BY ANDREW DEMIRDJIAN
“Your motivation may be that you want
the people out, but if in doing that you intend
to destroy the group, then it’s also genocide.”
Professor James Silk
(Yale Law School)
By flagrantly violating the ceasefire agreement of November 9, 2020, Azerbaijani forces executed a surprise attack on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) on September 19 and 20, 2023, killing 200 people, wounding 400, and left a trail of devastation of the important infrastructure of the enclave.
For over 3,000 years, the indigenous people of Artsakh have been continuously living on their ancestral lands. Within 48 hours of heavy artillery and missile strikes against Artsakh’s defense forces and unarmed civilians by Azerbaijan, the beleaguered people had to surrender before many more lives were perished.
The consequence of this brutal attack was the exodus of the 120,000 population of Artsakh, a massive number of 100,000 individuals were forced to seek asylum in its neighboring Republic of Armenia alone. The flight was triggered out of internationally founded fear of war, violence, and persecution including ethnic cleansing and genocide by Azerbaijan.
On account of President Ilham Aliyev’s nefarious schemes, Artsakh was devastated and eventually emptied of its native people. In this way, Azerbaijan has inflicted a lot of mental and physical pain and suffering on civilians consisting of unarmed men, women, and children.
The fundamental question was whether the henious act was ethnic cleansing or genocide? Or a combination thereof perpetrated by President Aliyev, the scourge, who caused great harm and suffering?
A traumatized population of over 120,000 has been rooted out of their native land. For some experts, this act constitutes ethnic cleansing of an unprotected people to deprive them of their homes and homeland; many others even proclaim the act as genocide.
In my previous articles, I have explored the contentions of the two schools of thought; that is to say, whether the brutal treatment of the people of Artsakh was ethnic cleansing or genocide. I also raised the question whether it was possible that these two concepts were related and that they were the two sides of the same coin?
The conclusion was drawn that Azerbaijan had committed “Ethnic-Cleansing Genocide” on the people of Artsakh. To consider the act as genocide, circumstantial evidence was used for the perpetrator’s intent to destroy whole or part of the population of Artsakh..
In this article, however, direct evidence, not just a smoking gun, will be presented to establish that Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev’s brutal acts had the intent to eliminate the people of Artstakh if his attack had failed to achieve his goal despite the fact that he had already killed part of the people of Artsakh.
Ideas have changed the world; ideas may also help Artsakh’s population regain their birthright to return to free and independent Artsakh. So, let us clarify the term Ethnic Cleansing as a new term used in the vocabulary of crimes and then discuss the crime of genocide along with the intent to eliminate an ethnic group in order to establish the killings of innocent people as genocide.
Ethnic Cleansing
Ethnic cleansing refers to a situation when “an ethnic group is forced to leave their homes due to the fear of “war, violence, or persecution”. It is generally referred to the expulsion of a group from a certain area usually claimed as their homeland.
It should be noted that under international law, ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime. The term was employed in the context of the 1990s conflict in the former Yugoslavia and is considered to have come from the literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression of “etnicko ciscenje, “ meaning ethnic cleansing.
The term “ethnic cleansing,{ however, has been used in resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly of the UN. It has also been acknowledged in judgments and indictments of the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia).
Ethnic cleansing has not been officially defined by the UN or any relevant or related organization. Furthermore, it is not recognized as a crime under international law according to the UN. As we shall see later, the required conditions between ethnic cleansing and genocide are not crystal clear or mutually exclusive at first sight. Later, we shall make this point clear after discussing the crime of genocide.
Many experts consider ethnic cleansing has happened to the popultion of Artsakh. Here is the supporting argument: On December 12, 2022, Azerbaijani so-called environmentalist activists with Aliyev’s consent blocked the Berdzor (Lachin) Corridor, which is the only link to connect Artsakh to Armenia and beyond.
The deadly blockage, thus, prevented the flow of food, medicine, and fuel from the outside world. In other words, Azerbaijan weaponized a siege starvation for nearly ten months to make the people of Artsakh to become weak, sick, and finally succumb to Aliyev’s wish of controlling their ancestral lands. And, to the dismay of many Armenians, Aliyev’s premeditated plans worked for him seamless for the Western powers chose to be just bystanders.
Fear, flight, destruction, and the capture and the downfall of a native nation are ample evidence to convict President Aliyev of ethnic cleansing of the people of Artsakh. Figure 1 summarizes the argument presented above.
Here is the challenging, critical question: Is the tragic event of the people of Artakh a case of ethnic cleansing or genocide or both? Let us see if we can answer this knotty question.
If we go through the five conditions to qualify a crime as genocide listed below, we see that the second requirement “2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm” and that the third requirement “3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part” support the position that ethnic cleansing may be the input to genocide.
Seemingly, therefore, both are related concepts to criminalize the perpetrators of the crime against humanity.
All of these instances prove that President Aliyev wanted to starve the people to death so that he can claim their ancestral lands. He even refused to let humanitarian aid to reach the people of Artsakh. We can conclude the whole act as being ethnic cleansing as a prelude to genocide. After all, Pres. Aliyev killed over 200 innocent people; this act alone constitutes genocide.
Unlike genocide, international law lacks enforcement mechanisms for ethnic cleansing crimes> Clearly it has not been effective. For example, more than 500,000 Rohingya refugees, escaping violence and persecution in Myanmar, have fled their homes in a matter of two months for the third time in 2016. No punitive measures have been taken against the perpetrators of the crime. Thus, President Aliyev has to be convicted of genocide if the righteous world wants to see him punished for crimes against humanity.
