The decades-old bellicose propaganda has long-sown seeds of hatred that can bear no other fruit- only blood, death, tragedy, a new generation of mothers with lost sons. Theirs is the type of loss from which there is no return to any ordinary life. Their only consolation is the understanding that there is no more worthy an altar than the battlefield upon which these boys fight for the very survival, the dignified existence of the Armenian ethnos in the 21st century.
One of the most peace-loving nations in the world is once more forced to take part in this theatre of war, this most shameful exercise of a civilized world. This scourge unleased by two dictators spurred by their innate blood-lust and engrained, but yet unfulfilled desire, to rid the world of its very last Armenian. Empowered by their hundred years of impunity, and the fantastic audacity to present insolent fiction as immutable fact. And our collective acquiescence to such falsifications are smugly ascribed to some variant of “genius.”
In the meanwhile, the boys continue to fall. The international organizations, charged by the charters of their inception with the righteous mission of preserving human rights wherever and whenever they are in peril, muster the lackluster response that can only be formulated in a state of selective ignorance of the magnitude and urgency of the situation at hand: “We are closely monitoring the situation in Nagorno Gharapagh.” It is not an Ethnic Armenia enclave of Azervaijan. It is Artsakh, that land of Armenians since time immemorial. It is also not a situation, nor a conflict, nor a clash, nor an eruption in hostilities. It is not any euphemism for war that functions to diminish its exigence. It is war. A 21st century perversion of war, at that. A war fought from the sky, raining cluster bombs onto villages below.
What does it mean to be “closely monitoring the situation,” or “following the events as they unfold?” What does it mean to urge the two sides to seek a diplomatic solution? How can blood lust be solved diplomatically if no one is willing to caution the aggressor that their dominance is not etched in certainty. The world takes the tone of a mother- in a feigned stringency- scolding her children’s argument over a toy. The neutral tone and projection of her voice suggesting she hardly glanced away from what she was doing. What does it mean to “urge both sides,” impugning each equally with fault in the war’s inception, when modern technology readily reveals which side deserves urging? They can and must know who unleased the beast of war, and therefore, whose obligation it is to rein it back in.
And if pretense and falisification are not only privileges of the aggressor, but also of the proclaimed defenders of peace, than what about this war, waged by savages upon civilized man, where the would-be arbiters of justice are playing politics? These structural failures, the undermining of our faith in the preservation of human rights being the utmost priority of a civilized world, is dangerous. It delivers us to a world full of catastrophic loss of human life by genocide, war, displacement, and poverty. So much loss of life leads to a distortion of civilization’s destiny. And who must be accountable for this? Men like Erdogan and Aliyev publicly disparage but privately rejoice at the indifference of these failed structures to intervene and forge non military solutions, forcing their well-armed hand, its premeditated finger hovering over the trigger for decades now . Erdogan is emboldened by the selective vision of the structures that failed the Armenians at the turn of the 20th century. He is cynically critical of these failures. But those fateful words, “who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” may have been Hitler’s in 1939 as he manifested his genocidal intentions for the Jews, but they can readily be spoken by Erdogan today.
His cynicism may be that of a charlatan, but it is not bereft of truth. He may well be correct in his assumption. After all, even honorable ideas and righteous constructs have within them the seeds of decay, and without meticulous attention to the spiritual, moral, and intellectual integrity of those entrusted with their protection, ensuring they are charged with the ethic that protecting innocent human life is the penultimate virtue, even the best structures in society are vulnerable to degradation.
These civilizational constructs are not self-sustaining. They require constant, conscious, and concerted attention. Their failures, even the negligible, harmless ones must be strernly and effectively addressed and ameliorated. Our tolerance for the failure of these systems that ensure our liberty to be human beings with aspirations that evolve beyond a mere survival instinct should be infinitesimal. Every violation of our faith in these systems should be seen as egregious and should elicit change at a level which exceeds the need. Only then can we have confidence in peace and those entrusted with its preservation.
When there is a perceived moral equivalency imbued upon the victim and the aggressor with the politically expedient even-handedness of warning, “we are watching you closely,” it degrades our faith in those structures that are meant to protect the innocents. Yours is not the watchful eye of God, and therefore it lacks potency. It is not enough to watch. It is not a chess game you are spectating. It is war. The fallen are not carved wooden pieces, they are the children of a kind nation, the lost sons of tragic mothers. How many must lost their lives before the public mannequin blinks its glassy eye?
P.S. Only God and robots are allowed to watch things unfold and not intervene. If the continued calls urging action to stop this ongoing tragedy are met with the same calm neutrality, those calls must be directed not to two parties, but three.