Christmas in Armenia: Genocide & Geopolitics (Armen Sahakyan)

“Armenia is not even a colony, it is not even worthy of being a servant.” That’s the president of Azerbaijan, Armenia’s Turkish Muslim neighbor, telling the world in 2015 how he really feels about the Christian nation on his western border. Today, as this episode goes live, Azerbaijan is besieging 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh as part of a long-term plan to eradicate Armenians from the region. For Armenians, this long-term plan goes back to the Turkish Muslim genocide of a century ago. In this episode, Robert and his colleague Mariam Wahba talk with Armen Sahakyan about that genocide and its connection to the ongoing assault on Armenians in the South Caucasus.

Armen V. Sahakyan is a Philos Project Advisory Board Member and an instructor at the American University of Armenia. Before that, he led the Armenian National Committee of America (Western Region) for three years and the Eastern Region office for four. Armen holds an MA in International Relations and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and BA in International Political Economy from Bloomfield College. His writing has appeared in various outlets, including The National Interest, The Hill, The Christian Science Monitor, Asia Times, and Providence Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @ArmenVS. 

Further Reading:

• Devin Watkins, “Pope Expresses Concern over Humanitarian Situation in South Caucasus,” Vatican News (Dec. 18, 2022).
• Uzay Bulut, “Azerbaijan is Torturing and Beheading Armenians,”Providence (Dec. 5, 2022).
• Remarks by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ilham Aliyev on the Two-Year Anniversary of the 2020 Karabakh war.
• Benny Morris & Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Harvard University Press, 2019).