The former U.S. president attacked his Democratic challenger Kamala Harris in a social media post clearly designed to woo Armenian-American voters.
“Kamala Harris did NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced in Artsakh,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform, using the Armenian name of Karabakh. “Christians around the World will not be safe if Kamala Harris is President of the United States.”
“When I am President, I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” added Trump, who served as president during the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Harris reached out to the Armenian community of the United States in a statement issued on September 23. The U.S. vice president pledged to “continue to support Armenia” and said the Karabakh Armenians have a legitimate right to “return safely” to their homeland recaptured by Azerbaijan in September 2023.
The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a major community organization, dismissed Harris’s statement, saying that she “did not lift a finger or even raise her voice against Azerbaijan’s 2023 aggression.”
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event at Washington Crossing Historic Park, Wednesday, October 16, 2024.
The ANCA director, Aram Hamparian, also criticized Trump when he reacted to the ex-president’s post that came less than two weeks before the tightly contested election.
“President Trump, who dramatically ramped up U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan – arming and emboldening the Aliyev regime’s 2020 attack on Artsakh – needs to do more than issue a campaign statement, needs to deliver actual results before Election Day,” Hamparian said, calling on the ex-president to “publicly affirm” the Karabakh Armenians’ right to return and seek U.S. sanctions against Baku.
Earlier this year, the ANCA gave the current and previous U.S. administrations an “F” rating on Armenian issues. Accordingly, the Armenian-American lobby group has not endorsed Trump or Harris so far.
More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining population, fled to Armenia in the space of a week following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 assault condemned by the U.S. and the European Union. Despite that condemnation, the administration of President Joe Biden did not impose sanctions on Baku or Azerbaijani officials.
Visiting Armenia in July, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, said Washington is still looking into the Karabakh exodus to determine whether it was the result of ethnic cleansing.
Azerbaijan denies forcing the Karabakh Armenians to flee their homes and says they can live there under Azerbaijani rule. Karabakh’s leaders and ordinary residents rejected such an option even before the Azerbaijani offensive. Some of those leaders have said that only “international guarantees” could convince the refugees to return home.
Armenia’s government, which has accused Baku of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Karabakh, does not seem to be seeking such guarantees. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly indicated that the Karabakh issue is closed for his administration.