Bloomberg
Aug 3 2014
Armenia-Azeri War Risks Grow as Clashes Intensify
By Henry Meyer, Sara Khojoyan and Zulfugar Agayev Aug 3, 2014
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan plan to meet this week in a bid
to defuse escalating tensions between the two countries after at least
15 soldiers were killed in the worst clashes in two decades.
The fighting in the past week in the disputed region of
Nagorno-Karabakh has been the deadliest since the two former Soviet
states signed a cease-fire in 1994. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan
will hold talks with his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the Russian
city of Sochi on Aug. 8-9, Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan
said on the government’s website.
“We hope that serious arrangements will be reached during the
meeting,” Abrahamyan said. “We are not afraid of war, I just think it
is not clever to solve problems with wars in the 21st century.”
The skirmishes between the South Caucasus countries, which border
Turkey and Iran, flared amid the worst geopolitical standoff since the
Cold War between Russia and the U.S. over the conflict in Ukraine. A
renewed war between Azerbaijan, an ally of the U.S. and Turkey, and
Russian-backed Armenia has the potential to put NATO directly at odds
with the government in Moscow, according to Timothy Ash, a
London-based economist for emerging markets at Standard Bank Group
Plc.
“Militarily, Armenia is still thought to have superiority, given
Russian backing, but with its rising oil wealth, Azerbaijan has been
re-arming rapidly,” Ash said yesterday by e-mail.
Facing off are 20,000 Armenian and Azeri troops, dug into World War
I-style trenches sometimes only 100 meters (330 feet) apart, according
to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Energy Route
The escalating death toll since July 31 has inflamed tensions between
landlocked Armenia and its eastern neighbor Azerbaijan, the former
Soviet Union’s third-largest oil producer and the only route for
Caspian energy to Western markets that bypasses Russia.
Armenia took over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave about the
size of Rhode Island, and seven adjacent districts from Azerbaijan in
a war after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. More than 30,000
people were killed and over a million displaced before Russia brokered
a cease-fire in 1994.
Once an Armenian-majority autonomous region within the Azerbaijan
Soviet Socialist Republic, Nagorno-Karabakh remains internationally
recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Four United Nations Security Council
resolutions were passed demanding an Armenian withdrawal from the
area. About 700,000 Azeris were forced to leave the districts in what
Azerbaijan describes as ethnic cleansing. The two nations’ presidents
met in November in Vienna for the first time in two years.
NATO, Russia
Azerbaijan has forged closer ties with Israel and NATO-member Turkey
and increased defense spending 27-fold to $3.7 billion a year in the
past decade, outlays that exceed Armenia’s annual budget. Armenia
hosts a Russian military base in its second-biggest town of Gyumri,
near the Turkish border, and Russian troops guard Armenia’s borders
with Iran and Turkey.
Azerbaijan, which signed a $45 billion contract in December with a BP
Plc-led group to pipe natural gas to Europe, has repeatedly threatened
to use force to regain control of the territory should peace efforts
fail. Aliyev said in January he had “no doubts” that Azerbaijan will
“restore its territorial integrity.”
‘Provocative’ Steps
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry accused Armenia of “provocative” actions
and said it “bears full responsibility for the evolving dangerous
situation,” according to a statement on the ministry’s website.
The U.S., France and Russia, which are leading efforts to resolve the
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to take
immediate action to defuse tensions and respect the cease-fire, as
well as resume negotiations.
Companies led by London-based BP have invested more than $40 billion
in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas fields. Azerbaijan can pump as much as 1.2
million barrels a day of oil to Turkey through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
pipeline, which allows supplies to bypass Russia.
Eight Azeri and two Armenian troops were confirmed killed in clashes
on July 31. Azerbaijan said it lost an additional four troops and an
Armenian soldier was confirmed dead in fighting on Aug. 1-2. Another
Azeri serviceman was killed Aug. 3, according to Nagorno-Karabakh’s
armed forces.
Crimea Context
Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in March and
the continuing pro-Russian separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine is
inflaming the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Thomas de Waal, senior
associate at Carnegie in Washington, said in a research paper posted
on the research group’s website in June.
“In this context, people are wondering not about whether Karabakh
creates a precedent for Crimea but whether it works the other way
round,” de Waal said. “The truth may be that Crimea has placed
Karabakh in a new vicious circle of destructive politics.”
With Russian President Vladimir Putin “cynical” about the chances of
pursuing peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the chances of a
diplomatic breakthrough are low, according to the Carnegie analyst.
As Azerbaijan bolsters its army with weapons such as drones,
multiple-rocket launchers and attack aircraft, “we can be certain that
a new conflict, however small, would be vastly more destructive than
that of the 1990s,” he said.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-03/armenia-azeri-war-risks-grow-as-clashes-intensify.html