in Russian – https://aga-tribunal.info/eibner-9-9-2021/
On September 9-10, 2021 a large Conference on International Religious Freedom and Peace took place in the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin (Armenia). Below is a report made by John Eibner (London) at this conference. Some other publications by J. Eibner and Christian Solidarity International (CSI) – here. Photo from this source.
Religious Cleansing in Progress: Beyond the Armenian Genocide in Time and Space
John Eibner, Ph.D. (London)
International President, Christian Solidarity International (CSI)
September 8-12, 2021
I would like to begin by thanking His Holiness Karekin II, Patriarch-Catholicos of All Armenians, and His Eminence Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, for sponsoring this timely conference on International Religious Freedom and Peace, and for the gracious invitation to address it. A special word of thanks must also go to Fr. Garegin Hambardzumyan and his
team for the excellent organizational arrangements.
It is a great privilege to be here in Etchmiadzin, the Mother See of the first nation to bow before Jesus Christ as Lord of Lords and King of Kings. The honor is all the greater as the Armenian nation’s allegiance to the Christian faith, first forged in 301 AD, has withstood violent, genocidal persecutions and also alluring secular seductions. The Christian faith remains today an intrinsic element of the Armenian national identity. Pope John Paul II recognized this when he stated on the occasion of the 1700th anniversary of the conversion of the Armenian nation:
“With the ‘baptism’ of the Armenian community… the people acquired a new identity that was to become a constitutive and inseparable part of Armenian life. It would no longer be possible to think that faith did not figure as an essential element among the components of this identity”. [1]
Long may the Christian faith remain an integral part of the Armenian nation.
My talk today, like the whole of CSI’s work, is based on two Biblical pillars. The first compels us to stand in solidarity with persecuted Christians. This pillar is I Corinthians 12:12-26. There we find a graphic image of the indivisible, universal Body of Christ – one in which all members suffer when another member suffers and all members sense joy when the others
are joyful. The second biblical pillar of CSI is the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37.) Here, risky, life-saving help is given to one in need with no questions asked about the ethnic or religious identity of the victim. The spirit of these two Biblical pillars is expressed in secular terms in a third pillar of CSI: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose
principal author was the great Lebanese Christian statesman, Charles Malik.
The title of my talk is Beyond the Armenian Genocide in Time and Space: Religious Cleansing in Progress. The essence of my message is that the spirit of the Armenian Genocide transcends the apocalyptic events of 1915 – 1918 in Anatolia. It was and remains today a profoundly important event, first and foremost for the Armenian nation. The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, the very public campaigning by Armenian civil society groups for international recognition of the Genocide, and the abundance of Armenian Genocide Studies programs bear witness to that reality. But this first great Genocide of the 20th century – one that famously inspired Hitler to embrace genocide as an instrument for fulfilment of his secular utopian dream – is also a seminal event for the broader global Body of Christ, and indeed for the world at large. Over the next few minutes, I will endeavor to connect dots scattered over time and space. The connections link the Armenian Genocide with the growing phenomenon of religious cleansing in our times. Moreover, I will do so with special reference to Christian communities that face violent existential threats. Christians, of course, are not the sole victims of genocide. But it is right that Christian leaders remain focused on the health and well-being of the Body of Christ, as distinct from the rest of the world. The dots to be connected are scattered far and wide, so should you conclude that my talk was “all over the place”, you would not be altogether wrong.
My starting point is thirty years ago. In October 1991, I visited Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) on the first of many CSI human rights fact-finding and humanitarian missions. It was a profound experience for me as a young historian and journalist. I was then confronted by the ethnic-religious cleansing that was taking place in the tiny Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno Karabakh. I was also confronted by the broader geopolitical context in which crimes against humanity were taking place.
The geopolitical context of the visit is as important as what we found on the ground, so it merits here a few words. The visit to Karabakh coincided with the end of the Cold War, the triumph of the Washington-led, liberal, capitalist empire over its Moscow-led Soviet communist counterpart, and the proclamation by U.S. President George H. W. Bush of a “New World Order”. The prevailing view of its bi-partisan architects was that the West’s Cold War victory marked the advent of a Washington-led unipolar world with liberal democracy as the final form of human government and the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution. This utopian terminus of secular eschatology was branded “The End of History” by the Francis Fukuyama, the Deputy Director of the State Department’s Planning Office, in his famous 1988 essay in the National Interest magazine. [2] This “End of History” ideology has animated American foreign policy throughout the post-Cold War era. It is, in fact, a liberal capitalist variation of dialectical materialism, and builds globally on the foundations of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The “End of History” ideology is often packaged and presented to the public as American exceptionalism and is frequently legitimized by the “City on the Hill” imagery that is so characteristic of national civil religion as opposed to historic Christianity.
