Given the fact that the Azerbaijanis are recruiting jihadis to fight for them, and the jihadist rhetoric of some of those applauding them, it is not unreasonable for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to be concerned about the possibility of another genocide.
“Turkey Orchestrating Another Genocide, Armenia PM Says as Nagorno-Karabakh Boils,” International Business Times, October 8, 2020:
The world has not reacted to the calls for help raised by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan even as the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh is entering the second week….
He has said in unequivocal terms that a genocide is waiting to happen unless the world intervenes. “For them [Azerbaijan] the only solution is through ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, to be fully cleaned of Armenians and will fall completely under Azerbaijani control. This is a threat of genocide,” Pashinyan told the Euronews….
The Armenian prime minister says the tiny minority of Armenians living in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh are facing an existential threat. He says their towns and villages are under constant rocket fire from Azerbaijan.
“These people cannot just leave their thousands of years’ homelands just because Azerbaijan demands so, they have to defend themselves and they have that right to self-defence. There is no other aim for Nagorno Karabakh here, but self-defence,” says Pashinyan….
The ethnic Armenians are majority Christians, while Azerbaijan is mainly Muslim, giving the conflict a religious undertone and linking it to the Ottoman era oppression and mass slaughter of Armenian Christians. Turkey has refused to accept a genocide ever took place, though the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) undersocred the breadth of the targeted killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during 1915-15. More than a million Armenians died under the persecution of the Ottoman empire.
The Armenians were driven en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert by the Turks. Thousands of them were killed while more perished due to starvation and diseases. While historians around the world say the mass murder was carried out in order to annihilate the Christian Armenian people, Turkey has held the view that there was no systematic plan of ethnic cleansing….
Pashinyan says a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding. He cites the fact that Turkey is recruiting mercenaries to fight against the Armenians. “Today international terrorists are involved in the implementation of that genocide. They were recruited, brought to the region by Turkey. They are fighting on the side of Azerbaijan.”…
Interestingly, a Radio Free Europe report suggests that it is only a matter of time before Afghan warlords send fighters to Azerbaijan too. In 1992, Afghan fighters were a crucial element in the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. The same tribe of mercenaries are eager to travel again and participate in the ‘jihad’, the report says, citing war veterans.
“If possible, I would again join the Muslims of Azerbaijan to defend them against non-Muslim … My real motivation in going to Azerbaijan was participating in a jihad, but I also wanted to make some money,” says an Afghan mercenary identified as Mohammad Younas.
He is one of the men who fought against Armenia after being recruted by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-e Islami, a major Afghan Islamist party….
Pashinyan says his country is determined to avoid another genocide. He says he’s in for a ceasefire but the international powers should make sure the ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh are protected. Yervan would not wait for them to come and commit genocide on our people, he says.
“We have not attacked anyone. Our actions and the actions of Karabakh are only for self-defence. We have not and do not have the purpose to kill anyone. Our only purpose is to protect the Armenian people from another genocide. It is a self-defence purpose,” says Pashinyan.