It happened quickly, the last invasion, and the aggressors killed hundreds of Christians. Armenia had no choice but to save thousands of its citizens from death by surrendering its enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh to the brutal forces of Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, says the article written by former UN war crimes judge Geoffrey Robertson on The Telegraph.
According to the former UN judge, placing responsibility on Russia for ensuring the safety of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh was an unwise decision.
In his article, Robertson points out that 120,000 Armenians are now forced to either leave their ancestral homes or live under tyranny that has fueled hatred against them for years.
“Nagorno-Karabakh won the war by 1994 and declared, like Kosovo, its right to self-determination. For the next quarter-century it governed itself with help from Armenia. It did so, reasonably enough, with fair elections and democratic institutions like an independent judiciary - as I found when investigating the situation in the country for a court case in 2014. It was not, as many news reporters said last week, a country of “Armenian separatists” but of an Armenian people whose ancestors had lived in these highlands for centuries and who had fought for, and won, for a quarter of a century, the right to resist a brutal dictator. But there were many Azeri provocations at the border - the “line of control.”
As for the United Nations, Nagorno-Karabakh will be remembered as yet another reason why it is no longer fit for purpose. That purpose, its Charter reminds us, is to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” yet it cannot expel Russia (even were Putin to use nuclear weapons) which would veto its own expulsion, and it cannot even expel Azerbaijan for aggression (because Russia would veto the necessary Security Council recommendation).
The only way forward is to replace the United Nations, because its Security Council is not fit for purpose. It is incapable of reform, because Russia and China will veto reform. ‘Security” will only come from an international representative body with the moral, military, economic power to deter authoritarian aggression,” Geoffrey Robertson writes.
