Eurasia News (15 September 2023)

Taras KUZIO(*)

The UN is wrong about genocide taking place against the 50,000 Armenian population of the Azerbaijani region of Karabakh and even more wrong in denying genocide is taking place against 45 million Ukrainians. Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accused the UN of becoming a lobbyist for Russian interests.

Armenian use of the term ‘genocide’ is taken straight out of the Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation toolkit. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2022 was based on fake news claims Georgians and Ukrainians were undertaking genocide against South Ossetians and the Donbas respectively. Armenians are using the same Kremlin disinformation rhetoric to falsely claim Azerbaijan is committing genocide in Karabakh.

It is ironic Armenia is misusing the term ‘genocide’ because Armenian forces committed many war crimes and human rights abuses in the First Karabakh War. These war crimes are not subject to investigation by the ICC as they took place before it was established in 2002. Armenian forces ethnically cleansed between 750,000 and one million Azerbaijanis from Armenia and the twenty percent of Azerbaijan they occupied for nearly three decades. 4,000 Azerbaijani soldiers and civilians are missing, presumably murdered during the First Karabakh War. Armenian occupation forces lay hundreds of thousands of mines and destroyed numerous cultural, historical, and religious buildings and desecrated cemeteries. Azerbaijan and Ukraine are the most mined countries in the world.

To read the rest of the article, please click: https://www.eurasiareview.com/15092023-why-the-un-has-got-it-wrong-on-genocide-oped/

(*) Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and the author of Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War (2022) and editor of Russian Disinformation and Western Scholarship (2023