Without holding Azerbaijan’s aggressive behavior to account, the imminent Caucasus peace deal won’t bring stability to the region.
Last October, during the heat of the US presidential campaign, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to admonish the Biden administration’s failure to stop the persecution of Armenians by Azerbaijan:
Kamala Harris did NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced in Artsakh. Christians around the world will not be safe if Kamala Harris is President of the United States. When I am President, I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
With Armenia and Azerbaijan poised to ink a peace deal at the White House this Friday, President Trump seems to be following through on that statement. Still, upon closer examination, this agreement proves to be toothless and a feeble attempt to portray Azerbaijan as a trusted partner. Put simply, it is rich in symbolism and lacking in substance.
For starters, there can be no durable peace in the South Caucasus without accountability. Azerbaijan, a country led by its petro-dictator Ilham Aliyev, has shown an unwillingness to respect human rights or uphold the rule of law. He has deftly used his country’s natural resources and geography to secure countless geopolitical deals and curry favor with global leaders on the world stage.
That is why the United States and Europe failed to prevent Azerbaijan from starving Armenians living in their ancestral homeland of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, during a 10-month road blockade which culminated in the ethnic cleansing of more than 120,000 Armenians from the region in September 2023, making it the largest displacement of Armenians since the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Since taking over the enclave, Azerbaijan has demonstrated a behavior that contrasts sharply with the desire for peace, indicating a preference for confrontation and even violence.
They continue to hold Armenian political prisoners and prisoners of war in jail without due process. These sham trials and proceedings have been criticized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. When pressured by external voices, Aliyev ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to leave Azerbaijan, which was a direct attempt to limit the only access these Armenian political prisoners had to the outside world and report on their condition.
While pursuing peace, Azerbaijan has also embarked on a campaign of cultural erasure of Armenian churches, monasteries, khachkars (cross-stone monuments), and other religious and historical sites in Artsakh that have stood in the region for thousands of years. Under the pretext of “restoring” Armenian churches and religious sites to their “original” form, Aliyev is trying to wipe out the existence of Armenian culture and identity in the region. Already, Azerbaijani forces have defaced or destroyed an estimated 400 Armenian churches and other religious sites since 2020.
Armenian culture have been closely defined by its Christian faith since it’s introduction in 301 AD, making Armenia the oldest Christian nation. By dishonoring and destroying that history, Azerbaijan is not signaling that it wants a genuine peace with Armenia.
Evan after absorbing Artsakh, Aliyev now claims large parts of Armenia’s territory as Azerbaijan’s “historical lands,” while calling Armenia “Western Azerbaijan.” This follows a troubling pattern of other speeches expressing similar arguments. Aliyev has even stated that Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, belongs to Azerbaijan. While this kind of rhetoric might be dismissed as just bombastic words, words matter and have consequences.
Despite this overwhelming evidence of Azerbaijan’s true intentions, President Trump continues to ignore the realities on the ground. In many ways, Trump is reneging on his campaign promise to protect Christian Armenians from further persecution and hold Azerbaijan responsible for its actions. He seems more interested in Azerbaijan’s natural resources than he is in the lives of Armenians or regional stability.
Therefore, any meaningful peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan must include the immediate release of all Armenian political prisoners and the unconditional release of all Armenian POWs.
It must also include the end of Azerbaijan’s religious and cultural mistreatment of Armenian antiquities and holy sites and rebuke all forms of historical revisionism that can be used as a pretext for future attacks on Armenian sovereignty.
And it needs to enforce the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that ordered Azerbaijan to allow the return of Armenians to Artsakh in a “safe, unimpeded, and expeditious manner.”
Peace should always be the end goal, but there can be no coexistence and tolerance in the region without accountability. So far, Azerbaijan has shown that it does not want peace. They want Armenia.
About the Author: Stephan Pechdimaldji
Stephan Pechdimaldji is a communications strategist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a first-generation Armenian American and the grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide. You can follow him on X at @spechdimaldji.
Image: Mato Z / Shutterstock.com.
