Denial of justice is a verdict

Mini-Sultan Ilham Aliyev was finally asked about his plans for the future of the military – political leadership of Artsakh. Of course, such an uncomfortable question was asked not by the Turkish satrap Nikol Pashinyan, but by the French TV channel FRANCE24.

The answer will not surprise our readers: for Aliyev, ‘everything is over’. Peace with Armenia has been allegedly achieved, while the guarantee for it is the lifelong torture of those, who could tell the Armenian people and the world in every detail how Artsakh was emptied of Armenians for the first time in thousands of years. To enhance the effect, the executioner of the Armenian destinies elevated his parody of the trial of these prisoners of illusions (and often his own cowardice) to the scale of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Of course, thanks to FRANCE24 for the question that the only representative of the Armenian people (yet) – the Republic of Armenia – is not asking. As you know, a means of communication is already a message in itself – just like the personality of the interviewer. Therefore, the question is actually different, but there is no one to ask it to curious foreign journalists yet: why is the Armenian world asleep and what is it still hoping for? What else and how much more do we need to (not) hear in order to realise that our problems will not only not be solved by a miracle, but will also constantly accumulate?

Today, the leaders of Artsakh are not being tried for being engaged (many of them) in personal enrichment instead of strengthening the key outpost of the Armenian world – along with their accomplices among the four leaders of the Third Republic. If they had known that Armenian history was going to be on trial for this, they would not have ended up in an Azerbaijani prison today. Many of them are being tried, because they held a position they were not worthy of holding, but they occupied it with our tacit consent; a position that would not have been questioned by anyone, if the Third Republic had logically completed the ‘Miatsum’ – the reunification of Armenia and Artsakh. The place of this position is the government buildings on the Renaissance Square in Stepanakert, which were supposed to become a modest marzpetaran (the centre of regional administration – marz) and the Miatsum Museum.

However, they are being tried, because ‘Nuremberg’ did not take place at least somewhere in Barda, because state ambitions end in the same place as spatial ones. The Armenian Nuremberg did not take place in 1994, leaving the memory of the victims of the Genocide in Baku, Sumgait and Gandzak (1988-1990), Northern Artsakh and Maraga (1992) unavenged. It did not take place in 2012 either, when Azerbaijan greeted its ‘hero’ with honours, who hacked down a sleeping Armenian officer with an axe. It did not take place in 2016, when Aliyev awarded medals to animals that posed with the severed head of the Armenian soldier Karam Sloyan and cut off the ears of peaceful Armenian elderly. Then, in 2016, 850 people were recognised as victims during the 4-day April war, as part of a criminal case that remained with no addressee. Finally, the Armenian court did not catch up with Azerbaijan in 2020-2023, when Artsakh and other parts of Armenia were occupied, when Azerbaijani soldiers desecrated our graves and churches, killed peaceful villagers in Artsakh, mutilated the bodies of Armenian officers – and all this perpetrated on camera without a shadow of shame.

It seemed that 2020 summed up the bloody outcome of every drop of Armenian blood that was forgiven by us. The unrequited 2020 was followed by 2023. Today, in February 2026, after almost 111 years since the final destruction of the Armenian factor in Western Armenia, after 38 years since the expulsion of Armenians from present-day Azerbaijan, after 35 years since the deportation from plain Artsakh, after almost exactly 22 years since the murder of the sleeping Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan, and further along the increasingly strengthening series of spits in our face, one thing is clear: if you do not arrange Nuremberg for the Nazis, they inflict it on you.

And one can pretend as much as one likes that the spit did not come in their face, but hit right on the wisdom teeth, which they were going to pull out anyway. After all, they have already given up on face. And all the teeth will have to be pulled out gradually, because where there is Nuremberg, there is a division into occupation zones and demilitarisation. This is how the post-war ‘reconstruction’ of the region, proposed by the Turkish world and carried out by their collaborationists in Yerevan, looks like. The Armenian world has not yet offered an alternative to the centres of power. Well, it is possible to survive without teeth, of course, but as a result there will be nothing to chew on the low-grade Azerbaijani grain.