An Open Letter to the US Ambassador to Armenia

Dear Madam Ambassador,

I am a US citizen who lived in Los Angeles from 2019–2022, and got to know and befriend a lot of Armenians during my time there. They welcomed me to their homes and businesses, and I had many wonderful experiences with my Armenian friends, even during the darkness of the pandemic. I also worked with Armenians and found them to be mostly humble and hard-working people. I developed an appreciation and love for their culture and cuisine, and I hope someday to visit Armenia. I am sure I will encounter the same hospitality and warmth I found back in Los Angeles.

They also taught me about the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide, a genocide that I didn’t even learn about in school. I was intrigued at the variety of places they came from- Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria- and they talked about how the Genocide scattered their people and led to the destruction and incorporation of their homeland into the modern Turkish state. To me, the marches of Armenians en masse to the desert paralleled the death marches the Nazis did with their concentration camp prisoners, the rounding up of intellectuals paralleled what the Nazis did with their purges of political opponents, the injections of gasoline and phenol paralleled what the Nazi doctors did to their prisoners. The Armenian Genocide was an insidious inspiration for the Holocaust, a nationalist agenda of ethnic cleansing gone genocidal. It is even more despicable that Turkey continues to deny the genocide and seeks to influence the global debate with their soft power and military importance. The Armenians today only have a fraction of their homeland, with Artsakh being a precarious remnant of the once mighty Armenian nation. And the recent blockade threatens to take yet another part of their homeland from them.

The Turkish aggressor has now been replaced by Azerbaijan, a mighty foe that has continued its aggression after winning the war back in 2020. They have blockaded Artsakh via the Lachin corridor since December of 2022, and even now they continue the blockade despite promising to end it. In addition, Armenian territory near the Lachin corridor has been occupied by Azerbaijan’s forces as well, and residents of these areas have been shot at and their livelihoods decimated. The Russian peacekeepers have failed to stop these incursions despite their mandate, and the supposed alliance between both countries has been proven to be a sham. This is not surprising given the Russian betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum and invasion of Ukraine. Putin does not care about the plight of the Armenians, and the Armenians are left with relying on Iran for their security. And that is not the most desirable country to ally with. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has strong alliances with Turkey and Israel, and Turkey commands a place in NATO, limiting Western concern and care about the Armenia-Azerbaijan crisis. They also have natural gas, a key resource that understandably makes them a key geopolitical partner against Russian aggression. It is not the Armenian’s fault that their enemy is seen by the EU and the US as geopolitically important, it is not the Armenian’s fault that they are reduced to relying on the Islamic, radical regime in Iran.

Despite Azerbaijan’s claims of protecting its sovereignty and reintegrating Artsakh, there was no need for it to send “environmental protestors”, no need for a blockade that is starving the people of Artsakh, and no need to basically invade Armenian territory itself. The international norms recognized since World War 2 demand self-determination and diplomatic solution of problems. The people of Artsakh want to be independent of Azerbaijan given their Armenian identity, and they have been allowed to exist autonomously since the first war ended. They should be given international recognition and protection because they are mostly Armenians, not Azeris, and they have lived on this land for millennia. Shall the US stand by and let Azerbaijan seize Artsakh and cleanse it of its Armenian population? Or God forbid, that Azerbaijan continues to chip away at Armenian defenses and occupy more of its territory. Shall the US continue to engage in realpolitik and allow Turkey and Azerbaijan to isolate and bully the Armenians, to deny the real history and continue to push their politically convenient history of what happened during WW1 and the collapse of the Soviet Union? The Armenians have always sought peace with their adversaries, and their Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has met with President Erdogan and President Aliyev. His diplomacy has led to a reopened border with Turkey and generous shipments of aid to Turkey after the devastating earthquake back in February. This shows the country’s commitment to peace and diplomacy, even with the country that perpetrated the Armenian Genocide over 100 years back and continues to deny what they did.

If the Armenians were truly the aggressors here, they would have formally annexed all the territory they occupied after the first war as well as Artsakh proper. They would have fortified their territory and would be looking to seize more of Azerbaijan itself, citing historical accounts of Armenian settlement in the land and spurious accounts of sabotage by Azerbaijan. They would be the ones bombing enemy territory, and they would perhaps be blockading Baku right about now via the Caspian Sea and Iranian desires to seize Azeri territory. What I have described is a hypothetical scenario based on what Azerbaijan claims about the Armenians, and these actions are what Azerbaijan has done in the past 3 years. Is there any excuse left to justify inaction on the blockade, any doubt about the indefensibility of Azerbaijan’s aggression, any illusion they will just stop and make peace with Armenia?

I strongly urge you to reach out to the President, to use the power of the US to compel Azerbaijan to end the blockade and come to a peace with Armenia. The US must do what Russia was supposed to do, establish and keep the peace. We must not let our alliances with Turkey and Azerbaijan lead to us turning a blind eye when they do the wrong thing, when they seek to perpetrate war and ethnic cleansing. NATO is an alliance to uphold international norms of peace and justice, a higher standard of morality than the alliances and international tensions that led to two destructive world wars. Let the US uphold these high international standards on the issue of Artsakh; let us save the people of Artsakh and end this blockade.

-Manav Dutta