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armenia
'Powerful Symbolism' as Armenia Recognizes Palestinian Statehood
"This is a victory for right, justice, legitimacy, and the struggle of our Palestinian people for liberation and independence," said one Palestinian official.
Jun 21, 2024
Armenia on Friday became the latest nation to formally recognize the state of Palestine, a move that infuriated Israel but was hailed by human rights defenders—some of whom urged nations including the United States and Britain to join the overwhelming majority of countries in supporting Palestinian statehood.
"The Republic of Armenia is genuinely committed to establishing peace and stability in the Middle East and lasting reconciliation between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples," the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"On various international platforms, our position has consistently been in favor of a peaceful and comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian issue, and we support the 'two-state' solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," the statement continued. "We are convinced that this is the only way to ensure that both Palestinians and Israelis can fulfill their legitimate aspirations."
"Based on the foregoing and reaffirming our commitment to international law and the principles of equality, sovereignty, and peaceful coexistence of peoples, the Republic of Armenia recognizes the state of Palestine," the ministry added.
Palestinian officials applauded the move by Armenia, which they said is the 149th nation to formally recognize the state of Palestine.
"This is a victory for right, justice, legitimacy, and the struggle of our Palestinian people for liberation and independence," Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee Secretary-General Hussein al-Sheikh said on social media. "Thank you, our friend Armenia."
However, Israel reacted angrily to Armenia's recognition of Palestine. A spokesperson for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Armenian Ambassador Arman Akopian for what they called a "harsh reprimand" following the move.
Armenia and Israel have historically had generally cordial relations. However, in 2020 Armenia recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv over Israel's arming of its enemy Azerbaijan during fighting between the two Caucasus countries over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Armenians have also bristled at Israel's continued refusal to acknowledge Turkey's 1915-17 genocide, in which at least 600,000 and possibly more than 1 million Armenians were killed. Armenian Christians also face persecution by Israeli authorities and bigotry from Jewish supremacists in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, home to a more than 1,500-year-old Armenian community.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry's Friday statement condemned the targeting of civilians in Gaza, where officials say that more than 133,000 people—most of them women and children—have been left dead, maimed, or missing by Israel's 259-day assault and siege, which has forcibly displaced around 90% of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people, destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, and caused
widespread starvation throughout the coastal strip and a famine that's killed dozens of people in the north.
The ministry also condemned Hamas' kidnapping of more than 240 Israelis and others on October 7—when over 1,100 people were killed during the Palestinian resistance group's attack on southern Israel—and demanded the hostages' "unconditional release."
Israel's conduct is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa. International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is
seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his defense minister, as well as three senior Hamas officials including Yahya Sinwar, who leads the group, for crimes including extermination.
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The Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict and the Pipelines That Run Through It
Given the country’s extensive energy resources, especially its oil and natural gas, U.S. officials have seen Azerbaijan as the key to creating a U.S.-led Caucasus
Dec 14, 2023
Officials in Washington are doubling down on their efforts to create a new energy corridor that runs through the Caucasus, a major transit route for trade and energy that connects Europe and Asia.
Focusing on Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries at odds over land and history, officials in Washington hope to link the two countries with energy pipelines, despite Azerbaijan’s recent incursion into Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the territory in September.
“A transit corridor built with the involvement and consent of Armenia can be a tremendous boon to states across the region and to global markets,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.
U.S. Objectives
For decades, U.S. officials have pursued geopolitical objectives in the Caucasus. Viewing the region as a strategically important area that connects Europe and Asia, they have sought to integrate the region with Europe while pulling it away from Iran and Russia, both of which maintain close ties to the region.
“The Caucasus is tremendously important as a crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” Senator James Risch (R-ID) said in a statement last year. “Trade agreements, energy deals, infrastructure, and investment all have the potential to better integrate the region within the transatlantic community.”
At the heart of U.S. planning is Azerbaijan. Given the country’s extensive energy resources, especially its oil and natural gas, U.S. officials have seen Azerbaijan as the key to creating a U.S.-led Caucasus that will help Europe transition away from its dependence on Russian energy.
“We have been hard at work, along with our European colleagues, over the course of the last decade, trying to help Europe slowly wean itself off of dependence on Russian gas and oil,” Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) explained at a hearing in September. “Part of that strategy has been to deliver more Azerbaijani gas and oil to Europe.”
Another reason for the U.S. focus on Azerbaijan is its location. With Russia to the north, the Caspian Sea to the east, and Iran to the south, U.S. officials have seen the country as “the epicenter of Eurasia energy policy,” as U.S. diplomats once described it. The United States has worked to position Azerbaijan as the starting point for an east-west energy corridor that benefits the West and deters a north-south corridor that would work to the advantage of Iran and Russia.
