SW News: A British peer and a Christian advocacy group have petitioned US President Joe Biden to take action to bring an end to the embargo imposed by Azerbaijan on the restive Nagorno-Karabakh region which is home to ethnic Armenian Christians.

John Eibner, president of Christian Solidarity International, and Baroness Caroline Cox from Britain sent a letter to the US President to intervene on behalf of the 120,000 Armenian Christians whose lives are at stake because of the blockade by Azerbaijan. In the letter, they asked for a UN Security Council resolution to organize a humanitarian airlift in Nagorno Karabakh if Azeri authorities do not lift the embargo. “You are the first American president to recognize the Armenian Genocide,” the duo said in the letter addressed to President Biden. “We urge you not to allow another Armenian Genocide to occur on your watch.”

Early in December, Azeri activists and troops sealed off the Lachin corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with neighboring Armenia, literally cutting off the residents from the outside world. Azerbaijan also cut off power, gas and internet connection to the region, plunging the residents into crisis. This has caused food, fuel and medicine supplies to run low. Without power and fuel, older residents and the sick risk perishing in the freezing winter said Christian rights outfit CSI. The outfit blamed Azerbaijan for carrying out an ongoing genocide.
“A process of genocide has been underway since the Ottoman massacres of Armenians in the late 19th century,” Eibner told The Christian Post. “What is generally called the Armenian Genocide (1915-'18) was, in fact, a broader genocide of Christians, including the Syriacs/Assyrians/Aramaeans. It was the high point of a process that continues in waves until the present day.”

The region suffered greatly in the second Karabakh war two years ago which resulted in thousands of casualties and the occupation of vast swathes of territory by Azerbaijan. Both the British Peer and Eibner said the  blockade manifests Azerbaijan’s aim “to conquer Nagorno Karabakh by, in the words of the Genocide Convention, ‘deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the end of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group in whole or in part’”.

Baroness Cox of Queensbury is a member of the British House of Lords.