of Artsakh would live in their own country in dignity, yet now we are talking about merely giving them a chance to life, asking for their right to live.

We have taken note with sense of appreciation all your efforts aimed at resolving this issue. Yet what is happening these days will not lead to any such settlement that you may quite diligently have envisioned. Direct negotiations between an experienced dictator and someone silly and incapable will simply not reach any reasonable point. Every satisfied demand by the dictating party will lead to new ones, much more difficult to satisfy. This will continue forever and will bring large-scale catastrophes. Keeping silence or failing to devote more time to the issue of Artsakh now means that very soon your countries will be forced to take time to address the “the question of Armenia”. This is a very real scenario given the incompetent negotiator we have, moreover having a sizeable portion of the sovereign territories of the Republic of Armenia under occupation for some time. 

I am hereby asking you – before anything else – stop the humanitarian catastrophe in Artsakh. I believe you can do that. Force the dictator to open the “road of life”. The fascist, who has made annihilating Armenians his lifestyle, cannot be allowed to continuously disregard clear messages by most serious international organisations and states. Stop the calamity. Please, secure the most basic life conditions for the people of Artsakh. I am asking you to ensure guarantees for this, and only then transition to efforts of finding diplomatic solutions. Or else it may be late tomorrow. 

Respectfully,

Serzh Sargsyan

Third President of the Republic of Armenia.”

Karabakh Armenians shouldn’t have to sacrifice their safety and autonomy.

Azerbaijan’s blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave within its international borders, is now stretching into its eighth month. By blocking the single road that connects Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper, the kleptocratic regime in Baku seeks to squelch the Karabakhi Armenians’ aspirations to self-determination and to humiliate Yerevan.

The good news is that Team Biden seems closely engaged with the crisis. The bad news is that Washington might be preparing to throw the Karabakhis under the bus, even as the administration has been helpful to Armenia proper in recent months.

On July 3, Kristina Kvien, the American envoy to Yerevan, sparked a justified freakout among the Armenians after she said in an interview that “all parties”—meaning the Azeris included—agree that “the rights and security of Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents must be guaranteed.” The subtext, as the Armenian government protested, was that the Karabakhi Armenians could live safely under Baku’s rule, as ordinary citizens of Azerbaijan.

Kvien later clarified her remarks, noting that “the United States does not presuppose the outcome of negotiations on the future of Nagorno-Karabakh” and “supports an agreement that is durable, sustainable, and lays the foundations for peace.” That’s good enough, so far as it goes. Still, the original remarks revealed an alarming naivete about the realities of the conflict.

Home to 120,000 Armenians, a quarter of them children, Nagorno-Karabakh is where the Armenian alphabet was developed. The Armenian people—the world’s oldest Christian nation—maintained a measure of sovereignty there even as the great empires traded control of the South Caucasus for centuries. Known to the Armenians as Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh was also the birthplace of the modern Armenian independence movement inside the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (where it had been relegated by ethnicities commissar Stalin).

Amid the breakup of the USSR, the Karabakhis took control of the enclave in a war with Azerbaijan that saw both sides commit atrocities, including population transfers. Not even Armenia proper recognized the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, however, and the dispute soon emerged as one of the world’s most intractable “frozen conflicts.” In 2020, however, the Azerbaijanis managed to recapture much of the territory, and more recently, the Baku regime has made military incursions into Armenia proper, even leaking “torture porn” showing Armenian troops enduring unspeakable crimes.

It’s conduct like that that makes the Armenians gasp when they hear statements like Kvien’s. The regime in Baku doesn’t even respect the rights of its own population, let alone Armenian Christians whom it views as interlopers, whose ancient cross stones and cemeteries it destroys, and who have been the subject of decades of ethno-sectarian animus from official organs. The notion that the Karabakhi Armenians can “integrate” into Azerbaijan, or that Baku has already agreed to recognize their rights in any meaningful sense, is a dangerous fantasy.

The Azeris’ goal, as the Armenian analyst Eric Hacopian told me during a reporting trip last year, is to conduct ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, establish a sovereign corridor across Armenia proper to their exclave of Nakhichevan, and ultimately to bring about the “Gaza-faction” of Armenia: a rump state with which the Azerbaijanis (and their Turkish allies) can do as they please.

The moment is golden, from their point of view. Russia, Armenia’s historic protector, is distracted in Ukraine, and the 2,000 or so Russian troops tasked by the “international community” to protect the corridor between Nagorno and Armenia proper are sitting on their hands. The Azeri fisc, meanwhile, is flush with petrodollars for Western lobbying. Baku promises more gas than it can deliver to a desperate European Union, and sells itself as an anti-Iran spear tip to the Israelis and American hawks.

Even so, the P.R. and political tide may be turning in Western capitals. Notwithstanding Kvien’s naive remarks, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have been quite strong in their support of Armenia; many officials in Yerevan credit Nancy Pelosi for putting a stop to the Azeris’ latest assault by taking a solidarity delegation. Sens. Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, meanwhile, are making a bipartisan push to stop American military assistance to Baku. That pairing is especially notable, since both are normally hawkish on Russia and Iran but have clearly had it with the Azeris’ behavior.

Friends of Armenia, Democratic and Republican, must make it clear to the Biden administration that the safety and autonomy of the Karabakh Armenians, and their preferences, can’t be sacrificed in any push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Otherwise, America risks replicating the kind of border redrawing from on high that gave rise to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem in the first place.

Sohrab Ahmari

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact magazine, a contributing editor of The American Conservative, and a visiting fellow of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University. His books include From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Ignatius, 2019) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (Convergent/Random House, 2021). He is currently writing a book about privatized tyranny in America.