At the onset of the New World Order, governmental funding for “Non-Governmental Organizations”, such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute of Peace, was substantially ramped up, ostensibly to encourage the global spread of liberal democracy, as a complement to traditional covert actions. [3]
Together with other elements of liberal democracy, “International Religious Freedom” – as suggested by City on the Hill imagery – was to be a component the New World Order. The International Religious Freedom Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998, established a set of instruments of soft power to shape opinion at home and abroad. They included the post of Ambassador-atLarge, a special office within the State Department, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and a budget for funding aligned “non-governmental” organizations. Other allied western states, most notably the United Kingdom, have followed suit.
But back to Karabakh thirty years ago. My CSI colleagues and I did not find much there to give credence to the “End of History” ideology. We encountered instead History Redux; the continuation of the process of ethnic-religious cleansing of Armenian Christians from their ancient homeland. The largely dormant historical dynamic of the Armenian Genocide had been revived as Perestroika and Glasnost destroyed communist totalitarianism and the Soviet Union collapsed. The history of those events – the Armenian Karabakhis’ political struggle for self-determination, the violent reactions in the form of anti-Armenian Pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovabad (Ganja), and Baku, the deportation of entire Armenian Karabakhi villages in “Operation Ring”, the Soviet-Azerbaijani-Turkish blockade of Karabakh, and the violent counter-reaction of the Karabakhi Armenians – are presumably very well known to all at this conference. My colleague Baroness Cox and I recounted them in a report entitled Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh. Those who take the trouble to read it will discover that we did not follow the prevailing “End of History” narratives of the time.
There was in the early 1990s a marked tendency on the part of most western observers to explain the bloody crisis in this tiny patch of ancient Armenian territory, with its roughly 180,000 inhabitants, as a minor, leftover problem of communism – one that would be solved by the replacement of Soviet totalitarianism with a capitalist liberal democratic order. It might still take some time, still some banging of the heads of uncooperative dictators, fair and free elections, and an influx of western capital. But sooner or later, this multi-religious, multi-ethnic region would inevitably thrive within the emerging, peaceful, liberal democratic World Order.
This post-Cold War perspective failed to consider an important reality: The spirit of the Armenian Genocide was not bound in time to 1915 to 1918, nor in space to Turkey. It extended far beyond Anatolia into the Caucasus at the end of the First World War, in the shape of the massacre of 10,000 to 30,000 Armenians in Baku. It was carried out by Ever Pasha’s Ottoman “Islamic Army of the Caucasus”, without which Azerbaijan would not exist as an independent state, according to the Azeri-Turkic historian and parliamentarian Anar Isgandarov. This was followed by the massacre of half the Armenian population of Shushi in 1920, by the army of the Azerbaijani state. Such proceedings were largely suspended, not by Washington and its victorious WW I allies, but by the imposition in 1920 of Soviet power over the Caucasus, which brought with it another form of religious cleansing in the form of atheistic policies designed to eradicate belief in God from the hearts of mankind. The process of the Armenian Genocide quickly reemerged in Karabakh as the Soviet power disintegrated. The dynamics of the Armenian Genocide are alive and well today.
There was another missing line in the prevailing narrative of the extended process of Armenian Genocide. It was that of religion. Western discourse, perhaps even Armenian discourse about these events has been largely secularized, thereby effectively marginalizing its salient sectarian dimension. The destruction of the Armenian Christian community in the
Ottoman empire was driven simultaneously by a combination of secular, ultranationalist forces and those animated by the Caliphate’s jihad against the infidel, the kufar, or the rayah – i.e. “cattle”, as non-Muslims were then generally known in Ottoman society. The Genocide was carried into the Caucasus as a modern-day jihad, directed by the architects of the Genocide in Turkey. The mix of sharia-based Muslim supremacism, rooted in the ancient religious institutions of jihad and dhimmitude, together with modern ultranationalism, also resulted in the religious cleansing of non-Armenian Christian communities, in particular the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrians and subsequently the Greek Orthodox. The process of this
genocide was not only anti-Armenian. It was fundamentally anti-Christian and had deep roots in the long tradition of violent jihad.
