ANCA Western Region Communications Director, Alex Galitsky, examines the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide felt by Christian communities in Turkey and the Armenians of Artsakh in the Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently found that Azerbaijan violated the European Convention on Human Rights for pardoning, promoting, and honoring an Azerbaijani officer who murdered an Armenian colleague in his sleep during a NATO Partnership for Peace training program in Budapest in 2004.
The court judgement laid bare the deep-rooted institutionalization of anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan. It also showed how the country’s practice of state-sponsored discrimination consumes the regime so much that it directly contravened international law to uphold its national narrative depicting “Armenians of the world” as the main enemy of the state. For the Armenian people, and keen observers of history, this feels all too familiar.
One hundred and five years ago, the Ottoman Empire engaged in the deliberate and systematic eradication of its indigenous Christian population, resulting in the first modern-day genocide. This event took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians and a further 1.5 million from other minority communities, including Greeks and Assyrians, during the First World War.