“We Are Our Mountains” monument (photo Marcin Konsek from Wikimedia)

A Call for Lasting Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh: Western Intellectuals Begin to Speak Up

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LOS ANGELES – The following is an appeal which appeared on October 16, 2020 in the LA Review of Books signed by important intellectuals Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tariq Ali, Viken Berberian, Noam Chomsky, Judith Herman, Cornel West and Seyla Benhabib. Along with recent editorials in major newspapers (e.g. “Let’s Not Allow Another Aleppo in the Caucasus,” by novelist Chris Bohjalian in the Boston Globe), many new statements in support of peace are appearing in the media.

Dear Friends:

We are writing this letter with the hope that you will join the international call for a ceasefire to end the bloodshed and human and cultural carnage taking place since September 27, 2020 in what has been described as the “de facto Armenian republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh)” within the Soviet-era boundaries of Azerbaijan.

Ever since the fierce border disputes at the time of the establishment of Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan, ethnic discomfort smoldered in the region and broke into open conflict at the disintegration of the USSR. Since then, it has been a history of conflict, small ceasefires in the thousands made to be broken. Serious military confrontation began in 2016; again with broken ceasefires. Now the violence seems to have increased exponentially and the last Russian brokered ceasefire was breached on October 10. The Azeris bombed not only the city of Hadrut in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), but also a region in Armenia proper. There are civilian deaths and many wounded … and we do not know what to expect in the coming days.

This wholesale destruction is part of the expansive and violent territorial policy of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey to re-establish a version of Ottoman power in the region. We would be closer to a compromise if Azerbaijan had a more open governance structure than Turkey with internal checks and balances. As it stands, we understand that Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey, is cleansing Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), a historically Armenian enclave placed within its Soviet-era boundaries, of its ethnic Armenian population. The frontline of the soldiers is reportedly composed not only of mercenaries and rebel fighters from Syria and Libya but also minorities living in Azerbaijan such as Lezgins, the Talysh, Avars, Tats, Udis, the Tsakhur, Ingiloys, Rutuls, and Kurds. We call on these minorities to support rather than oppose the minority struggle of the Armenians. Azerbaijan’s 1997–2006 erasure in Nakhchivan of its Armenian culture gives us a sense of the seriousness of the continuing violence and relentless destruction of civilian lives and property, precisely of longstanding minorities, that we have been witnessing over the last decades. We remind you that the site of the bombing includes archaeological sites such as the ancient Armenian city of Tigranakert.

Before the ravages brought in by World War I and the 20th century, Azeris and Armenians in the area lived in the kind of conflictual coexistence with which we are acquainted in the multiethnic parts of the world. We are asking now not only for an agreement to a ceasefire but an insistence on the preservation of that ceasefire and protection for the Armenian minority in its efforts toward self-determination. We hope, in the long run, with the participation of all international institutions of justice, that the democratic will of the ethnic Armenians of the area can be acknowledged.

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In solidarity,

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

Tariq Ali, Writer

Viken Berberian, Writer

Noam Chomsky, University of Arizona

Judith Herman, Harvard Medical School

Cornel West, Harvard University

Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

¤

This letter echoes a similar statement made by Jacques Derrida, Isaiah Berlin, Alain Finkielkraut, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals in the New York Review of Books on September 27, 1990.

The LA Review of Books also used the image of the statue We Are Our Mountains from Karabakh used here.

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