The whole world is watching the latest Israeli-Hamas war in horror after each side accused the other of very serious crimes. Israel regards Hamas’ large-scale slaughter of its civilians as an act of terror aimed at ethnically cleansing Jews. Likewise, Hamas regards Israel’s retaliatory large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza that’s killed a roughly equal number of civilians to be an act of state terrorism aimed at ethnically cleansing Palestinians. Whichever side one supports, it’s clear that both of their civilians are suffering.
The tragic scenes that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past week are etched in everyone’s minds, which is why many feel very strongly about this conflict after seeing how devastating the humanitarian consequences have already been in such a short time. It’s therefore not without reason that a lot of people believe that one or both sides are attempting ethnic cleansing. By contrast, some earlier claimed that Azerbaijan was ethnically cleansing Armenians despite the absence of such scenes.
It was a little less than a month ago that Azerbaijan’s one-day anti-terrorist operation decisively ended the three-decade-long Karabakh Conflict. After their side’s defeat, the Armenian diaspora lobby falsely alleged that Azerbaijan was plotting to “genocide” their co-ethnics, which scared many of them into fleeing and thus artificially manufactured the optics of an “ethnic cleansing” there. Western politicians and the media, both mainstream and alternative, then echoed these groundless claims.
The Guardian quoted that formerly separatist region’s “rights ombudsman” at the time in their article here to report that the latest conflict only killed 10 civilians out of the region’s estimated pre-war population of 120,000 people. These statistically insignificant losses don’t qualify as “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” by any objective measure. Furthermore, Baku pledged to uphold the rights of all those Armenians who choose to remain in Karabakh upon its full forthcoming reintegration into Azerbaijan.
With these facts in mind coupled with the lack of that region’s physical destruction, there was never any credible basis upon which anyone could claim that Azerbaijan committed crimes against its Armenian minority, unlike the situation in Israel and Gaza today. Over 1,000 civilians on both sides have been killed thus far, and everyone’s already familiar with the tragic scenes that each party is responsible for, just like they’re aware of their mutual ethnic cleansing allegations that aren’t unreasonable as was explained.
Those who continue claiming that Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed Armenians therefore expose themselves as agenda-driven propagandists after everything that just unfolded in the latest Israeli-Hamas war. Azerbaijan neither sent death squads into Karabakh to slaughter Armenians like Hamas sent into Israel to slaughter Jews nor did it bomb Karabakh into oblivion like Israel is doing to Gaza. With this in mind, no honest Israeli or Hamas supporter can accuse Azerbaijan of the same crimes as their enemy.
