According to a weekend statement released by the Armenian Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, one of the two sees of the Armenian Apostolic Church, during the Friday phone call with His Holiness Aram I, the head of the Catholicosate residing in Antelias, the former U.S. president “voiced his great appreciation to His Holiness for his leadership and expressed his full support for the issue of Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] and the establishment of complete peace within the region.”
During the telephone conversation held ahead of the November 5 presidential election in the United States, Trump also “warmly welcomed the Armenians of the United States as an organized, active and powerful community,” the statement added.
It said that Catholicos Aram I, for his part, “expressed his appreciation to Trump for his recent public statement in support of the rights of Artsakh Armenians, while, at the same time, emphasizing the importance of the United States’ global role.”
“It is necessary for there to be a suitable person representing the American Armenian community in the new government,” Aram I added, according to the Catholicosate.
In a social media post last month clearly designed to woo Armenian-American voters, Trump blamed the current U.S. administration for last year’s forced exodus of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population and pledged to end the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict if he wins the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
The former U.S. president also attacked his Democratic rival Kamala Harris in that post published on October 24.
“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 for Nagorno-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 also 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 stated that 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.”
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.
Reacting to the news of the Trump phone call with Catholicos Aram I, the ANCA, in a social media post, welcomed “the centering of Artsakh in our American electoral arena, including via this recent exchange between His Holiness Aram I & former President Trump.”
“We have also welcomed engagement by VP Harris & look forward to her renewed personal outreach,” the ANCA added.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a former autonomous oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan, enjoyed de facto independence for nearly three decades after breaking free from Baku’s rule following the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.
Azerbaijan regained control of much of the breakaway region in a 2020 war in which nearly 7,000 Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers were killed. Thousands of ethnic Armenians then fled their homes, either relocating within Nagorno-Karabakh or moving further to Armenia.
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.