Lebanese-Armenian protesters maintain flares with the colours of the Armenian flag close to the Azerbaijani Embassy in Ain Aar, east of Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023.

Hussein Malla/AP

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Hussein Malla/AP

Lebanese-Armenian protesters maintain flares with the colours of the Armenian flag close to the Azerbaijani Embassy in Ain Aar, east of Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023.

Hussein Malla/AP

BEIRUT (AP) — The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of a lot of its inhabitants has shocked the massive Armenian diaspora all over the world. Traumatized by genocide a century in the past, they now worry the erasure of what they think about a central and beloved a part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh on Thursday introduced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will stop to exist by 12 months’s finish – a seeming dying knell for its 30-year de-facto independence.

Azerbaijan, which routed the area’s Armenian forces in a lightning offensive final week, has pledged to respect the rights of the territory’s Armenian group. But by Thursday morning, 74,400 individuals – over 60% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s inhabitants — had fled to Armenia, and the inflow continues, in line with Armenian officers.

Many in Armenia and the diaspora worry a centuries-long group within the territory they name Artsakh will disappear in what they name a brand new wave of ethnic cleaning. They accuse European nations, Russia and the United States – and the federal government of Armenia itself – of failing to guard ethnic Armenians throughout months of blockade of the territory by Azerbaijan’s army and within the lightning blitz earlier this month that defeated separatist forces.

Armenians say the loss is a historic blow. Outside the fashionable nation of Armenia itself, the mountainous land was one of many solely surviving elements of a heartland that centuries in the past stretched throughout what’s now jap Turkey, into the Caucasus area and western Iran.

Many within the diaspora had pinned goals on it gaining independence or being joined to Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh was “a page of hope in Armenian history,” Narod Seroujian, a Lebanese-Armenian college teacher in Beirut, stated Thursday.

“It showed us that there is hope to gain back a land that is rightfully ours … For the diaspora, Nagorno-Karabakh was already part of Armenia.”

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians on Thursday protested outdoors the Azerbajani Embassy in Beirut. They waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and burned photos of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents. Riot police lobbed tear fuel after they threw firecrackers on the embassy.

Ethnic Armenians have communities round Europe and the Middle East and within the United States. Lebanon is residence to one of many largest, with an estimated 120,000 of Armenian origin, 4% of the inhabitants.

Most are descendants of those that fled the 1915 marketing campaign by Ottoman Turks through which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and compelled marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic Armenian areas in jap Turkey, are extensively seen by historians as genocide. Turkey rejects the outline of genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that these killed have been victims of civil battle and unrest throughout World War I.

In Bourj Hammoud, the principle Armenian district within the capital Beirut, recollections are nonetheless uncooked, with anti-Turkey graffiti frequent on the partitions. The red-blue-and-orange Armenian flag flies from many buildings.

“This is the last migration for Armenians,” stated Harout Bshidikian, 55, sitting in entrance of an Armenian flag in a Bourj Hamoud cafe. “There is no other place left for us to migrate from.”

Azerbaijan says it’s reuniting its territory, declaring that even Armenia’s prime minister acknowledged that Nagorno-Karabakh is a part of Azerbaijan. Though its inhabitants has been predominantly ethnic Armenian Christians, Turkish Muslim Azeris even have communities and cultural ties to the territory as nicely, notably town of Shusha, famed as a cradle of Azeri poetry.

Nagorno-Karabakh got here beneath management of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian army in separatist combating that led to 1994. Azerbaijan took elements of the world in a 2020 battle. Now after this month’s defeat, separatist authorities surrendered their weapons and are holding talks with Azerbaijan on reintegration of the territory into Azerbaijan.

Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Europe assume tank, stated Nagorno-Karabakh had turn into “a kind of new cause” for an Armenian diaspora whose forebearers had suffered the genocide.

“It was a kind of new Armenian state, new Armenian land being born, which they projected lots of hopes on. Very unrealistic hopes, I would say,” he stated, including that it inspired Karabakh Armenians to carry out towards Azerbaijan regardless of the shortage of worldwide recognition for his or her separatist authorities.

Armenians see the territory as a cradle of their tradition, with monasteries relationship again greater than a millennium.

“Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years,” stated Lebanese legislator Hagop Pakradounian, head of Lebanon’s largest Armenian group, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. “The people of Artsakh are being subjected to a new genocide, the first genocide in the 21st Century.”

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is not only a reminder of the genocide, “it’s reliving it,” stated Diran Guiliguian, an Armenian activist who is predicated in Madrid however holds Armenian, Lebanese and French citizenship.

He stated his grandmother used to inform him tales of how she fled in 1915. The genocide “is actually not a thing of the past. It’s not a thing that is a century old. It’s actually still the case,” he stated.

Seroujian, the teacher in Beirut, stated her great-grandparents have been genocide survivors, and that tales of the atrocities and dispersal have been talked about at residence, faculty and locally as she grew up, as was the reason for Nagorno-Karabakh.

She visited the territory a number of occasions, most just lately in 2017. “We’ve grown with these ideas, whether they were romantic or not, of the country. We’ve grown to love it even when we didn’t see it,” she stated. “I never thought about it as something separate” from Armenia the nation.

A diaspora group referred to as Europeans for Artsakh plans a rally in Brussels subsequent week in entrance of European Union buildings to denounce what they are saying are ethnic cleaning and human rights abuses by Azerbaijan and to name for EU sanctions on Azerbaijani officers. The rally is timed forward of a summit of European leaders in Spain on Oct. 5, the place the Armenian prime minister and Azerbaijani president are scheduled to carry talks mediated by the French president, German chancellor and European Council president.

In the United States, the Armenian group within the Los Angeles space – one of many world’s largest – has staged a number of protests making an attempt to attract consideration to the scenario. On Sept. 19, they used a trailer truck to dam a serious freeway for a number of hours, inflicting main site visitors jams.

Kim Kardashian, maybe essentially the most well-known Armenian-American as we speak, went on social media to induce President Joe Biden “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide.”

Several teams within the diaspora are amassing cash for Karabakh Armenians fleeing their residence. But Seroujian stated many really feel helpless.

“There are moments where personally, the family, or among friends we just feel hopeless,” she stated. “And after we speak to one another we form of lose our minds.