When the World Is Not Ready.
The situation is clear. Nothing to see here, just another ethnic cleansing. So Azeris, helped and encouraged by the Turks are bombing, threatening and pushing away ethnic Armenians from the land where they lived since the time immemorial. Myopic and cynical Lenin/Stalin national policy had assigned this land to Azerbaijan, thinking that eventually, everyone would become a model Soviet citizen looking down at ethnic divisions.
Except they didn’t. Soviet National policy is one festering wound that keeps on giving, leading to the endless amount of ethnic rivalries and hatreds, from Ukraine to Baltics, from Kazakhstan to Chechnya, and from Israel to Canada. In other words, neither the world nor the Soviets were ready to handle this problem. Indeed, one can’t blame the Soviets as such. Cynical manipulation of ethnic rivalries had been the staple of all major Empires, whether you spell their name in Latin, English, Russian, or Turkish.While Empires are wondering, what’s in it for me, and how can I advance NATO or other armies to exploit the situation, people are suffering. They suffer in Romania and Moldova, they suffer in Bulgaria and Serbia, they suffer in Bosnia and Syria.
When Empires do nothing, it results in mayhem. When they intervene, as the US did in Serbia, Iraq or Libya, it can be even worse. Why? Because the world is not ready. What’s in it for me is hardly a proper attitude and it is a far cry from John Donne’s “the death of every man diminishes me.”
Of course, we’ve been there before. That’s why the UN was established. A supranational body that was supposed to be above the fray and that was expected to protect us from the explosions of all sorts of sectarian violence on the one hand, and from cynical manipulation of those explosions by the nasty and rapacious empires on the other. But as the results of ugly reality on the ground, the UN had been practically neutered and had turned into a rather insignificant body, rubber-stamping the decisions and actions taking by force.
So the festering wound is not just the legacy of Soviets. It is the legacy of Brits and Ottomans and Americans and many others. US and its vassals are very happy to pit Turkey versus Russia, as they were happy to pit Nazi Germany vs. Stalinist Russia. Why not? If Turks are seriously threatened, they’ll run to NATO with their tail between the legs, If Russia is humiliated; it can become more subservient to the Western dictate. Except when these games were going on during the WWI, we ended up with Armenian genocide, when it was happening in the 1930s, we ended up with Jewish genocide, and it looks like it is the Armenian turn now. And of course these are just the tips of the iceberg. Plenty of people and ethnic groups are being wiped out as we speak.
The need for the fully functioning UN is obvious, as the need for clean air, clean water, or the need to obey the laws and regulations. We might not like this or that decision of the supposedly impartial jury but that’s the best we have. Without it, it is lynching and ethnic cleansing all the way. A rather neutral BBC report this morning had informed us that already half of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian population is displaced. But the world is not ready. The only thing it offers us is the blind and stupid pendulum that goes to one extreme and then to another, crushing everything on its way. Now it is the Armenian turn. And all we can do is watch helplessly, it as we watch the crushing train in a bad dream.
