Armenian-American Christians say proposed U.S. bill would reward Azerbaijan for ethnic cleansing

David Harapetyan, an ethnic Armenian and taxi driver who came from the Russian city of Stavropol to lend assistance, hands over food and water to refugees fleeing from Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region as they arrive in the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia, Sept. 27, 2023. Credit: OSV News photo/Irakli Gedenidze, Reuters

By Edward Desciak

America, The Jesuit Review

Armenian Americans have become the most recent ethnic community targeted by members of the Trump administration after Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV doctor turned administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, depicted members of the Los Angeles-area Armenian community as health care fraudsters while standing in front of an Armenian bakery.

But Dr. Oz’s fraud allegation may not be the greatest concern facing the nation’s Armenian community. Last December, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that seeks to lift longstanding military and economic aid restrictions on Azerbaijan, Armenia’s neighbor and military foe in the fractious South Caucasus region.

Christopher Zakian, the communications director for the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, and other supporters of Armenia oppose the end of those restrictions against Azerbaijan. They argue that the bill would have the effect of rewarding Azerbaijan for the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in western Azerbaijan that is the ancestral homeland of many Armenian Christians.

“The great crime—the second Armenian genocide as people call it—the ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijan’s Armenian population has now occurred,” Mr. Zakian told America. “This is the reality that all Armenians must deal with, and the imperative now is that the Republic of Armenia remains a viable, peaceful and one day prosperous continuing state.”

Ms. Luna’s bill—H.R. 6534—proposes to amend Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, a bipartisan law that was passed in 1992 to structure assistance to former Soviet states in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Section 907 made Azerbaijan the only post-Soviet state barred from receiving U.S. aid until it could be determined that the nation had taken “demonstrable steps to cease all blockades and other offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.” (U.S. humanitarian aid and aid to promote civil society had been allowed.)

In 2001, Congress amended the law to allow a waiver of aid restrictions at the discretion of the White House. During the “war on terror,” as Azerbaijan’s strategic importance grew, that power was exercised on numerous occasions, most recently in August by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The blockades and offensive use of force cited in Section 907 have indeed now ended, but only because of Azerbaijan’s almost complete success on the battlefield in 2023, a use of force that resulted in the flight of essentially the entire Armenian population out of the disputed enclave.

A close ally of the Trump administration and described as one of the more pro-Russian members of the House, Ms. Luna has not explained what prompted her to propose the amendment, which was welcomed by Azerbaijani media. Her press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Ms. Luna did comment on her proposal in a response on X to a post from the Armenian National Committee of America charging that the measure rewards “Azerbaijan’s genocide of Armenian Christians with our U.S. tax dollars.”

“I wrote the legislation to codify the PEACE deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia,” she countered. “So this is FAKE NEWS.”

The “peace deal” Ms. Luna refers to is the Trump administration’s facilitation of a joint declaration between Armenia and Azerbaijan last August. While not technically a peace treaty, the declaration is the first signed commitment between the two long-warring nations toward a full armistice.

As part of the agreement, Armenia agreed to give the United States development rights to establish a transit corridor through Armenia to connect Azerbaijan to an autonomous Azerbaijani-dominated exclave, Nakhichevan, on the western side of Armenia. In addition to heaping praise on President Trump and endorsing him for the Nobel Peace Prize, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan agreed to name the transit corridor the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

The Armenian National Committee of America has objected to the August peace arrangement despite the Armenian government’s assent.

“What we’re looking at is a deeply asymmetric peace process that has seen Azerbaijan frequently resort to the threatened use of force, to hostage diplomacy, to impose its demands on Armenia, essentially at the barrel of a gun,” Alex Galitsky, A.N.C.A. policy director, said.

Mr. Galitsky argued that Ms. Luna’s bill would “send a permissive signal” to Azerbaijan and called for justice, security guarantees and protections for the “fundamental rights” of ethnic Armenians. The bill, he said, would mean that “Azerbaijan will not face accountability or consequences, not only for its historic human rights violations, but also its ongoing abuses.”

An alternative proposal before Congress, the ARMENIA Security Partnership Act, H.R. 6840, tightens restrictions on aid to Azerbaijan.

Conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, called Artsakh by Armenians, has been ongoing since 1988, when the enclave’s parliament voted in favor of uniting with Armenia. The people of the region held another referendum in 1992. They voted overwhelmingly to secede from Azerbaijan in a declaration of independence that was not internationally recognized.

As the dispute over the enclave moldered for years, both sides levied accusations of ethnic cleansing against each other, The New York Times reports. Following secession efforts by the Armenian majority, the First Nagorno-Karabakh War resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis (and some Armenians) in the 1990s.

