{"id":11047,"date":"2023-08-28T23:42:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-29T03:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=11047"},"modified":"2023-08-30T22:39:41","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T02:39:41","slug":"starving-armenians-and-very-tasty-cookies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/08\/starving-armenians-and-very-tasty-cookies\/","title":{"rendered":"Starving Armenians and very tasty cookies"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>riter Nancy Kricorian<\/strong> argues that the blockade of 120,000 people trapped in an enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, has awakened trauma and triggered fear in Armenians around the world. This humanitarian crisis demonstrates again the need to build internationalist solidarity from below, a political force independent of the brutal machinations of nationalist chauvinism and imperial and sub-imperial politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I was growing up in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, in the sixties and seventies, attending a church founded by genocide survivors and their children, I found it confusing when I heard the parents of my non-Armenian schoolmates say to their children, \u201cEat your food. Think of the starving Armenians.\u201d Who were these starving Armenians? I certainly wasn\u2019t one of them. I had never been explicitly told about the genocide, although I knew that the Turks had done something terrible to my grandmother\u2019s family, something we didn\u2019t talk about because it was too upsetting for her.<\/p>\n

I gradually learned about the systemic mass deportations and massacres of Armenians by Ottoman authorities that started in 1915 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people. This genocide caused the virtual destruction of Armenian community life across the empire. Images of the survivors, most of them orphaned children, who were on the verge of starvation in desert camps and orphanages inspired an international campaign spearheaded by Near East Relief and other charitable organizations to care for them. Photos of near skeletal Armenian children dressed in rags were circulated, giving rise to the expression that reverberated for decades, \u201cstarving Armenians.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A
Pre-dawn bread line in Stepanakert. Photo by Mary Astryan, August 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fast forward to 2023, and the specter of starving Armenians, this time 120,000 people trapped in an enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, has awakened trauma and triggered fear in Armenians around the world. In the past few weeks, the dire situation has started to receive mainstream media coverage as the alarm is sounded. Former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo stated that Azerbaijan\u2019s ongoing blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only land route connecting Artsakh to the Republic of Armenia, which provides food, medicines, and other supplies to the local population, is tantamount to genocide<\/a>. It is, at the very least, already a humanitarian catastrophe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Azerbaijan is an oil and natural gas rich country ruled over by president and de facto dictator Ilham Aliyev, who has close alliances with Turkey and Israel<\/a>, receiving weapons shipments and political support from both. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe the complicated and long history of the struggle for control over Nagorno-Karabakh, but this 2020 interview<\/a> with Berkeley history professor Stephan Astourian provides a short primer on the conflict. <\/p>\n

Suffice it to say that in the post-Soviet 1990s, Armenia wrested control of the enclave from Azerbaijan, to whom it had been assigned by Stalin, and a 30-year frozen conflict ensued, ending in September 2020 with a military assault by Azerbaijan, during which three-quarters of the territory was taken. The remaining area, the city of Stepanakert and surrounding villages populated by ethnic Armenians, was put under the control of Russian peacekeepers, while a permanent settlement was pursued.<\/p>\n

In December 2022, Azerbaijani agents posing as purported \u201cenvironmental activists\u201d<\/a> blockaded the Lachin Corridor, under the pretense of protesting ore mining operations, but the effect of their actions was to strangle and starve the people of Artsakh, who are seen as an impediment to full Azerbaijani control over the area.<\/p>\n

Genocidal incitement against Armenians is a regular feature of statements from Azerbaijani government officials and in its media. Destruction of Armenian cultural heritage<\/a> in Artsakh has proceeded under Azerbaijani rule, bolstered by the claim, disproven by international art historians, that Armenian churches and monasteries are actually \u201cAlbanian Christian\u201d monuments. The Azerbaijanis have been removing Armenian inscriptions<\/a> from medieval churches and razing cemeteries. It is not enough to attempt to destroy the Armenian presence in the area, but their history must also be wiped out.<\/p>\n