For the United States and its European allies, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline demonstrates the possibilities. Since 2006, the BTC pipeline has carried oil from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean Sea, where it has been shipped to global energy markets. The pipeline is controlled by a consortium of energy companies headed by BP, the British oil giant.
“We need that to keep functioning,” State Department official Yuri Kim told Congress in September.
From the U.S. perspective, another major geopolitical achievement has been the Southern Gas Corridor. The corridor, which combines three separate pipelines, runs from Azerbaijan all the way to Europe. Since its initial deliveries of natural gas to Europe in 2020, the corridor has been critically important to keeping Europe supplied with energy during the war in Ukraine.
“That Southern Gas Corridor is extremely important for ensuring that there is energy diversity for Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, potentially Albania, and definitely Italy, and possibly into the Western Balkans,” Kim said. “We cannot underestimate how important that is.”
A New Route?
As pipelines carry oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the West, U.S. officials have sought to reinforce the east-west corridor by creating additional pipelines that run through Armenia. Not only would a pipeline through Armenia add another route to the corridor, but it would pull Armenia away from Russia, which maintains a military presence in the country and provides Armenia with most of its energy.
For decades, one of the major challenges to U.S. plans has been the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. As long as Armenia and Azerbaijan have remained at odds over the region, U.S. officials have seen few options for integrating Armenia into a broader east-west energy corridor.
“If not for the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009, “the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline could have been routed through Armenia, reducing the distance and construction cost, and providing Armenia both an alternative source of gas as well as much-needed transit fees.”
In recent years, regional dynamics have rapidly shifted, however. As Azerbaijan grew flush with cash from its operations as an energy hub for the West, it began spending more money on weapons. With Israel and Turkey selling Azerbaijan increasingly sophisticated weapons, Azerbaijan built a large arsenal and acquired the upper hand over Armenia.
“Where other Western nations are reluctant to sell ground combat systems to the Azerbaijanis for fear of encouraging Azerbaijan to resort to war to regain [Nagorno-Karabakh] and the occupied territories, Israel is free to make substantial arms sales and benefits greatly from deals with its well-heeled client,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009.
Emboldened by its growing power and influence, Azerbaijan made its move. As fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September 2020, Azerbaijan’s military forces took advantage of their advanced weaponry from Israel and Turkey to capture the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh.
Before Azerbaijan’s military forces could seize control of Nagorno-Karabakh, however, Russia intervened, brokering a ceasefire and deploying about 2,000 peacekeepers to the region. Although various observers portrayed the outcome as a victory for Russia, the deal did not last long.
This past September, Azerbaijan moved to take the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh, armed by additional supplies of Israeli weapons. Following Azerbaijan’s incursion, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the territory for Armenia, where they remain today.
Now that Azerbaijan has taken control of Nagorno-Karabakh, U.S. officials are renewing their efforts to persuade Armenia and Azerbaijan to forge a peace deal that could be the basis for a new energy corridor.
“There is business to be done in this region,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.
At the Start Department, officials have been reviewing U.S.-funded plans for building the new energy corridor. As O’Brien noted, “the feasibility studies on this transit corridor [have] actually been done, funded by [the Agency for International Development (AID)], so we’re in the middle of seeing what kind of economic future there may be.”
Obstacles
Several obstacles stand in the way of U.S. plans. One possibility is that an increasingly emboldened Azerbaijan will invade Armenia and take the territory it wants for new pipelines. If Azerbaijan continues to acquire weapons from Turkey and Israel, it could take Armenian land by force, something that U.S. officials believe could happen.
“I think, from what I hear, the Armenians are concerned and feel threatened by that corridor and what it might imply for another grabbing of land by Azerbaijan,” Representative James Costa (D-CA) said at the hearing in November.
A related possibility is that Azerbaijan could work more closely with Russia. As Russia maintains military forces in Azerbaijan, it could facilitate a move by Azerbaijan to take Armenian land for a north-south energy corridor that benefits Russia.
Although Russia maintains a security pact with Armenia, relations have soured over Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh, making it possible that Russia will side with Azerbaijan.
Another challenge is the Azerbaijani government. For years, critics have charged Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev with leading a corrupt and repressive regime that has hoarded the country’s wealth while leaving the population to suffer.
In internal reports, U.S. diplomats have been highly critical of Aliyev. Not only have they compared him to mobsters, but they have suggested that the country “is run in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages.”
As critics have called on Washington to reconsider the U.S. relationship with Azerbaijan, some members of Congress have begun questioning U.S. strategy, particularly as it concerns the U.S. partnership with Aliyev.
The United States may have made “the wrong bet by moving more Azerbaijani resources into Europe,” Senator Murphy said in September. “This strategy of being dependent on a system and series of dictatorships… may not necessarily bear the strategic game that we think it does.”
