I am starting to get very annoyed by the amount of people that I consider reasonable who toy with the idea that it’s OK for Azerbaijan to start a war over NK “because it is internationally recognised as part of its territory”... (thread).

First of all (and this should be enough really): starting a war is not OK.

But, just for the sake of the argument, let’s forget the complexity of the situation and assume that NK is Azerbaijani territory: why should we normalize war, violence and death, and accept that it is OK for the authorities of a certain place to attack and kill people there?

A lot of people will say: the Armenian army should leave because it’s not their land. OK, and then what? What about the civilians? Isn’t it their land either? Why not? Because they are Armenians?

Answer that question carefully, because it is not rhetorical; it’s crucial! Not the least, because this already happened before.

Azerbaijan does not only want NK: it wants NK without Armenians.

Azerbaijan denies it, of course. They say that Armenians will be fine, happy and well-treated. They will even say that this is how it used to be...

And this is where we need to get serious: we can indeed look at what happened in the past and, if we do, we will understand that we would need to be very naïf to trust Azerbaijan. And Armenians are not naïf...

The Azerbaijani belief that everything used to be good and coexistence was friendly comes from the Soviet times, when NK was given to the Azerbaijani SSR by Stalin. Things were peaceful, mostly. Soviet style...

The moment when the winds of freedom and reforms started blowing in the USSR, Armenians from NK started expressing their grievances. Peacefully.

And the Azerbaijani rulers didn’t react well. Civil protests in NK were met with disdain and violence. In Azerbaijan proper (Baku, Kirovabad and Sumgait) was even worse: pogroms targeting the Armenian population left hundreds of death and many more injured and sexually abused.

And that was not even the first time when anti-Armenian sentiment was expressed in violent terms in Azerbaijan: already in 1918-1920 organised killings of Armenians occurred in Baku and Shusha.

Not to mention that small historical detail called the Armenian Genocide...