By Alexander Pracht
Armenia’s foreign minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, compared the 1915 Armenian Genocide with Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh that happened last year, asserting that developments leading to genocidal acts do not usually attract enough international attention that could prevent such crimes. He said this as he spoke at the 5th Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide, held in Yerevan today, according to state news agency Armenpress.
“Unfortunately, the international community only starts to talk more about genocides and other mass crimes when those become established facts. We witnessed this in our region not only about 110 years ago in the case of the Armenian Genocide but also literally last year. This is one of the examples when the response of international structures was not equal to the risk factors and the situation on the ground,” he argued, adding that governments all around the globe should be more sensitive and flexible to mitigate genocidal risks.
Armenian president Vahagn Khachaturyan, also attended the forum. “Today, our country aims to build and maintain peace based on legal solutions and a stable international system of justice. A system that is able to notice and record gross violations of human rights and provide a proportionate response to them. We are confident that early prevention should be pivotal to having an effective international security system,” he said, noting that Armenia has assumed a pioneering role in advancing the issues of genocide prevention, punishment, and commemoration of victims.
The forum also featured a message from the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said that education and the fight against disinformation are among the most efficient genocide prevention tools.
Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh, a region with a millennia-old Armenian community, in September last year, imposing a nine-month blockade on the region that culminated in an offensive that forced all of the region’s Armenians to flee and seek refuge in Armenia proper. The Russian peacekeepers, deployed in Karabakh after the 2020 war to prevent hostilities, failed to intervene and withdrew several months after Baku captured the region’s capital Stepanakert.
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