Thousands of Armenian Christians flee Azerbaijan rule

Thousands of Armenian Christians have fled their ancestral homeland in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh over the weekend and more are expected, the government of Armenia confirmed Monday.

“The mass exodus has begun,” Siobhan Nash-Marshall, a U.S.-based human rights advocate who has been speaking to witnesses on the ground, told CNA.

Nash-Marshall founded the Christians in Need Foundation (CINF) in 2011 to help Armenian Christians in the region, and in 2020 she started a school for children and adults in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Now, Nash-Marshall has received word from her school in Nagorno-Karabakh that “all is over” and that “people from all regions, all villages, are homeless” and without shelter, food, and water. 

Hundreds of ethnic Armenians are sleeping in the streets and cannot even drink water because they claim it has been “poisoned by Azeris,” according to Nash-Marshall’s contacts. 

Nash-Marshall was told that there are lines of “2,000 in front of the only bakery” near her school and that “all are hungry, frightened, and hopeless.” 

According to the government of Armenia, 6,650 “forcibly displaced persons” entered Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh since last week.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Sunday that he expects most of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh to flee the region due to “the danger of ethnic cleansing,” Middle Eastern news source Al Jazeera reported.

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HT: Dr. Tighe

Armenians torch their homes on land ceded to Azerbaijan

 KALBAJAR, Azerbaijan (AP) — In a bitter farewell to his home of 21 years, Garo Dadevusyan wrenched off its metal roof and prepared to set the stone house on fire. Thick smoke poured from houses that his neighbors had already torched before fleeing this ethnic Armenian village about to come under Azerbaijani control.

The village is to be turned over to Azerbaijan on Sunday as part of territorial concessions in an agreement to end six weeks of intense fighting with Armenian forces. The move gripped its 600 people with fear and anger so deep that they destroyed the homes they once loved.

The settlement — called Karvachar in Armenian — is legally part of Azerbaijan, but it has been under the control of ethnic Armenians since the 1994 end of a war over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. That war left not only Nagorno-Karabakh itself but substantial surrounding territory in Armenian hands.

After years in which sporadic clashes broke out between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces, full-scale fighting began in late September this year. Azerbaijan made relentless military advances, culminating in the seizure of the city of Shusha, a strategically key city and one of strong emotional significance as a longtime center of Azeri culture.

Two days after Azerbaijan announced it had taken Shusha, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a Russia-brokered cease-fire under which territory that Armenia occupies outside the formal borders of Nagorno-Karabakh will be gradually ceded.

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Barack Obama breaks promise to call Armenian killings ‘genocide’

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama declined Friday to call the 1915 massacre of Armenians a genocide, breaking a key campaign promise as his presidency nears an end.

Obama, marking the upcoming Armenian Remembrance Day, called the massacre the first mass atrocity of the 20th century and a tragedy that must not be repeated. Yet he stopped short of using the word "genocide," a phrase he applied to the killings before he became president in 2009.

 "I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view has not changed," Obama said.

Armenian-American leaders have urged Obama each year to make good on a pledge he made as a candidate in 2008, when he said the U.S. government had a responsibility to recognize the attacks as genocide and vowed to do so if elected. Obama's failure to fulfill that pledge in his final annual statement on the massacre infuriated advocates and lawmakers who accused the president of outsourcing America's moral voice to Turkey, which staunchly opposes the genocide label.

"It's a Turkish government veto over U.S. policy on the Armenian genocide," Aram Hamparian, head of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in an interview. "It's like Erdogan imposing a gag rule very publicly and an American president enforcing that gag rule." He was referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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100 Years Ago: The Armenian Genocide

Armenian Church to Glorify Martyrs of 1915 Genocide

“In a move that has surprised Turkey, the Armenian Church is going to proceed with the canonization of the victims of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Turkish State in 1915, using Kurdish labourers for the massacres. The scientifically perpetrated genocide by, is described by the Turkish historian Taner Akcam as "A shameful act" (the title of his book ) . But the Ankara government has never recognized it and rejects the definition of "genocide”,” missionary news agency AsiaNews reports.

“Sources quoted by Turkish newspapers say the canonization will take place in 2015, the centenary of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians killed in Asia Minor.”

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Furious Armenia Breaks Diplomatic Ties With Hungary

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Armenia broke off diplomatic ties with Hungary after an Azerbaijani military officer sentenced to life in prison here for killing an Armenian officer was sent back to his homeland on Friday and, despite assurances, immediately pardoned and freed.

Lt. Ramil Safarov was given a life sentence in 2006 by the Budapest City Court after he confessed to killing Lt. Gurgen Markarian of Armenia while both were in Hungary for a 2004 NATO language course. Azerbaijan and Armenia are ex-Soviet neighbors who have been locked in a long-standing conflict over the mountainous territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In response to Safarov’s release, Armenian President Serge Sarkisian said his country was cutting diplomatic ties with Hungary, while Hungarian state news agency MTI reported that protesters in the Armenian capital of Yerevan threw tomatoes at the building housing Hungary’s honorary consulate and the tore down the Hungarian flag.

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Vatican reveals unpublished Armenian genocide documents from its secret Archives

In the Secret Vatican Archives are stored documents that testify to the unprecedented and shocking genocide by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians after the First World War, documents that will be published soon in a book co-edited by the same Vatican Archives.

The advanced news arrived, a little by surprise, during the presentation in the Vatican of the exhibit "Lux Arcana", which - from next February - will open to the public, for the first time, the treasures of one of the oldest and most extensive archives in the world.

The testimonials, explained the prefect of the Secret Archives, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, describe "in detail" the "procedures of torture that the Turks used towards the Armenians". For example, he said, there is evidence of how the soldiers of the Sublime Porte would bet "on the sex of fetuses in the wombs of pregnant women before they quartered them and with the same knife killed the babies".

These episodes, said the Vatican archivist, who "make me ashamed to be a man, and if it were not for faith, I would see only darkness".

It is easy to imagine that the publication of these documents reignite the tension between the Holy See and Turkey, at a time when the memory of the killing of Monsignor Luigi Padovese, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, a year ago June 3rd, is still alive.

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