GPI White Paper No. 4. The diplomatic tour of occupied Artsakh, the duty to prevent, and the precedent of 1915.
On September 11 and 12, 2026, Azerbaijan drove roughly 150 representatives of 58 countries and nine international organizations into occupied Artsakh, assembled them in front of a Victory Arch in the emptied capital of Stepanakert, and photographed them. The United States chargé d’affaires used the occasion to discuss more than eight billion dollars in commercial agreements, American participation in Azerbaijan’s defense exhibition, and the continued suspension of Section 907. This paper documents what those governments knew before the population was removed, and what they have done since.
Every government represented on that tour had specific notice of a serious risk of genocide before September 19, 2023: a ten-month obstruction of the Lachin corridor affecting 120,000 people, a binding order of the International Court of Justice on February 22, 2023, a genocide opinion issued on August 7, 2023 by a former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and the presentation of that opinion to a commission of the United States Congress on September 6. Azerbaijan attacked five days after the Senate hearing that followed, and more than 100,000 Armenians were gone within eight days. The paper sets that record beside the sequence that began in 1915, when the same powers declared they would hold the Ottoman leadership personally responsible, then released every Malta detainee without a conviction, discarded the Wilson award, concluded Lausanne with no Armenian party to it, and arrived at full military alliance with the successor state thirty-seven years later. From the warning of 2023 to eight billion dollars discussed on the ground in occupied Stepanakert took three. It documents the arming of the perpetrator in both sequences, from the July 1915 Spanish Mauser arrangement recorded in the Colt archive at the University of Rochester to the 1992 appearance of Iran-Contra figures in Baku under the MEGA Oil name, and the unbroken run of Section 907 waivers from 2002 to the suspension signed on August 8, 2025. It assesses the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity as a forty-nine-year exclusive development right inside sovereign Armenian territory, held through a company in which the United States side takes 74 percent. And it documents the claim Azerbaijan has already announced: the Western Azerbaijan doctrine, which designates the Republic of Armenia as Azerbaijani land and now has a headquarters in Baku, a Concept of Return lodged on the United Nations record, identity cards, and a toponymy department. Every legal instrument that was missing in 1921 exists today. The outcome was the same. Read the paper, and understand what is being prepared.