15th Session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Intervention Item 9 – Violence against indigenous women – July 2022

Lydia Margossian – Assembly of Armenians of Western Armenia 

Madam President,

First of all, I would like to express my solidarity with the suffering of all indigenous women in this struggle to defend their sacredness. 

The torment of the indigenous Armenian woman is the direct result of genocidal programs and will not cease until the international law that enshrined the recognition of an Armenian state in 1920 on the basis of the sufferings and historicity of the Armenian nation is fully implemented.

The suffering of the indigenous Armenian woman is inherent in the violence of the Turkish colonization of the Armenian plateau and is part of the past, present and future. 

– A suffering of the past through the dehumanisation consubstantial with colonisation and in its paroxysmal phase through the genocide of the Armenians where the attack on the sacredness of the indigenous Armenian woman, the martyr among the martyrs, was directly targeted and revealed in all its extent under the pen of the French Deputy Jean Jaurès: “pregnant women disemboweled, and their foetuses skewered and walked at the end of bayonets and girls distributed to Turkish soldiers and Kurdish nomads and raped until the soldiers having exhausted them with outrages finally shot them in a monstrous exercise of sadism with bullets starting from the lower abdomen and passing to the skull. “

– A suffering of the present through the colonial violence in occupied Western Armenia in a daily life of forced turkification and persecutions that echoes the suffering of their sisters in exile, of which I am one, descendants of survivors, deprived of the right to return, de facto assimilating and losing the modes of acquisition of their ancestral knowledge.

A violence of the present through the suffering of mothers bereaved by the extermination of 5000 of their sons and the mutilation of 10,000 others on the territory of Artsakh in Western Armenia during a war of aggression launched in 2020 by Azerbaijan. 

The suffering is compounded by the fact that the world is silently witnessing the use, for the first time in human history, of an unprecedented international military arsenal that defies all understanding against a peaceful indigenous people of 150,000 inhabitants.  

And the daily anguish for all these mothers linked to the fate of their sons illegally imprisoned since 2020 in Azeri jails.

Finally, a violence of the future by what should now be called a perpetual genocide that strikes the Armenian nation by successive programs.

Thank You !