Other members of Congress have questioned the State Department’s claims that a new energy corridor can bring peace to the region.
“I don’t see the peace process as going nearly as well as some of the description I’ve just heard,” Representative Costa said at the hearing in November. “It was ethnic cleansing that happened with the removal of these Armenians from their historic homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Regardless, officials at the State Department remain confident in their plans. Pushing forward with efforts to forge a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they remain hopeful that they can create a new energy corridor that runs through Armenia, even if means that the ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh will never be able to return to their homes.
“As we go from the medium to the longer term, there’s going to have to be some effort made to help integrate these folks into Armenian life,” AID official Alexander Sokolowski told Congress in November. “Many of them dream of going back to Nagorno-Karabakh, but for right now, they’re oriented towards making a life in Armenia.”
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To 'Honor the Victims' of 20th Century Atrocity, Biden Recognizes Armenian Genocide
"This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey's century-long obstruction of justice for this crime, and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people."
Apr 24, 2021
U.S. President Joe Biden cracked many decades of U.S. government silence on Saturday by publicly and officially recognizing that the systematic killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans during the First World War was--as historians, survivors, and their descendants have long known--a "genocide."
In an official White House statement, Biden said, "Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring."
In a phone call on Friday, Biden reportedly told Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that such an announcement--which the Turkish government has long, and successfully thus far, campaigned against--would be issued, as it ultimaely was, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorated each year on April 24 to mark what is called the "Meds Yaghern" by the Armenian people.
"We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history," Biden said in his statement. "And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms."
\u201cI commend President Biden\u2019s decision to formally recognize the Armenian Genocide. Calling this atrocity what it was \u2013 genocide \u2013 is long overdue. We must recognize the horrors of the past if we hope to avoid repeating them in the future. https://t.co/ffngbkAGvA\u201d— Elizabeth Warren (@Elizabeth Warren) 1619212696
According to the Associated Press:
Officials said Biden wanted to speak with Erdogan before formally recognizing the events of 1915 to 1923 as genocide--something past U.S. presidents had avoided out of concern about damaging relations with Turkey.
Friday's call between the two leaders was the first since Biden took office more than three months ago. The delay had become a worrying sign in Ankara; Erdogan had good rapport with former President Donald Trump and had been hoping for a reset despite past friction with Biden.
Upon earlier reports that Biden was preparing to make his announcement, Armenian National Committee of America executive director Aram Hamparian on Thursday said in a statement that his organization, which lobbied for nearly a century for public recognition by the U.S. government, would welcome the effective end of "the longest lasting foreign gag rule in American history."
"This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey's century-long obstruction of justice for this crime," Hamparian said, "and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people."
Recognition of the genocide, he added, "holds great meaning in terms of remembrance, but it is--at its heart--about the justice deserved and the security required for the survival of the Armenian nation--a landlocked, blockaded, genocide-survivor state."
Salpi Ghazarian, director of the University of Southern California's Institute of Armenian Studies, told the AP that the U.S. recognition of genocide would have resonance beyond Armenia and the diaspora.
"Within the United States and outside the United States, the American commitment to basic human values has been questioned now for decades," Ghazarian said. "It is very important for people in the world to continue to have the hope and the faith that America's aspirational values are still relevant, and that we can in fact to do several things at once. We can in fact carry on trade and other relations with countries while also calling out the fact that a government cannot get away with murdering its own citizens."
Writing in Newsweek on Friday, Danielle Tcholakian, an Armenian American journalist and essayist, wrote fiercely about the pain of growing up in a nation whose government has openly denied the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against her people and questioned what the declaration by Biden will mean at this point given the decades of self-interested and cynical U.S. foreign policy. She wrote:
It's difficult to see recognition this late as courage, especially as our ally relationship with Turkey has grown tenuous. The only excuse left is the one that always rang false: The naive delusion that not using the word "genocide" will somehow result in Erdogan's Turkey making any sort of effort at peaceful relations with Armenia. Armenia will never be safe as long as Erdogan is in charge of Turkey and Ilham Aliyev in charge of Azerbaijan. If America cares about Armenia's safety, leaving it in the hands of malignant autocrats is a bizarre way of showing it.
Recognition alone, 106 years after the fact, will not mean much to me personally, if I'm being honest. It will be a good thing to have in the historic record, and our hope has long been that it will help clarify when a genocide is happening and the urgency of intervention. Even today, the situation in the Tigray region in Ethiopia could not be more dire.
According to Hamparian--who also cited the ongoing persecution by the Turkish government and Azerbaijan--the declaration will have limited meaning if it does not "translate into a fundamental reset in U.S. policy toward the region--one which ensures the security of Armenia and Artsakh, and lays the groundwork for a durable peace based upon a just resolution of the Armenian Genocide."
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