Turkey's Finger in the Eye of Armenia

"Indeed, it was Erdogan who initiated the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. For too long it was calm in this region, nothing has changed there for the last few years, and here, out of the blue, hostilities begin."

"For the first time in the history of the conflict, Turkey is simultaneously opposing the United States, France and Russia, while participating in several conflicts in different parts of the world at once; it is pure madness and political suicide [Ankara’s defiance of the cease-fire call by the Minsk Group, an international initiative by France, Russia and the United States to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict]." 

Konstantin Sivkov, Russian military affairs expert

"The final stage of genocide is denial. By being this aggressive, there's fear that Turkey has ulterior motives in this conflict."

"There's now documented evidence that Turkey has been ferrying religious extremist fighters from Syria into Azerbaijan to fight Armenian forces."

Kyle Matthews, executive director, Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Concordia University

 

"It's a direct threat to women living in border areas and conflict zones."

"There is a generation who has experienced displacement for the second time in their lives."

Lara Aharonian, Armenian Montreal, founder, Women's Resource Center, Armenia and Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh 

Ashot Agajanyan's home was wrecked by a missile

 

In Canada's 2016 census, 64,000 Canadians identified themselves as Armenian, half of whom live in the Montreal area. Armenians, according to Taline Zourikian, a psychiatrist living in Montreal, remain tight-knit although they have integrated into Canadian society in general. "We don't assimilate", she said. "We're decedents of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide", she explained of the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.

Armenians have gathered a collective voice to demand of their Canadian government that action be taken, for Canada to take a position in support of the people of Armenia and the Armenian people. "Normally, I'm proud to call myself a Canadian, but this past week has been a horrible disappointment", said Talar Chichmanian of Montreal. "I don't want tears on Remembrance Day; I need action today", she stated. Her children are "terrified. There's only so much that I can share with them Their lives are already disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I don't want to s tress them out even more."

Little wonder her children are terrified and stressed. Their father, whose own father, brother and uncle died defending Armenia in 1994 in an earlier conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, the breakaway province of Azerbaijan, with its majority Armenian population, in which their father also fought. He has returned to Nagorno-Karabakh with the intention of fighting for his country, since the Azerbaijani army began hostilities on September 27, a war that has already left hundreds dead on both sides of the conflict.

Kyle Matthews spent two years in the South Caucasus with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He makes a comparison between Turkey's involvement and support for Azerbaijan against the ethnic Armenian-administered Nagorno-Karabakh, to a scenario where present-day Germany decides to attack Israel. Having committed genocide against a minority in the days of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has incited Azerbaijan to attack that same minority's homeland, and is providing fighting forces known for their inhumane tactics to the process of conquest.

All the more horrifying that Turkey has never ceded the reality that it committed genocide against Armenians and has gone so far as to imprison those within its jurisdiction of control who urge the government to recognize the deadly carnage that Ottoman Turkey subjected Armenians to on a mass scale that served to both impress and service Adolf Hitler's belief that the world would take little notice if and when he decided to annihilate European Jews, in the example of the Armenian genocide.

 

Long-range missile debris lies in a street in Stepanakert, capital city of Nagorno-Karabakh

 

Lara Aharonian and her husband relocated from Montreal to the Armenian capital Yerevan as volunteers in both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh since 1999, their organization aiding women overcome the trauma they suffered from the conflict in 1994. Her concern now is the estimated 75,000 people displaced by the present-day fighting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Where Azerbaijan has boasted of taking towns outside of the main cities of Nagorno-Karabakh, emptied of their displaced residents who fled to the cities for haven.

The executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Canada, Sevag Belian, is unequivocal, that Canada has an obligation to condemn both Turkey and Azerbaijan. "Because if we don't hold the aggressors accountable, they will continue committing their crimes with impunity." Greece has a case against Turkey for occupying part of Cyprus, that led to a deadly conflict and now a standoff, the Turkish presence on Greek Cyprus condemned as illegal by the international community.

 

For Erdogan, the conflicts he initiates is as much religious conquest for Islam, as it is a territorial imperative. 'The minarets are our bayonets, the mosques are our barracks, the believers are our soldiers' This is pure and unequivocal jihad.

Stepanakert: Some Armenians are sheltering in churches   Getty Images