Imagine reading that the U.S. government sent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to Russia, which used those funds to attack and invade Ukraine.
Shocked? You should be. And now replace “Russia” with “Azerbaijan” and “Ukraine” with “Armenia,” and you no longer have to imagine, as it is precisely what happened last week and continues to take place.
Except, Azerbaijan is even more of an autocracy than Russia (its current president inherited the presidency from his father and is married to the vice president) and has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
It gets worse: the U.S. government sent these dollars — your and my dollars — in violation of its own laws, according to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office. So why are we not paying closer attention?
My hometown was among several dozen Armenian towns attacked last week.
For me, the week of September 12 started like any other – coffee, email. Then came the horrific news: just after midnight in Armenia, Azerbaijan had launched a massive and coordinated attack on a number of Armenian towns and villages, shelling peaceful citizens while they were sleeping. This shelling was so intense it showed up as massive fires on satellite mapping by NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management Systems.
Jermuk — my town, the home of my cherished childhood memories, friends, classmates, neighbors, my happy place — was among the targets. It is a ski resort town surrounded by lush mountains, a beautiful corner of the world where I was fortunate to grow up, attend school, breathe its fresh air and drink its pristine water. It’s sort of the Aspen of Armenia, minus million-dollar homes. It will forever have my heart.
Frantically, I started calling friends and family. “Are you OK?” “What’s going on?” “Please, God, please be ok . . . .”
They were far from ok.
My childhood friends, now adults, had grabbed their sleeping children and, still wearing bedclothes and slippers, were driving them away from the town, away from the border, away from the shelling, from death.
Once the children were out, men and many women came back, ready to defend our town, our mountains, our air and water.
And defend they did. They stopped the invasion before the enemy could enter the town center until the U.S. was able to compel a temporary ceasefire. The price of the defense was high — more than 200 people, soldiers and volunteers, were killed in three days.
Soon after, videos of horrific war crimes by Azerbaijani invaders emerged, including stripping and mutilating the body of a female soldier, a mother of three children, who had stood up against the aggressors, while the Azeri invaders giggled and encouraged one another. This is one of many war crime accounts from last week.
Why should we, Americans, care about what is going on in another part of the world, thousands of miles away? For one, any military escalation in the region would further destabilize an already fragile part of the world.
Turkey is a strong supporter of Azerbaijan and its aggression against Armenia. If these efforts are not stopped, there is a risk that Iran, which is concerned about the growing Turkish presence at its northwestern border, could get involved, thus sparking potentially an unmanageable regional war in the Middle East, with potentially even worse consequences than the emergence of ISIS.
We should care because Armenians are our neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians live in the U.S., some for several generations, having found refuge here following the Armenian Genocide in 1915, when one and a half million Armenians were massacred by the Turkish government, and thousands of others, mostly orphans, were scattered all over the world.
The tiny ancestral homeland of the Republic of Armenia, the only democracy in the region, is a beacon of hope for all Armenians, a symbol that despite centuries of persecution and a Genocide, the Armenian people, our culture, language, and Christianity continue to survive and thrive.
At a minimum, we should care that our taxpayer dollars are financing invasion and war crimes by an autocratic dictator in blatant aggression against its democratic neighbor. In 2020, when Azerbaijan was attacking Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region, candidate Joe Biden ridiculed President Donald Trump for not enforcing Section 907 sanctions against Azerbaijan.
Yet, President Biden has broken his own promise to enforce the U.S. sanction law on Azerbaijan.
In late 2020, the Republic of Armenia made enormous concessions to Azerbaijan to stop the war on Nagorno-Karabakh. But now Azerbaijan’s dictator wishes to invade the Republic of Armenia, dismember and depopulate it — because he thinks he can get away with it.
On September 21, Armenia’s independence day, dictator Aliyev openly ridiculed the U.S. and the international community, saying that “no one and nothing can stop us” from invading Armenia. This was said, in part, as a reaction to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s weekend trip to Armenia in support of Armenia’s democracy and security.
Armenia is outgunned. Armenia is outnumbered. Yet, it’s not asking for weapons. It’s simply asking the U.S. to enforce U.S. law — to stop arming Azerbaijan.
My childhood friends in Jermuk are ready to die to save their home against the invaders when the next round of aggression starts. They may be more successful if the U.S. isn’t supporting the invader.
Hermine Kallman is an Armenian-American attorney in Denver who serves on the board of the Armenians of Colorado, an organization serving the Armenian community since 1979.
