The indigenous population of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) is being besieged by cluster bombs as they suffer a climbing death toll.
But why is this conflict happening now? The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Turkey’s latest efforts to expand its influence as part of its neo-imperial ambitions in the region at the expense of human life and human rights – a foreign policy identified by scholar and researcher Alexander Murinson as the Strategic Depth Doctrine. If Turkey’s attacks are not stopped, the world can expect that this country, with a long track record of human rights abuses, will continue expanding its influence throughout the region.
The attacks are also a continuation of a history of terror that Armenians have suffered for more than a century. Long before the genocide of 1915, the Armenian people endured mass egregious human rights abuses, pogroms and slaughters in their homeland mostly at the hands of Turkish occupiers. Then, in 1915, the Young Turk-led Armenian Genocide killed 1.5 million Armenians. Stripped of everything—loved ones, communities, homes, indigenous lands, and culture. The survivors fled to countries near and far. Scattered across the globe for their very survival, the Armenians lived as minorities in the lands of others, where they were marginalized, then frequently had to flee their new homes once or twice more—often due to war (for example, in Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, and Iraq) or other abuses. In their indigenous lands of Artsakh, where Armenians have lived continuously since around 500 BC, they are still struggling for their existence.
