Armenia, a country of relatively modest dimensions but strategically important in the heart of the Caucasus, with a thousand-year-old Christian culture but now based on the constitution of a secular democracy, sees itself today threatened by the ever more aggressive imperialism of new dictatorships, at the forefront of which emerges, a little more than a century after the genocide of which it was already the victim in 1915 (with the massacre of 1.5 million of its citizens), the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It is, even more precisely, its most sacred region with regard to its historical socio-philosophical dimension, Artsakh, better known under the name of Nagorno-Karabakh, that the territorial integrity as well as the national sovereignty of this even Armenia, which became independent in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, finds itself today, since 2020, in the most direct danger. And this through this other contemporary dictatorship, that of one of its neighboring countries, the Azerbaijan of the no less despotic Ilham Aliyev, an ambitious armed wing, in this region with a tumultuous, if not often painful, past, expansionist appetites, nostalgic for the former Ottoman Empire and therefore ever more voracious politically, economically and militarily, of Turkey, again and again, of Erdogan.
Russia itself, in the past, had supported Armenia, a former Soviet republic. But dictatorships, as we know, easily change their foreign policy according to their most immediate interests. Also, now engaged in his war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has therefore abandoned the Armenians, victims of the Azerbaijani dictatorship, to their sad fate, therefore favoring the improvement of his relations with Erdogan, while treating the tyrants likely to fall into the “anti-Western” camp.
Tragedy foretold
Thus, in this same enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, increasingly isolated under the double totalitarian rule of Azerbaijan and Turkey, countries further supported there by a militia made up of a few thousand jihadists, each more fanatical than the other, is it more than 150,000 inhabitants who, unjustly deprived of the most elementary living conditions and therefore abandoned to such a cruel fate, are today forced to submit, in a surprisingly deafening silence, if not to an almost general indifference by relation to the rest of the world, the bloodthirsty beginnings of a new, umpteenth, ethnic cleansing.
Hence, precisely, this appeal, urgent and solemn, that we, signatories of this petition, humanists enamored of these moral values and universal principles that are freedom, justice and tolerance, launch to the governments of our most enlightened democracies , and in particular those of the European Union, where the Armenian diaspora is also considerable, so that they come to more concrete aid, more effectively and without further delay in view of the growing danger for these thousands of innocent civilians, to Armenia.
We are therefore finally appealing here too, in the face of this tragedy, however announced, for the awakening of our consciences: this is, this moral imperative in the form of human help, a noble and just cause, where it also goes, beyond even the survival of the Armenian people in Nagorno-Karabakh, of our own civilization!
Signatories: Daniel Salvatore Schiffer (philosopher, writer, director of the collective work “Penser Salman Rushdie”), Marc Alpozzo (philosopher, essayist), Elisabeth Badinter (philosopher), Dominique Baqué (philosopher, art critic), Stéphane Barsacq (writer), Florence Belkacem (writer, journalist), Véronique Bergen (philosopher, writer), Marie-Jo Bonnet (historian), Jeannette Bougrab (essayist, doctor of law, former Secretary of State for Youth and Associative Life ), Jean-Marie Brohm (sociologist, professor emeritus of universities), Belinda Cannone (writer), Sophie Chauveau (writer), André Comte-Sponville (philosopher), Sara Daniel (journalist, great reporter), Jean-Philippe Domecq (writer , novelist, essayist), Luc Ferry (philosopher, former Minister of National Education), Renée Fregosi (philosopher, political scientist), Franz-Olivier Giesbert (journalist, writer), Christian Godin (philosopher), Nathalie Heinich (sociologist), Dominique Jamet (journalist ste, writer), Jacques Julliard (historian, essayist, journalist), François Kasbi (writer, journalist), Arno Klarsfeld (lawyer), Jean-Paul Lévy (honorary lawyer, former member of the Council of the Paris Bar Association, former member of the Conseil national des Barreaux (France), Isabelle de Mecquenem (philosopher, member of the Council of Secular Elders), Edgar Morin (sociologist, philosopher), Bruno Moysan (musicologist), Véronique Nahoum-Grappe (anthropologist, researcher in social sciences), Yves Namur (writer, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature of Belgium), Eric Naulleau (writer, essayist), Fabien Ollier (director of QS? and the magazine Quel Sport?), Michelle Perrot (historian, professor emeritus of the University of Paris Diderot), Laetitia Petit (psychoanalyst), Sabine Prokhoris (philosopher, psychoanalyst), Christiane Rancé (writer), Robert Redeker (philosopher) , Stéphane Rozès (political scientist, essayist), Boualem Sansal (writer), Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (writer, playwright), Dominique Schnapper (sociologist, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), honorary member of the Constitutional Council), Annie Sugier (president of the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes (LDIF)), Pierre-André Taguieff (philosopher, political scientist, historian of ideas, director of research at the CNRS), Valérie Toranian (journalist, editor-in-chief ), Valérie Trierweiler (journalist, writer), Maral Ulubeyan (philosopher), Patrick Vassort (sociologist, publication director of the magazine Illusio), Jean-Claude Zylberstein (lawyer, editor, writer).