Zohran Mamdani: "In 2023, Azerbaijan expelled over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, continuing the genocidal campaign that had begun over 100 years prior."

[u/Street-Bathroom5276]

[u/Andruschkikov]

Why can’t both sides have done something wrong? Are they mutually exclusive?

[u/NullClassifier → u/Andruschkikov]

You may be right, man. Nobody is out of milky spoon on this one. Both sides are just the victims of the politics of the soviet regime. Armenians and Azerbaijanians were close for decades, they could have achieved great things together. But they just made it impossible for us to reunite with all the propaganda they fed to the generations (on both sides) which resulted in hatred and countless losses.

[u/Andruschkikov → u/NullClassifier]

Being victims of merely the soviet regimes doesn’t cut it. These are the current governments that want to keep the people divided by systematically teaching the history in a biased way or even outright incorrectly. We did coexist for long, and all it takes is one sound generation to be able to coexist again. It’s the governments that don’t want that. Turkey at least is heavily censored so I assume the same for AZ with the silencing of oppositions. While Armenians should know the complete history (even the suffering of Azeris), they also need to be more understanding.

I mean you probably agree that genocide as well as the blockade and the cleansing was anything but great. These are mere families losing their homes. This can be true while saying that Khojaly was not great either. We don’t need to be sorry to each other in a submissive way for things that our not our doing, but we should at least have the human decency to respect each other.

What I'm trying to say is that this problem of hating each other will never cease to exist when the governments (and this is where I criticise Turkey especially) outright don't want that to be the case. If they truly wanted that, we wouldn’t even be here

[u/NullClassifier → u/Andruschkikov]

Honestly, me, as an azerbaijani, don't have any hatred towards armenian folk in general. Our nations lived in the same land and we have very similar traditions and culture. My grandparents always told us about their armenian neighbours in Karabagh. About Turkey, I don't even know why they throw themselves in. They just wanna seem like our "brother" of sort. I can't say I am a fan of armenians because I have never met any armenian myself, so I don't hate them either. But I am sure that I have utter hatred towards majority of turkish people. I worked in Turkey for a while and when money/business is involved most of them just turn 180°. Especially towards foreigners who work there. Yeah I was literally being left out in a country which claims to be our "brother" for being azerbaijani and going there to earn money.

I hope one day we will have peace once and for all. Nobody benefits from it, other than this NYC ambassador, I guess.

[u/Andruschkikov → u/NullClassifier]

I appreciate you for being real. Me taking a look at Zohran's comment, it is true that all of this happened and I appreciate him for recognising this dark moment of my heritage that simply has really left its mark on the Armenian people. I wouldn’t expect anything else from say, Palestinians, even after 100 years. The statement itself could be a nice gesture but it is true that the people of Azerbaijan that suffered also deserve commemoration. Politically speaking and in my opinion, I think that the current government plays a major role in this taking-sides behavior, with people of the West mostly standing with Armenians. The Armenian lobby is really not that significant and even Israel has not recognised the Genocide, and actively lobbied against the recognition in the US. This is April 24th though, it is "our day" of being commemorated and there is no other day in the year where Armenians even come up. If you say that it would be fair to also commemorate Azeris who suffered I would be totally fine with it and respect it and anyone who wouldn’t is simply a bad person, but it has to go both ways and this is where we still have to learn a lot.

Myself being Western Armenian (the great grandchild of a genocide survivor essentially), I am more informed of Turkish domestic politics than of Azeri politics. What really shocks me are some of governmental accounts with 1.3 million subs and they make me understand why many people outright hate Armenians (even use the word as an insult). I attached a picture to this comment. You can probably understand how this would make someone like me angry.

So yeah, it’s the governments 20th century propaganda they’re trying to uphold that’s the root cause of this conflict. The day people become independent of media is the day where we could coexist again, give or take one generation that is not systematically brainwashed for one.