The All-Armenian Student Association honored Artsakh Awareness Month with a panel discussion Wednesday night on the violent events that culminated in more than 100,000 Armenians fleeing from Nagorno-Karabakh in September. 

The USC chapter of Delta Phi Epsilon, the USC Global Policy Institute, Glimpse from the Globe and the USC Armenian Students’ Association co-sponsored the panel with All-ASA. More than 40 members of the USC community attended the panel on what the former chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has called the genocide of ethnic Armenians by Azerbaijan.

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The event, entitled “Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century: A Panel Discussion on Artsakh,” took place on Zoom and featured presentations from panelists Simon Maghakyan, Gegham Mughnetsyan and Anoush Baghdassarian. Will Erens, DPE’s director of academic development, and Jake Haviland, DPE’s external vice president, moderated the event.

Mughnetsyan, a Chitjian researcher archivist at the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, kicked off the event by discussing the historical significance of Azerbaijan’s takeover of the Nagorno-Karabakh region Sept. 20.  

“This is already the second month that Artsakh, for the first time in millennia, has no population at all, and more importantly, has no Armenians in it,” Mughnetsyan said. 

Maghakyan, a visiting scholar at Tufts University and a doctoral candidate studying heritage crime at Cranfield University, added on to the conversation by explaining the role of Armenian heritage preservation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. 

“There were an estimated 20,000 monuments and artifacts [in Nakhichevan], all of which [Azerbaijan] reduced to zero,” Maghakyan said. “I hope that there is a chance to preempt and prevent a similar final erasure in Artsakh, but also make the case that this is ultimately not just about physical stones … It’s about the people who consider them sacred.”

Baghdassarian, a Harvard International Legal Studies Fellow and a field researcher at University Network for Human Rights, discussed the legal community’s recent responses to the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive. During her remarks, Baghdassarian made a point to highlight the upcoming case in the International Court of Justice, Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Armenia v. Azerbaijan). 

When the ICJ delivers its order on the case on Friday, Baghdassarian will be in Armenia, where she is conducting field work on the Armenian citizens who have been affected by the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. 

“I just felt that if I could be [in Armenia] for any period of time to help prevent, in my small way, this ethnic cleansing from happening, and more happening on Armenia’s territory, I had to come,” Baghdassarian said. “I’m not saying that as a ‘hero’ thing. For myself, too, it’s meaningful to be here, and I want to be dedicating as much as I can of my knowledge and experience to this.” 

After moderating the event, Erens, a junior majoring in political economy, said listening to Baghdassarian’s stories from on the ground was a “learning experience” that not enough students have been getting from mainstream news outlets. 

“Just to get those kinds of stories of what is happening on the ground … [and] get those stories out to the audience, all the people that came, that’s really important,” Erens said. “It’s something that is being missed right now, in terms of the American media.”

Reflecting on the international human rights community widely characterizing Azerbaijan’s attack in September as an act of genocide, Mughnetsyan emphasized the parallels between the conflict unfolding today and past campaigns against ethnic Armenians. 

“My fear presently is that Azerbaijan, which has so closely looked up to Turkey and how it had ‘dealt’ with Armenians, as terrible as that sounds, will do exactly the same by using the same playbook,” Mughnetsyan said. “These fears tied to what had happened 100 years ago in the Ottoman Empire live very much vividly in people’s memories.”

Mughnetsyan also commented on the protest that broke out at USC in response to the University’s decision to host Turkish Ambassador to the United States Hasan Murat Mercan Sept. 29. 

“It was just misguided, timewise,” Mughnetsyan said. “I believe that [USC] could have, in a timely fashion, dealt with it to at least have taken into consideration the feelings and the state of many of its students who had been going through this tragedy, literally a day or two after the loss of their ancestral homeland.”

Mane Berikyan, an executive member of four of the five of the event’s co-sponsoring organizations, said she also felt that it was especially important to discuss Artsakh awareness at USC, in light of the ambassador’s visit to campus. 

“To host this event that directly platformed genocide denial in an academic setting, not one day after the Republic was essentially dissolved and all Armenians were expelled from the region was [in] poor taste, extremely damaging, harmful to the community,” Berikyan said. “I mean, words are not strong enough to describe the sort of harm it’s caused.”

Moving forward, Berikyan said she hopes to see the University administration’s presence at the upcoming initiatives, advocacy and cultural celebration events that will take place in honor of Armenian History Month in April.

“We’re here, and we’ve made our presence known, and we’re putting in the work,” Berikyan said. “All we need is the administration to acknowledge our existence. Because I think, at the end of the day, all we want is acknowledgement and recognition for all the value we add to campus, which is huge.”