i am less concerned with the idea that people whose families have been in a place for a long time (let’s say three to five generations) have more of a right to live there than others, which i don’t think is at all true, and more concerned with the idea that people whose families have been in a place for a long time do not necessarily have the attachments to other places on earth that more recent arrivals might
if you expel such long-term residents from a place, on whatever basis - religion or ethnicity, perhaps - they may not have anywhere else to go. if they are lucky, there will be a country that will take them in on the basis of their last name, or the language they speak. but it may be a country they have never been to before, and where they will most likely not be comfortable, and where they may not want to be at all. the imagined community of the nation-state is, at best, a poor substitute for the real, material community of the town or neighborhood in which you and your parents and your grandparents grew up, lived, worked, fell in love, etc.; at worst it is a prison
for much of the 20th century, armenian and azeri hack ‘historians’ produced dueling accounts of the history of karabakh, attempting to show that their particular ‘nation’ had continuously occupied the area for so many hundreds of years longer than the other. these accounts are still dredged up today, even though the argument, by and large, has been transmuted into one of international-law legalese, into polemics on ‘national self-determination’ and ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘institutional succession’
what neither the historiographic arguments nor the legal ones recognise, what none of them are willing to address, is the fact that the vast majority of the people living in the greater karabakh region in the late 1980s not only did not want to leave their homes but had nowhere else to go. armenia is not necessarily a welcoming or friendly place for people who are not from the republic of armenia proper (and in the ‘90s there was hardly adequate money or resources to provide for karabakh refugees, even had the government had a legitimate interest in it); the eventual losers of the conflict, the karabakh azeris, found themselves ignominiously shoved into tent housing and slums outside baku, trapped and denied both employment and services for a period of decades by their proud fellow countrymen
nationalism provides would-be ethnic cleansers with two convenient fictions. one, ‘national self-determination’ provides the motivation for a ham-fisted grab at land and resources: they are Ours, and the sovereign Nation’s will is law. two, it justifies expulsions by imagining that those expelled will have another place on earth to go, and be well-fed and happy, and if anything they will be even better off there because they will be with their Countrymen, who are the Same as them, and as we all know a happy and harmonious society comes from gathering together only those people who are the Same
five minutes of observation declares this absurd
