Month: September 2020

The fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan is energizing nationalist and ethnic tensions in neighboring Turkey and Iran. While Ankara encourages the violence, Tehran fears rising ethnic tensions among its own Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities.

Start with Turkey, the larger economic force in the Caucasus. For months Ankara’s full-throttled support for Azerbaijan, its bellicose rhetoric and their joint military drills, have looked like preparations for war. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is using the conflict to boost his credentials with nationalists and distract from perpetual economic crisis at home, much as he has done around the Mediterranean in recent years.

Domestically, his hawkish, hands-on foreign policy has helped Erdoğan’s Islamist political base forge an alliance of convenience with secular nationalists. From talking tough with Europe on immigration, Libya, and Mediterranean energy, to restoring the famed Hagia Sophia as a mosque, Erdoğan seems bent on doing anything for a short-term win at home. Given widespread animosity toward Armenia and the close communal and historical ties with Azerbaijan, the current resumption of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh provides Erdoğan with yet another rallying cry – and distraction.

The timing is not coincidence: COVID-19 has brought the Turkish economy, already gutted by a debt crisis, to its knees.

Iran, on the other hand, is watching the events nervously. The Islamic Republic is home to sizeable Azerbaijani community, perhaps one quarter of the population, within which elements have flirted with independence. Iranian Azeris form an influential political and economic block that has become vocally frustrated with perceived discriminations in recent years. It was, thus, no surprise that protests in support of Azerbaijan popped up in Tabriz, Urmia and Tehran during a bought of fighting over Karabakh in July.

Yet in one of the clearest signs of its pragmatic approach to foreign policy since the Islamic Revolution – and born out of a desire to enervate any potential political link between its own Azeri regions and Baku – Tehran has generally supported Christian Armenia over Shia-majority Azerbaijan since the two became independent in 1991. Notwithstanding improvements in bilateral relations in recent years, Baku and Tehran bicker over Baku’s ties to Israel, the development of Caspian Sea energy resources, and Tehran’s alleged support for religious groups inside Azerbaijan. 

More recently, Baku has complained that Tehran is allowing Russian weapons shipments to Armenia to transit Iranian airspace. A September 28 article on a website linked to Azerbaijan’s security services pointed to these shipments and asked, “Who is our friend and who is our enemy?” It went on to demand “a more intelligible and decisive position” from Tehran. Baku has not complained directly to Tehran, at least not publicly, but on September 29 Tehran denied claims that shipments of Russian materiel to Armenia were crossing Iran by land.

This considerable mistrust puts Tehran in an awkward position. Given its lack of credibility as a neutral actor, its offer this week to mediate between Baku and Yerevan will, similar to its offer in July, go ignored. Yet Tehran cannot remain indifferent. It has economic interests in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even more troubling, the prospect of protracted conflict on its northern border could lead to the reemergence of protests in support of either waring party and possibly clashes, even anti-government ones, while Tehran’s domestic credibility is at a low ebb thanks to its daft handling of COVID-19.

Such divergent views by the two regional heavyweights will do little to bring peace to Nagorno-Karabakh. Not that Ankara or Tehran have traditionally played the role of peacemaker. But with the world distracted by COVID and economic crisis – and traditional meditators Washington, Moscow and Europe preoccupied with a growing number of bitter disputes – it is regretful that two would-be regional powers cannot play a more constructive role in ending this decades-long war.

Nima Khorrami is a research associate at the Arctic Institute.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a place name few in the West will recognise. But this small, unrecognised mountainous state with a population of about 150,000, is now the site of deadly ongoing clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh, known in Armenian as Artsakh, has been the object of a protracted conflict between two peoples of the South Caucasus since before the fall of the Soviet Union. The territory’s mostly Armenian inhabitants declared independence from Azerbaijan in late 1991, with Armenia’s support. Attempts by Azerbaijan to reimpose its authority led to a fight for ownership which turned into the bloodiest of the many conflicts that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.

Between 1991 and 1994, both sides sacrificed over 30,000 people, and ethnically cleansed each other from areas under their control.

