By Armen Agopian
With recent violations of the cease fire over the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh have escalated once again, this time to a new level. For those who don’t know, Nagorno-Karabakh is a region in the South Caucus that has been a point of dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan for many decades. Nagorno-Karabakh’s population demographic shows that over 90% of its people are Christian Armenians.
A brief history lesson. During the late 20th century, when modern day Armenia was still under the control of the USSR, the Soviet Union gifted the region of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Azerbaijanis.
To simply explain the conflict, Azerbaijan is upset because on paper, Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to them, but in practice, they cannot enforce rules on a land where their people represent a fraction of the population.
Mainstream media tries to depict everything in black and white when in reality there are a lot of grey areas in ideological conflicts like these. Huge news organizations say “Armenian backed fighters won the battle in 1994” which is a very wrong way of stating the fact that the Armenians liberated their people. What people also don’t realize is that there is an extreme amount of politics behind conflicts like these. Countries with the same ideologies as others tend to back them up. Erdogan and the Turkish government have openly criticized the Syrian government led by Bashar Al-Assad and has armed the Islamic State to aid the siege of Syria. Under all the layers and the politics, the main reason was because Sunni Muslims and Shi’a Muslims don’t see eye to eye. 4 years ago, Erdogan told Aliyev, Azerbaijani head of state, that he will “support Azerbaijan until the end”. Even though Sunnis and Shi’as never fail their reputation of having relative hatred toward each other, these two camps must have had something in common for them to agree and support each other during this conflict. Their one idea in common was the vendetta they have against the Armenians.
The world must stop the hatred towards Armenians. The anti-Armenian politics and civil movements must halt. The pen is mightier than the sword, but in these dire moments it is the sword we need.
