Azerbaijan Abducts Critical-Care Patient
An Azerbaijani checkpoint at the entrance of the Lachin Corridor | Tofik Babayev/AFP via Getty Images
Azerbaijani forces abducted an elderly Armenian patient who was being transported on July 29 from the Republic of Artsakh to Armenia for urgent care.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was transporting 68 year-old, Vagif Khachatryan, when Azeri forces detained their vehicles at a checkpoint and took Khachatryan in an unknown direction. Sources conflict on whether or not a Red Cross representative was taken with the patient.
Azerbaijan has held Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, under a blockade for 7 months and counting. Food, fuel, and medical supplies have been heavily restricted, to the point that the entire country is on starvation rations.
The Republic of Armenia transported 400 tons of humanitarian aid towards Artsakh on July 27, but was prevented from entering Artsakh by the Azeri checkpoint who refused passage.
Minimal transport of critical care patients has been allowed outside of Artsakh, and the abduction of Khachatryan is seen as further escalation by the Aliyev regime of Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s state media claims Khachatryan has been placed under arrest for “genocide” and claims that during the war in 1991, Khachatryan and accomplices slaughtered a village of 25 Azeris and destroyed property.
Artak Beglaryan, Artsakh’s advisor to the president rejects this claim:
“Vagif Khachatryan was born in 1955 in Artsakh, lives in Patara village.Like all males, he also protected his homeland in the 1991-94 war, but the Az accusation is false, as there was no such a crime in Meshali village. Today he was kidnapped near his own daughter & ICRC rep.”
Many Armenians argue that Azerbaijan’s policy is to treat all men over the age of 18, as criminal conspirators simply because the people filed for independence upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
During the Soviet Era, the genocidal communist leader, Joseph Stalin, went against his advisors and declared that Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian region, would be an autonomous oblast ostensibly under Azerbaijan’s control.
This decision has sparked decades of conflict, owing to the Turkic-Azeri tradition of treating Armenians as treacherous enemies who must be eliminated. One Azeri poem educators have the option to teach their young students translates to:
“If he sleeps in the cradle
Don’t hold the knife too long
Find a sharper one and slit his neck.
He is a dirty Armenian.”
This attitude goes back to numerous pogroms by the Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens throughout the 1800s, and culminated in the Armenian Geocide, beginning in 1915, which saw the death of 1.5 million Armenians, as well as hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Assyrians, and other ethnic minorities.
Massacres against Armenian populations also took place in Baku, with the support of Ottoman Turks, and allowed the Azeri population to seize power in 1918. This is the first time that the name “Azerbaijan” denotated a geographical country.
The region around Baku has historically been controlled by one empire or another and didn’t come to be populated by Azeris until the bloodlines of Iranians and Turks formed the new tribe in the late Middle Ages.
Armenians, in contrast, have lived in the region since biblical times, and their continued presence in the Caucasus is a constant reminder to Turkey and Azerbaijan that they are occupying invaders, and are not native to that land.
Erasing the history of native inhabitants is the reason why “academics” in Turkey and Azerbaijan change the names of Armenian and Greek monuments. These two countries have no other way to establish a national culture or tradition that roots them to the land because their entire identity is rooted in conquest.
Turkic tribes were excellent warriors and skilled in deceitful diplomacy, which is why they were able to conquer so much. Cultural beauty, however, was created by the people they conquered up until the 1900s when the Ottomans massacred native inhabitants in order to create a “Turkish identity” out of the things others had fashioned.
The international community has long rejected recognition of Artsakh’s right to self-determination. Many Westerners view the issue has having been settled by Stalin’s decision as to who should control the Karabakh oblast.
Furthermore, political think-tanks in Washington D.C. view Azerbaijan as a useful ally against Iran and a source for access to oil in central Asia, despite the fact that the Aliyev regime is a dictatorship on par with other oppressive regimes in the region.
One almost comical incidence took place in 2013 when Azerbaijan released the results of the presidential “election” one day prior to voting even taking place. Ilham Aliyev won, of course, and continues to use the rich supply of oil to bribe Western leaders and academics to prop up the image of Azerbaijan with what is known as “caviar diplomacy.”
Khachatryan’s abduction is an indicator of what will happen if the international community allows Azerbaijan to starve Artsakh into submission. The men will be punished like terroristic criminals, and the women and children will be raped, and/or forced to flee from their ancestral homeland.
