Monday 11 April 2016

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.

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