Genocide
Upon Raphael Limpkin’s coining of the term genocide based on the Armenian massacres and sufferings of 1.5 million during 1915-1923 period by the Ottoman Empire, the United Nations first defined genocide in 1948 in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide. One way to define it by stating that genocide is “the crime of intentionally destroying pasrt or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods
As a result of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide, the treaty outlines the following five acts that can qualify as genocide if they are done “with the intent to destroy an ethnic, national, racial or religious group”:
1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm
3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births
5. Forcibly transferring children
` To constitute an act as genocide, the act must be done with intent to eliminate an entire group or part of people. Without provable intent, a group or individual can still be guilty of “crimes against humanity” or “ethnic cleansing” but not genocide.
Tribunals have historically struggled to establish a legal standard for genocidal intent. The task has defied a solution due to the fact that only a few perpetrators, with the notable exception of the Nazi regime, have left explicit plans detailing their intentions to eradicate groups.
Here is a brief explanation on how ethnic cleansing dovetails with genocide. If what I say is convincing of Aliyev’s intention to torture people with fear and famine, to force them into submission, then that agrees with the second act of genocide condition: “2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm” and with the third genocide requirement condition: “3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in To clarify the difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide, based on the brief argument above, we can draw the conclusion that through ethnic cleansing acts we can also arrive at genocide for both in ethnic cleansing and genocide, the perpetrator is “2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm,” and “3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The two concepts of ethnicc clansing and genocide are presented in the self-explanatory Flowchart 1 listed below as being analogues based on circumstantial evidence for the presence of intent to destroy a group in whole in part. As of January 20, 2024, we have direct evidence for the genocidal intent.
Genocidal Intent
Legally, a better than a smoking gun has just surfaced. It came from the horse’s mouth: without the following admission we would not have been able to establish a direct, incontrovertible, incriminating evidence that President Aliyev had the intention to eradicate the natives of Artsakh on September 19 and 20, 2023, surprise attack on Stepanakert. In the event the remaining population of Artsakh had not surrendered to his forces, President Aliyev would have “eliminated” them.
Here is the supporting evidence. According to over twenty-page report in Eglish on the Internet (https://president.az/en/articles/view/63017), on January 10, 2024, President Aliyev gave a lengthy two-and-half-hour (2.5) long press conference to Azeri reporters of various TV channels during which he expressed his usual venom toward Armenia and the Armenians,
President Aliyev also expressed his threats of having his way with the so-called Azerbaijani territories in Armenia, especially the realization of his and Turkey’s dream of the so-called “Zangezur Corridor, connecting the Nakhichevan exclave with mainland Azerbaijan without any check points or customs inspections by Armenia.
. During the national press interview of 2.5 hours long cited above, President Aliyev admitted his intent of genocide of the people of whom 200 had already been killed and 400 wounded to terrorize the people into fleeing their homeland, by stating –”Had they [the Armenians of Artsakh] not surrendered, they would have been eliminated. There was no other option.” The act is a crime of genocide no matter how many Armenians were killed 200 or 120,000 by Azerbaijan. It is one of the UN rules pertaining to genocide.
“They [The people of Artsakh] would have been eliminated” means Aliyev had the intention to liquidate or eradicate them had they continued to defend themselves against his aggression, but he could only eliminate part of them, which is still genocide.
In a court of law, when someone is accused of a crime and enters a “not guilty” plea, the prosecutor would have a herculean task to prove otherwise. However, when a smoking gun surfaces or a direct evidence such a defendant’s admission of guilt, the entire case takes a new direction to convict the suspect with the new irrefutable evidence.
So is true with Aliyev. He has admitted his intent to eradicate the rest of the population of Artsakh for wanting to remain free and independent in their ancestral lands.
Not too many leaders leave traces of their plans to exterminate a group of people in part or in whole. Hitler’s Nazi regime is an exception, which put it in writing and speaking about the “final solution” of the Jews. And now, we have President Aliyev to have admitted his intent, advertently, inadvertently, or ignorantly to “eliminate” the population of Nagorno-Karabakh. In so doing, he has incriminated himself of Ethnic-Cleansing Genocide.
President Aliyev maybe the second head of state to have left evidence of his intent to exterminate an entire ethnic group. Here we have unequivocal piece of information that proves Aliyev had committed the crime of genocide by kiling part of the inhabitants of Artsakh and intending to wipe them out if they continued to refuse to succumb to his wish.
The term “smoking gun” is a reference to an object or fact that serves as a relatively conclusive evidence of a crime or similar act, just short of being caught in “flagrante delicto”. Smoking gun refers to the strongest kind of circumstantial evidence, as opposed to direct evidence, which is the primary, the ultimate evidence to convict a defendant of the accused crime.
Let us not forget: Since the Second Artsakh War in 2020, a number of international genocide watch organizations have warned the world of the looming massacres of Armenians by genocidal Azerbaijan, causing fear and anxiety in the natives of Artsakh. Besides, Azerbaijan’s track record in brutal treatment of the Armenians in Azerbaijan are well document in specific pogroms and massacres throughout its adjustment as a newly minted state in 1918.
In a criminal proceeding, a defendant’s confession or admission of guilt invariably constitutes direct evidence. Now that we have the incriminating admission from the horse’s mouth, we can conclude with 100 percent certainty that President Ilham Aliyev is guilty of Ethnic-Cleansing Genocide of the natives of Artsakh.