On this day, Armenia would have become part of Azerbaijan...

There is an architect working in Armenia named Vruyr Kocharyan. He has gained some recognition by occasionally sharing photographs of architectural monuments on his Facebook and Instagram pages. But apparently, having observed the increasingly active political processes in Armenia, he decided to make his own contribution to this field as well.

With this in mind, two days ago he posted a statement on his Facebook page titled “We all owe the Karabakh movement.” In other words, as the saying goes, he decided to “bake a piece of bread while the oven is hot.” And what kind of “bread” did he bake? The Armenian architect thanked the “Karabakh movement,” which, according to the author, committed ethnic cleansing in Armenia and Karabakh, writing:

“Imagine that if there had been no ‘Karabakh movement,’ approximately one million Azerbaijanis would be living in Armenia today, and approximately 30 percent of the seats in parliament would belong to them. Considering their demographic growth rate, it is possible that after 2070 they could even become the majority in our country.”

In his view, if the Karabakh movement had not been physically present in the Republic of Armenia, then in approximately 100 years, 100 percent of Armenia could have become Azerbaijani territory.

“I thank the ‘Karabakh movement’ and its participants. Thanks to them, if our generation takes the right steps and develops, we have the opportunity to save the future of the Republic of Armenia and close the path toward Islamization,” the Armenian architect concluded.

Ter-Petrosyan also used to beat his chest and say...

Of course, if these views belonged solely to an architect named Vruyr Kocharyan, we could dismiss such ramblings as the result of sunstroke. The problem is that this rambling, which amounts to an admission of what the author describes as the international crime of ethnic cleansing, does not belong solely to Vruyr Kocharyan.

Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia’s first president and one of the most pragmatic figures in modern Armenian political history, known for his relatively tolerant approach to differences, expressed similar views 33 years ago while addressing a meeting of the Yerkrapah volunteer organization held on July 23–24, 1993.

In that speech, a video of which was released last year, Ter-Petrosyan, much like Vruyr Kocharyan, proudly declared:

“The governments of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh have solved a problem that the Armenian people had been unable to solve for more than 600 years. Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh have been completely cleansed of foreign nations. I repeat, this is a 600-year-old problem. The Armenian people will feel the significance of this for at least another 600 years. Imagine that if there were 180,000 representatives of foreign nations in Armenia today, as there were in 1988, our present state would not exist. We would not be able to defend Zangezur, our northeastern regions or the shores of Lake Sevan. Several autonomous regions would even have emerged here. Remember that Azerbaijanis constituted the majority in three districts — Vardenis, Masis and Amasia. Their numbers in Zangezur were also extremely high. Now this problem has been solved.”

Cheap heroism...

As for the Armenian heroism they boast about while beating their chests, we all know what it consisted of: entering the homes belonging to Azerbaijanis and settling there after the blood-stained Soviet Russian army carried out what the author describes as genocidal operations in defenseless Karabakh villages.

Of course, such cheap heroism could not last long, and it did not. During the 30 years since Azerbaijan gained independence, the Azerbaijani people built a powerful army and drove the Armenian aggressors, along with their patrons, out of the territories of Karabakh — in the words of Ilham Aliyev, “chasing them away like dogs.”

Moreover, Azerbaijan not only liberated its own territories from occupation, but also created favorable conditions for Armenia itself to free itself from Russian occupation, even though Armenia has still failed to learn the lesson of the heavy defeat it suffered.

Today, against the backdrop of shattered hopes regarding security, the Armenian people are struggling against Moscow. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, is supporting it by supplying fuel and food. In return, ungrateful Armenians are still busy fighting our shadow.

But this, too, is not the real problem. The higher and stronger the rock, the more winds there are to wear away its dust. God has granted us the fate of standing tall and having our dust carried away by the winds. We have never been ungrateful for this blessing and never will be.

Toward “Ermeniyye”

Nevertheless, I would like to remind our ill-wishing neighbors of something they have forgotten. Human beings cannot change the course of processes taking place in the world. If they could, the Sumerians and Akkadians, as well as the Urartians, whose shadow you seek to shelter under and attach to your own history, would never have collapsed, and the sound of Turkish horses’ hooves would still be shaking the world.

Unfortunately — and perhaps fortunately — nothing in this world is eternal, and the wheel of fate carries us, regardless of our wishes, toward the destination determined by God.

I do not want to elaborate too much, so as not to upset you. But know this: the irreversible course of history is gradually moving Armenia toward becoming “Erməniyyə” once again.

Even if neither you nor we want it, over the next 50 to 100 years, this inevitability will condemn two million Armenians to dissolve among the hundreds of millions of Turkic peoples. This is your unavoidable fate.

At least conduct yourselves in such a way that tomorrow, when you come clinging to our feet and pleading for help, saying “Akbercan,” you will still have the face to do so.

Giymat Mahir