Stepanakert is starkly beautiful. It is a city of wide boulevards, parks, cafes, and churches nestled in a valley surrounded by high mountains. If it were not for a monthlong siege by Azerbaijani paramilitaries, Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital might look like something out of Switzerland. As it is, however, the city’s 75,000 men, women, and children grow increasingly desperate. Food stores and pharmacies are empty, and
Azerbaijan’s
blockade of fuel has led residents to burn whatever scraps they can find to heat houses.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken
, who often invokes his stepfather’s Holocaust survival as a formative influence, not only ignores the looming slaughter but also subsidizes it. Blinken’s illegal
waiver of Section 907
of the Freedom Support Act enables the United States to provide Azerbaijan with $100 million annually.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s attempt to starve, if not eradicate, Armenian Christians was
predictable
. After all, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel Peace Laureate no less, used the same tactic in Tigray,
murdering
more than a
half million
civilians for no reason other than their ethnicity and perceived political disloyalty, President
Joe Biden
rushed to rehabilitate him. While the State Department, as if by algorithm, urged “both sides” to deconflict, Biden laughed and joked with Abiy as they together watched a World Cup match on the sidelines of the U.S.-African Leaders Summit. Did Biden really expect Aliyev to take U.S. finger-wagging seriously after that?
The same is today occurring in eastern
Congo
. Just as Aliyev and Abiy incite their public to genocide in order to distract from their own governance failure, so too does Felix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. As if flipping a switch, Tshisekedi, who faces elections in the coming year, reversed a decade of rehabilitation by inciting Congolese against ethnic Tutsi, debasing them as aliens and interlopers in the same way that Rwandan leaders did in the run-up to the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide. Rather than take a no-nonsense approach to Tshisekedi’s efforts to surround and starve Congolese Tutsis, Blinken today treats persecutor and victim as moral equivalents.
Such tactics should not surprise.
Between 1932 and 1933, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians in the so-called Holodomor. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler penned Jews in Ghettos and starved tens of thousands before emptying others into Death Camps. In 1991, Somali Dictator Siad Barre sought to starve Somaliland’s Isaaq clan. They
resisted and regained
a de facto independence that they enjoy to this day. Whereas Masoud Barzani and his sons Masrour and Waysi today control a multibillion-dollar empire in Iraqi Kurdistan, just over two decades ago, the Kurdish region in northern Iraq was far different. Saddam Hussein, tired of three decades of Kurdish resistance, decided he would starve them into submission. Against the backdrop of a brutal winter, he blockaded the region and demanded the Kurds accept his rule or starve. They resisted, helped by President George H.W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation Provide Comfort, creating safe havens bolstered by emergency food deliveries.
Biden prides himself as a foreign policy president, but appears ignorant of history. Dictators precipitate famines when they believe they can murder opponents without consequence. Drawing and enforcing redlines stops them in their tracks. There is no diplomatic nicety to explain partying, let alone funding murderers and genocidaires. There is no difference between Biden’s failure to stand up to Aliyev, Abiy, and Tshisekedi and greenlighting starvation as statecraft.
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Michael Rubin (
@mrubin1971
) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