In 2020, Azerbaijan launched an offensive to retake the region from Armenian forces, beginning the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Following a powerful renewed campaign in 2023 by Azerbaijani forces, roughly 100,000 Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh.

In an email to America, Jamila Mammadova, a public affairs officer from the Azerbaijani embassy in the United States, argued that Armenian advocates were misrepresenting the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. She cited a report from a U.N. mission, “the position of credible international organizations and not the biased, politically motivated lobbying groups,” that visited the region in October 2023. At that time, the U.N. team “observed no damage to civilian public infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, housing, or cultural and religious sites, and did not receive any reports of violence against civilians.”

But the U.N. report does not address whether destruction of religious sites or infrastructure has occurred since the initial flight of Armenians from the region. The report also notes, “The mission was struck by the sudden manner in which the local population left their homes and the suffering the experience must have caused” and that between 50 and 1,000 Armenians remained in the enclave at the time.

Ms. Mammadova also criticized “certain political circles” who “continue to oppose the situation…even when the facts reflect positive and constructive outcomes.”

She called Azerbaijan a proud “international representative” of how to be a “home for everybody without discrimination” and “a model for many.”

Azerbaijani officials have previously defended the successful military campaign against Armenia as a response to Armenian ethnic cleansing, depicting its neighbor as the aggressor.

A report from the University Network for Human Rights “found that Armenians had been victim to arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, unlawful killings, incitement to hatred, attacks on cultural heritage, and forced displacement.”

Christianity became the state religion in Armenia in 301 C.E., making it the oldest Christian nation in the world. Of particular concern to Armenian activists in the United States has been the destruction of cultural and Christian heritage sites in Nagorno-Karabakh now that the ethnic Armenian presence has all but disappeared.

“We’re talking about monasteries and churches, some dating back to the fifth or sixth centuries, shortly after Armenia’s adoption of Christianity,” Mr. Galitsky said. “These are some of the earliest testaments not only to our Christian heritage but also our shared global Christian heritage that now faces destruction and desecration.”

Mr. Galitsky claimed that “a number of churches have been leveled entirely.” He charged that Azerbaijanis (97 percent of whom are Muslims) are converting some churches into mosques and erasing Armenian characteristics so that they “can’t be identified as Armenian churches.”

According to Mr. Galitsky, the obliteration of Armenian cultural sites and artifacts in Nagorno-Karabakh was reminiscent of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when the Ottoman Empire “engaged in the systematic destruction of the cultural memory of Armenians by erasing their churches, their cemeteries, their monuments to culture and civilization.”

Mr. Galitsky also noted the continued detainment of “at least 19 Armenian prisoners of war” by the Azerbaijani government. He alleged that “these prisoners have faced torture and abuse. They have been deprived of their fundamental legal rights and due process.”

An absence of independent observers and the recent expulsion of the Red Cross from Azerbaijan raises additional concerns surrounding the verifiability of human rights abuses. Reporters Without Borders, an international nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom, ranks Azerbaijan 154 out of 180 in its Press Freedom Index. Armenia is ranked 74.

Bordering both Russia and Iran as well as Armenia, Turkey and Georgia, Azerbaijan has become an increasingly important strategic partner to the United States, offering cooperation on energy security, counterterrorism and transportation that has been crucial to U.S. interests in the region, despite significant concerns about its record of human rights abuses. Azerbaijan recently joined the Trump administration’s Board of Peace.

“The U.S. relationship with Azerbaijan has been justified on the grounds that the country serves a strategic utility in the region,” Mr. Galitsky said. “When the waiver of Section 907 was first adopted in 2002, it was because the U.S. was engaged in military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Azerbaijan was conveniently located in the region and had offered to provide NATO troops with refueling and resupply access in Azerbaijan.”

Mr. Galitsky also noted that Azerbaijan as an alternative to Russia could prove an important energy partner for Europe but added that proposed pipeline development projects under consideration that bypass Armenia represented an attempt “to isolate Armenia” economically.

A commentary welcoming Ms. Luna’s bill in AzerNews, a state-sponsored news outlet, argued that current aid restrictions “served as an instrument of bias,” hampering peace efforts, “not a tool of strategy.”

“I’m sure that from Azerbaijan’s perspective…[aid restrictions are] an impediment to relations with the United States,” Mr. Zakian said, “something that singles them out to an extent that none of the other former Soviet Republics at the time were.”

He pointed out that, in practical terms, there is little preventing the Trump administration from delivering military and economic aid to Azerbaijan, since current limits can already be waived by executive order. “I suppose that [Ms. Luna’s bill] is in some ways a symbolic gesture,” he said.