There is obviously a need for sensitivity when addressing these sectarian issues. We have no interest in inciting and fighting religious wars. But we need to understand the sectarian drivers of religious cleansing and find appropriate ways of thwarting them. We also need to understand that violent jihad, whether declared explicitly or executed implicitly, is a religious war. It cannot be satisfactorily be explained in purely secular terms.
If we now fast forward to the 21st century and the post-Cold War world, we find President George W. Bush in Istanbul in 2004 declaring that Turkey is a country “with 150 years of democratic and social reform”, one that “stands as a model to others and as Europe’s bridge to the wider world”. [4] These sentiments were echoed by his successor in Ankara in a speech to the Turkish Parliament in 2009. [5] Regrettably, Turkey has been and continues to be a model for others, but not as a conveyor of liberal democracy, nor of religious freedom. Instead, we see that Turkey’s long tradition of religious cleansing becomes an ever more commonplace characteristic of the real World Order, as opposed to the theoretical one.
For the ancient Christian communities of the Levant and Mesopotamia, the New World Order has brought grave existential threats. These communities, including their Armenian components, have been decimated by the revival of violent jihad. Many Armenian Christians from Syria and Iraq – once safe havens for persecuted Christian – have been forced to seek refuge here in Armenia, just as many survivors of the great Genocide did over one hundred years ago. But it is not only in the Bible lands, like Syria and Iraq, where the existence of Christians faces an existential threat. Violent jihad is also on the march throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. This vast region is often and rightly referred to as the “Hope of the Christian World” on account Christianity’s dynamic growth there and the fervor of its faith communities. But violent jihad is today targeting that Hope throughout the Sahel region, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, even in the Congo and Mozambique. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming the new sanctuary for the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups. Scarcely a day goes by when CSI does not receive reports of five, ten, twenty, thirty killed and scores or more displaced from African Christians on the frontlines of jihad in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, as in the days of the Armenian Genocide, the cries of the victims go largely ignored or even denied by the powers and principalities of the international state system.
Perhaps we are living on the cusp of the “End of History”. If so, it increasingly looks more like hell for many millions of Christians than a liberal democratic utopia with religious freedom for all. The growing spirit of post-humanism and religious intolerance as Fourth Industrial Revolution gains momentum does not augur well for religious freedom. As members of the Body of Christ, we must work for its health and well-being. We cannot stand on the sidelines while its most vulnerable limbs and organs – in fact our most vulnerable limbs and organs – are crushed and severed. For Christians this is not a peripheral concern. It is a vital interest.
My plea to this conference is to avoid as much a possible being fully coopted into support for the secular utopian ideologies and agendas of the powers and principalities of the world. It is in the very nature of those powers and principalities that they should strive to draw Christians and Christian institutions into serving their interests, even when those interests
are at odds with those of the Body of Christ. We would do well to keep in mind that the projects and utopias conjured up by those power and principalities will inevitably collapse, despite paying short-term dividends, as did the Tower of Babel. I would instead urge all to redouble efforts to challenge those that deny religious freedom and fuel religious cleansing, with inspiration coming primarily from the Biblical prophetic tradition. Let us simultaneously redouble efforts to strengthen Christian unity of action, despite our many and deep theological, cultural and political differences. A good place to start would be to unite in increasing consciousness of the Armenian Genocide and connecting the dots between it and the religious cleansing that is a living reality in the world today.
I will conclude with the wise, secular words of common sense articulated by Benjamin Franklin at the time of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence: “Gentlemen, we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” So, it is with the members of the Body of Christ today. Reversal of the rising tide of religious cleansing will require much more of us than unity of spirit. It will cost in the words of another great statesman, Winston Churchill, nothing less than “blood, sweat and tears” – and the cost will have to be carried not only by those on the frontlines of persecution.
1 Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter for the 1700th Anniversary of the Baptism of the Armenian People, February 2, 2001.
2 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History”, The National Interest, No. 16, Summer 1989, pp. 3-18.
3 David Lowe, “NED at 30”, https://www.ned.org/about/history/
4 George W. Bush, “Remarks at Galatasaray University in Istanbul”, June 29, 2004, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-galatasaray-university-istanbul.
5 Barack H. Obama, “Remarks by President Obama To the Turkish Parliament”, Ankara, April 6, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-turkish-parliament.
John Eibner
September 9, 2021