What genocide began on Sept. 27, 2020?
I posed that question to a social justice group who tracks this kind of thing. One person was sure of the answer, correctly, but the other 12 disagreed, asserting his answer couldn’t be true because they hadn’t heard of it.
Azerbaijan, a UN member state most Americans couldn’t locate on a map, launched a full-scale invasion of Artsakh, a land-locked area within its own country, targeting civilians for the distinct purpose of ethnic cleansing. Sadly, there was no Anderson Cooper or Norah O’Donnell there to report the disaster.
Vic Gerami, the director/producer of “Motherland,” is a Los Angeles-based Armenian-American journalist and radio talk show host/producer. Appalled at the massacre, he has asked, “When did it become okay for the world to watch and do nothing?”
In defense, I’m not sure the world watched or even heard about the tragedy. In the fall of 2020 CNN was involved in its repetitive news cycles on COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the lead-up to the US election, and ever more flashy news about Trump antics. FOX was rife with attacks on the Left and delivering misinformation on any given topic. The three standard 30-minute daily news networks stuck primarily to national news, though stalwart PBS and Democracy Now! published numerous articles on the Armenian tragedy.
This has been the problem for years now. We get the salacious, distracting, repetitive news that has proven to be audience-getters while the rest of the globe simmers in peripheral struggles and crises. This is one excuse for not covering the massacre of Armenians in an orchestrated Turkey-supported attack by Azerbaijan. But there is a greater story and Gerami, a master researcher, is has exposed it.
Luckily, he neatly organizes his report into chapters, because the story is new to most of us and a little complicated. In chapter one he starts with a geography and history lesson, ending with Azerbaijan’s Turkey-supported attack on the Armenian area within Azerbaijan’s borders called Artsakh (aka Nagorno-Karabakh).
In the next chapter, Gerami exposes the US interests: Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to the Trump White House on Nov. 13, 2019, the Nazi connection, and Azerbaijan’s status as one of world’s biggest importer of weapons.
Chapter three documents the specifics of the 44-day attack. Mercenaries from ISIS, Syria, Libya and Pakistan were offered $100 for every Armenian beheaded or skinned alive.
Chapter four asks, “Why is Turkey so intensely supporting this attack on historic Armenia?”
Social justice advocates like Sen. Adam Schiff and Baroness Caroline Anne Cox weigh in.
By the time we near the end of the film we learn about compromising issues: Turkey threatens to release more refugees into the EU; Azerbaijan leverages its oil and gas to manipulate the Western World; and the US, because Azerbaijan borders Iran, gifts it with massive aid money to gain loyalty.
On Jan. 19, 2023 Gerami sent me the following: “Unfortunately, Armenians are yet to exhale in 2.5 years. Since Dec. 12, 2022, Azerbaijani special operations have seized the only road connecting Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Armenia, stopping all traffic, and cutting off Artsakh from the outside world. 120,000 indigenous Armenians are on the brink of starvation as the world watches without much meaningful action against oil-rich Azerbaijan. It’s day 37 today. ‘Motherland’ is even more relevant now than it was last year.”
A work of passion, “Motherland” tells the story of ongoing genocide that is ignored by the UN and its member nations (except Macron’s France). Armenian groups rallied in Europe and America in 2020 for intervention to stop the killing to no avail. Gerami intones MLK’s words, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Credits
Director/Producer: Vic Gerami
Executive Producer: Mark Geragos
Featuring: Adam Schiff, Jackie Speier, Katie Porter, Bob Menendez and Vic Gerami
Producer: Henrick Vartanian
Editor: Chris Damadyan
Official website: https://motherlanddoc.com
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