A ceasefire was finally signed in 1994, leaving the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and a swathe of land surrounding it in Armenian hands. Tortuous negotiations continued over several decades, led by Russia, France and the US. But there was very little progress towards a final resolution.

Since September 27, the two adversaries appear to have relapsed into war, with heavy battles reported along the sections of the front line near the territory. These most serious clashes since 1994 have left at least 65 dead at the time of writing. Both sides are using a wide range of military equipment, including heavy tanks, long-range artillery and drones.

As both countries declared martial law and decreed mobilisations, the rhetoric in the Armenian capital Yerevan and Azerbaijani capital Baku has been uncompromising.

In Armenia, this is seen as nothing less than a struggle for survival. A recurring theme in both official circles and the country’s media has been the possible extermination of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. Links are made with the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire, especially in light of Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan.

In Azerbaijan, on the other hand, the war has been presented as an opportunity to right the wrongs of 1991-94 by bringing the territory back under Azerbaijani control, allowing hundreds of thousands of displaced people to return home.

The territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh under Armenian control. Wikimedia Commons

This latest fighting has a number of drivers. In the short term, Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev, was under pressure to correct setbacks suffered by the Azerbaijani forces during earlier clashes on the border with Armenia in July. The setbacks led to spontaneous demonstrations in Baku by citizens calling for the resignation of the armed forces’ chief of staff, and an all-out war against the Armenian side.

As a result, Azerbaijan’s longtime foreign minister was replaced. Azerbaijan has also upgraded its already close relationship with its traditional ally, Turkey, which has made public assertions of unconditional support. Along with its stated readiness to engage in intensified military co-operation, this has probably bolstered Aliyev’s confidence.

Seen over the longer term, this escalation must be viewed in terms of the intractable nature of the negotiations surrounding the conflict. Azerbaijan has shown increased frustration with the ongoing negotiations in recent years, especially after unmet expectations for a breakthrough following Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution.

The absence of a definitive solution has also allowed Armenia to present its control of the unrecognised Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh as the new normal. It has also gradually hardened its public position that the lands surrounding the territory are also Armenian.

Azerbaijan has invested billions of petro-dollars in state-of-the art military hardware, and sunk plenty of social capital into the promise of regaining control over Nagorno-Karabakh. This puts Aliyev under increasing pressure to force some movement on the matter.

An Armenian Foreign Ministry handout allegedly showing the destruction of a building in Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian Foreign Ministry Press/EPA

This is undoubtedly a highly dangerous phase in the conflict. The unequivocal support by Turkey for Azerbaijan could draw it into the confrontation, especially if Azerbaijan were seen to be losing ground. Reports of Turkey hiring Syrian rebel fighters to serve in Azerbaijan would, if confirmed, also be perceived as highly provocative by Moscow in light of the proximity of the restless North Caucasus, inviting a potential response.

Hostilities could also spill into Nakhichevan, a part of Azerbaijan separated by a band of Armenian territory, whose status is subject to a Turkish guarantee under a Soviet-era treaty. Unlike a confrontation in Nagorno-Karabakh, a direct attack on Armenia proper – from Nakhichevan or elsewhere – could trigger Russia’s defence commitments under the Collective Security Treaty Organization, with potentially very serious repercussions beyond the region itself.

With the stakes high, the UN is holding an emergency meeting on the issue. Separate diplomatic contacts between the belligerents and Russia, Turkey and others are already underway. But even if that were successful in achieving a ceasefire, this would still leave the more important, longer-term problem: how to resolve an issue which strikes at the core of the identities of both Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Over the past decades, these two peoples have developed views of history that are exclusive and exclusionary in the extreme. Anyone striving for peace will have to change history before being able to write the future. And that would be quite a circle to square.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Tuesday that the atmosphere was not right for talks with Azerbaijan while military operations were taking place in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Russian news agencies reported.

Pashinyan said that senior Turkish military officials were in Azerbaijan directing military operations and urged the international community to condemn Azeri and Turkish aggression, adding that existence of the Armenian people was under threat.