The night before the Republican presidential debate, hundreds of Armenian Americans demonstrated outside of the California debate location, calling on GOP candidates to speak out about what they called a current genocide happening in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Across southern California, which has one of the largest Armenian diaspora populations in the world, residents expressed heartbreak and anger over what they saw as the failure of the US and Europe to prevent the current crisis, which has left the futures of an estimated 120,000 ethnic Armenians in limbo as Azerbaijan moves to take full control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The territory is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but has been governed by ethnic Armenians since the fall of the USSR – in which both Armenia and Azerbaijan were Soviet Republics. Azerbaijan gained territory in a 44-day war in 2020 that resonated so deeply in Los Angeles some local residents flew out to fight to defend their homeland.
An Azerbaijani military offensive this month saw Baku claim control over Nagorno-Karabakh and tens of thousands of its 120,000 population leave for Armenia, fearing they cannot trust Azerbaijan’s assertions it will respect the rights and religious freedom of those ethnic Armenians who chose to remain.
“Everything that is happening today is utterly predictable, and much of it could be avoided with more forceful American action,” Paul Krekorian, the first Armenian American president of the Los Angeles city council, told the Guardian.
“It’s a catastrophic situation. Genocide is happening before our very eyes,” Krekorian said. “And my country is doing essentially nothing.” Memories of the 1915 Armenian genocide, when 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians died under the Ottoman Turkish empire, remain strong in the community and many of the signs held outside the Ronald Reagan library referenced it and what the protesters saw as its echoes.
“End the cycle of genocide!”
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) September 27, 2023
“1915 happening again!”
Armenian Americans chant “Republicans speak up” and “Biden supports genocide outside the Reagan library in California pic.twitter.com/NR5cKek7WE
Armenian Americans said they are pressing for more than words of official condemnation – they’re asking for US government sanctions against Azerbaijan and its president, Ilham Aliyev; an end to US military support for Azerbaijan; and major humanitarian aid, from immediate efforts to transport sick and injured people out of the region, which is currently struggling with a lack of medical supplies, to long term assistance for displaced families.
Some Armenian Americans criticised the $11.5m in humanitarian assistance the US government pledged this week as “pathetic”, saying it amounted to less than $100 per person of the estimated 120,000 people that many Armenian Americans believe will ultimately be displaced.
“There needs to be compensation and restitution of these families, for what they’ve lost,” said Gassia Apkarian, a superior court judge from Orange county who is currently in Goris, the border town where refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh are arriving.
The Armenian National Congress of America (ANCA), a prominent advocacy group, repeatedly shared a video of USAID administrator Samantha Power during a visit to Armenia this week, and a critic who shouted at her: “Sanction Azerbaijan or go back to your country. You don’t care, stop the lies.”
Power became famous as the author of a 2002 book on how America should confront genocide, a book that argued there are “bystanders” and “upstanders” during every crisis, said Raffi Hamparian, ANCA’s chairman. When it comes to Nagorno-Karabakh, “in about every way imaginable, the Biden administration has been a bystander,” Hamparian said.
The point of the rally outside the Reagan library, which was organized by the Armenian Youth Federation, was to encourage Republican presidential candidates to push for more government action, Hamparian said. So far, he said, none had emerged as a champion.
“Republicans, speak up!” the roughly 300 protesters chanted. “GOP take action!”
“Republicans, speak up!”
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) September 27, 2023
Armenian Americans protest in advance of the GOP presidential debate in California. pic.twitter.com/X0kOCYHRbm
Like the United States, some California demonstrators said, western democracies in Europe appeared to be reluctant to challenge oil-rich Azerbaijan, as the war in Ukraine continues to disrupt global oil markets.
“They’ve traded 120,000 people’s lives for oil and gas, and they don’t care that we’ve been there for thousands of years,” said Sevana, an Armenian American at the protest, who would only share her first name, citing employment concerns.
Ramil Gurbanov, the consul general of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Los Angeles, said in a statement that the country rejects “the unfounded allegations of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ or ‘a new genocide’ as propagated by Armenia and echoed by some sources”. He said Armenians had committed war crimes during the long conflict between the two countries, and that hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis had been forcibly displaced during the war that ended in 1994, separating them from their homes for 30 years.
“The Azerbaijani president has instructed our armed forces, before the local counter-terrorism measures started, to exercise utmost care and precision to avoid harm to civilians,” Gurbanov said.
As one recent “gesture of goodwill”, he said, Azerbaijan has allowed Armenian helicopters to land at an airport in the region to transport injured Armenians who do not want to stay in the country.
In recent months, Armenian Americans have continued to sound the alarm about worsening conditions in the region, which Armenians call Artsakh. Kim Kardashian shared an op-ed in early September asking Biden to “stop another Armenian genocide”.
Around Los Angeles, pro-Armenian protesters have shut down freeways at least twice in recent weeks to raise awareness of the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, but some demonstrators said they still feel the conflict is invisible to other Americans, and that they are struggling to get the kind of recognition or support that Americans showed to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion.
“No one is really talking about it,” said Diana Baronian, a San Fernando Valley resident whose grandparents survived the 1915 genocide. “It’s painful. It’s very painful.”
A friend in Nagorno-Karabakh, she said, just had a baby and had been forced to hide in a basement.
Armenian Americans in California said they are now struggling to get updates from friends and relatives in the region, as the lack of electricity makes communication difficult.
“Hours will go by, and you just don’t know if something happened,” said Joseph Kaskanian, who spoke at the Reagan library protest. Many people were missing, he said.
Maggie Arutyunyan, an Armenian American activist and attorney, has spent the past three years working to document humanitarian abuses and war crimes in Artsakh as part of the Center for Truth and Justice, an American nonprofit.
She said her second cousin, who lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, recently made it into Armenia with her family, after spending the past week with two small children “huddled in a bunker underneath a school with no electricity, no Internet, no food, nothing to drink”. Once a day, she said, her cousin turned on her phone to let her family know she was alive, before turning it off again.
“All the time,” Arutyunyan said, another cousin in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, was “calling me to see, ‘What is the US going to do? What is the US going to do?’”
