Armenian News... A Topalian... What on earth has happened to Robert Fisk?

The Independent
Echoes of Stalinism abound in the very modern

Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict 
The same old enemies are clanking around the black mountains 

of Karabagh: Russian power, Turkish expansionism and Armenian 

nationalism
Robert Fisk
Saturday 9 April 2016 
                       

 The weariness with which the media reported the latest battle for 

Nagorno-Karabagh was all too evident during al-Jazeera’s first news 

reports. Blaming Stalin for the Armenian-Azerbaijan war, the satellite 

channel showed an old news clip which had absolutely nothing to 

do with the conflict. The poor quality footage actually showed Winston 

Churchill presenting to Stalin the Sword of Stalingrad – a gift from 

King George VI to the Soviet people for their courage in defending 

the city against Hitler’s Germany and defeating the Nazi Sixth Army

 in 1943.

Stalin has so often been blamed (as Soviet acting Minister of 

Nationalities in the 1920s) for giving the mountainous Armenian

 region to Muslim Azerbaijan – on the grounds that he liked to divide 

nationalities – that a 20-year discrepancy and the unrelated history 

of the Second World War didn’t seem to matter. The line from reporters,

 diplomats and pseudo-experts was pretty much the same when the 

conflict flared up again this month: here they go again.

Now I have to say that I always thought that the current war in 

Nagorno-Kharabagh was a particularly dirty conflict. When it was 

rekindled with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1988, one of Yerevan’s 

excuses for “taking it back” was that it contained some of the nation’s 

oldest churches. True. But there are plenty of Turkic historical roots 

in Karabagh. In much the same way, eastern Europe contains some 

of Teutonic Germany’s oldest buildings, and much of the Balkans 

boasts fine Ottoman Turkish architecture. But the ruins of ancient 

heritage make a very dodgy excuse for war. 

By the time I was covering the Karabagh war in the early 1990s, 

Armenian militia bands were murdering Azeri villagers in massacres 

eerily similar – though on a smaller scale – to those which occurred 

during Turkey’s genocide of the Armenian people in 1915; no wonder 

the Armenians in the capital of Yerevan denied these well-documented 

modern killings – those at Khojali in 1992, for example – for they 

undermined the victimhood of the Armenian people.

Yet in Karabagh’s “capital” of Stepanakert, I found little trace of Armenian 

government troops during the war. What I did see were roving bands of 

Armenian thugs, some of whom had been involved in the ethnic cleansing 

of the minority Azeri people. And I fear that for many Armenians in those 

dramatic days of the Soviet collapse – when Armenian citizens of the 

Soviet Union were also being slaughtered around Baku – the mountains 

and old churches of Karabagh became for Armenians a symbol of the 

equally ancient lands of Ottoman Turkey, from which they were deported 

in the 20th century’s first industrialised genocide.

The million and a half Armenian dead of 1915 were being avenged in 

Karabagh – and this is not just mere imagination. I was shocked to discover 

less than ten years ago that at the great Yerevan shrine to the million and 

a half martyrs of 1915 – to which Armenians and world leaders flock each 

April “Genocide Day” – the Armenians have buried the local Karabakh 

“martyrs” of the 1988-1994 war, men who in some cases may have been 

war criminals. It was as if the Israelis were to dishonour the Jewish 

Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem by burying there the leaders of the 

Stern Gang of the 1940s.

At the Yerevan shrine stands one of Armenia’s finest research centres 

into the facts of the 1915 Armenian Holocaust (as The Independent has 

called it for many years); yet a few hundred metres away are the graves 

of men who died for Nagorno-Karabagh, a land still recognised by the 

rest of the world as part of Azerbaijan.

Cynicism only comes to the rescue of hypocrisy when we hear the same 

old enemies clanking around the black mountains of Karabagh: Russian 

power, Turkish expansionism and Armenian nationalism. Given his 

current policies – or medical condition – it’s unclear whether Turkish 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan models himself on Mustafa Kemal 

Ataturk or the last mad rulers of post-First World War Pan-Turkish. 

In this weird scenario, does Vladimir Putin represent the Tsar who 

allied himself to the Armenians in the First World War – or the Bolsheviks 

who were happy to divide Azeris from Armenians?

In one sense, Putin is playing Putin the “intervener”. He is, after all, the 

intervener of Georgia and the intervener of Ukraine and the intervener 

of Syria. And now he is the intervener of Karabagh, or Azerbaijan.