Five years ago, Kim Kardashian and her husband, Kanye West, visited Gyumri, the second largest city in Armenia, after the capital, Yerevan.
It was the first and only time that socialite, main face of one of the reality shows most viewed in the world, trod the land of ancestors. The father, well-known lawyer Robert Kardashian, was born and died in Los Angeles, as were his parents and their parents, so his Armenian ancestry goes back to the line of great-great-grandparents, which did not stop Kim, Kanye and the baby North West visited the hut once occupied by the Kardashian family – and that filmed for the tenth season of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”, to the delight of the population and the mayor, who was part of the committee organized to welcome them to the city.
Nor has it prevented it, now that Baku has returned to claim possession of the Republic of Artsakh, in the Nagorno-Karabakh region – the majority Armenian Christian territory that was integrated in 1921 by the USSR in Azerbaijan and which, 70 years later, proclaimed unilaterally and with Armenia’s support for its independence – that Kim Kardashian be one of the most audible voices in the defense of Armenian interests in the conflict.
Since the rekindling of the conflict – which in two weeks has claimed at least 300 deaths and several hundred displaced persons -, the socialite, from the suburbs of Los Angeles, where she lives, has been deployed in social media shares, in order to to draw attention to what is happening over 11,500 kilometers away.
Please share the news @esrailian Armenians in #Arstakh have been attacked. We are praying brave men & women risking their lives to protect Artsakh & #Armenia. The news is misleading & these are not “clashes.”
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) September 27, 2020
“Armenia is being the victim of attacks not provoked by Azerbaijan and the predictable disinformation campaign that accompanies them. Azerbaijan is blocking social networks except for war propaganda, ”he wrote on September 27 on Twitter, a network where he accumulates 66.9 million followers.
This Saturday, through a video posted on Instagram – 189 million followers – Kim Kardashian has announced that he will donate one million dollars to support fund for Armenia, created in 1994 by the millions of Armenian descendants in the diaspora – it is estimated that between 500,000 and one and a half million Armenians were exterminated, during the First World War, by the Ottoman Empire, in what became known as the Armenian genocide, which led the exodus of a large part of the population abroad.
Interviewed by the Telegraph’s special envoy to Armenia, the Mayor of Gyumri, showed up satisfied with the support of this weapon, very little secret: “[A exposição pública de Kardashian] is essential for us. We are very happy that the family is from Gyumri and that it really helped to put the city on the world map, ”said Samvel Balasayan.
“Kim Kardashian’s efforts to post and talk about the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh have aroused a great public awareness of the conflict, not only in the United States but around the world,” added an Armenian, interviewed in front of the family’s old home Kardashian, on a dirt road.
The visibility that the socialite has brought to the conflict, in a position applauded by many but rejected to social media spaces by defenders of Azerbaijan and Turkey, who seconded it, was considered essential also by the executive director of the Repat Armenia Foundation. “Armenia is a small country that has always been at the mercy of other empires, we only have two allies: our army and our diaspora. Whenever we have an existential issue, the entire nation becomes an army. ”
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