By Paul Vartan Sookiasian
Members of the influential U.S. Helsinki Commission indicated Tuesday that Congress is ready to provide Armenia with additional support, but did not provide any details on future policy steps in that direction.
“There is clear bipartisan support for the U.S. to step up its support for Armenia,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said. “Assistance, both economic and political, will help solidify Armenian democratic gains, strengthen its institutions, and provide a bulwark against external threats.”
Wilson was speaking at a hearing on “Supporting Armenia’s Democracy and Western Future” organized by the Helsinki Commission, a U.S. government agency that promotes democracy and human rights around the world.
To that end, expert witnesses at the hearing repeatedly urged the United States to increase its support for the more than 100,000 Armenians forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh last September. Since September 2020, total U.S. humanitarian assistance on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh has reached nearly $31 million, according to a USAID fact sheet from April.
“The long-term integration of Karabakh Armenian refugees is a daunting task which requires substantial international support. If left unresolved, the resulting socio-economic issues could undermine social cohesion in Armenian society,” Tigran Grigoryan, president of the Yerevan-based Regional Center for Democracy and Security think tank and a CivilNet contributor, told commission members.
Echoing that point, South Caucasus security expert Olesya Vardanyan encouraged the United States also to provide expertise in effectively managing large-scale displacements over the long term.
Turning to the key issue of ongoing efforts to reach an Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization deal, Grigoryan argued the most important thing for the United States to do is to support Armenia to defend itself, noting there is currently “a huge imbalance of power” that Azerbaijan could exploit in the future.
In addition, Grigoryan cautioned that “there will still be a lot of unresolved issues after the signing of the treaty,” adding, “we might still have a very volatile situation even if a peace treaty is signed.”
Similarly, Vardanyan warned “should Azerbaijan pursue Armenia’s total capitulation, its forces could within hours seize critical infrastructure, especially in Armenia’s vulnerable southern regions.”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who co-chairs the Helsinki Commission and heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed frustration with the state of the negotiations, specifically noting that the current draft fails to address Armenians’ right to return to Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan’s ongoing occupation of an estimated 83 square kilometers of Armenian territory.
“I’m not sure that the peace agreement is very fair,” Cardin said.
Still, another expert witness, Dan Baer, senior vice president for policy research at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, encouraged the United States and its partners to continue to offer political, diplomatic, and economic support to the normalization process.
To that end, Baer suggested creating security and defense partnerships with Armenia, as a number of Western countries have done with Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, in order to “give confidence to Armenians as their leaders take difficult steps to reduce dependence on Moscow and carve an independent future.”
That point on Armenia’s reliance on Russia came up repeatedly at the hearing and appeared to be a major point of focus for a number of the commission members.
For his part, Grigoryan noted that there is no quick fix to reduce Armenia’s dependence on Russia, but struck an optimistic note about the country’s ability to move away from the Kremlin in the medium-to-long term.
“Russia is quite weak at this moment and that’s an opportunity for countries like Armenia to have a bolder foreign policy,” Grigoryan asserted.
