With Russia in retreat in its southern neighborhood, Western nations are trying to prevent Muslim Azerbaijan from moving into the power vacuum and settling scores with Christian Armenia. Azerbaijan is flush with a victory two weeks ago that ended a 35-year-old separatist “republic” of Armenians.
Now Azerbaijan may be planning to power through Armenia’s southernmost province, aiming to open a road and rail “corridor” to an Azeri exclave — and on to Turkey. By bridging this 40-mile gap through Armenia’s mountains, Azerbaijan’s military could fulfill a ‘pan-Turkic’ dream.
That is the dream of joining Turkey with the 70 million inhabitants of Azerbaijan and Central Asia’s four Turkic-speaking nations: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. “The corridor that is going to pass through here is going to unite the whole Turkic world,” Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, says.
That is the assurance he gave President Erdoğan on a visit two years ago to the Azerbaijan border region where the international route would start. Since then, Mr. Aliyev, an autocrat, has ratcheted up crowd-pleasing irredentist rhetoric, provocatively referring to Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan.”
In this “might makes right” era in the southern Caucasus, Azerbaijan is the 1,000-pound gorilla. After Mr. Aliyev’s father, Heydar Aliyev, lost a six-year war to Armenia in 1994, Ilham Aliyev embarked on an arms buying spree. Russia and Israel sold billions of dollars of tanks, drones and artillery cannons to oil-rich Azerbaijan.
In one recent year, Azerbaijan’s defense budget was the size of Armenia’s GDP. For shorthand, Azerbaijan has three times the population, three times the economy, and three times the military of Armenia. When a revenge match came in 2020, Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in 44 days.
President Putin signed an ensuing ceasefire and dispatched 2,000 peacekeepers. Last month, though, Azerbaijan brushed Russia aside and took over the Armenian separatist area in 24 hours. Now, with Russia distracted by Ukraine, Armenians fear that America and Europe will fail to move strongly enough to head off Azeri attacks on Armenia proper.
“My concern is that Azerbaijan will keep going, and try to get southern Armenia for the so-called land corridor,” the director of the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan, Richard Giragosian, tells the Sun. “The breakthrough was the arrival of the first Western officials.”
On Tuesday, the French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, flew from Ukraine to meet with officials in Yerevan. At a press conference, she said: “France has agreed on future contracts with Armenia which will allow the delivery of military equipment to Armenia so that it can ensure its defense.”
Perhaps addressing France’s 500,000 voters of Armenian origin, she vowed: “France will be vigilant regarding the territorial integrity of Armenia.” From the United States, where the Armenian diaspora is estimated to be 1,000,000, the American foreign aid administrator, Samantha Power, came to Yerevan and delivered a letter from President Biden to Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan.
Mr. Biden promised “the strong support of the United States and my Administration for Armenia’s pursuit of a dignified and durable regional peace that maintains your sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and democracy.”
Yet Azerbaijan’s leadership, bolstered by oil and gas revenues, has a history of ignoring American, European, and Russian warnings. Last year, the EU signed a deal with Baku to double gas imports over the next five years.
Russia depends on Baku to duck energy sanctions and ‘launder’ Russian gas through an Azerbaijan-Turkey pipeline. Armenia depends on Russia for 40 percent of its exports and 90 percent of its energy supplies. Washington cultivates Azerbaijan, the only country that borders Russia and Iran, two adversaries of the United States.
On September 14 in Washington, the acting assistant state secretary for Europe and Eurasia, Yuri Kim, testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that Secretary Blinken’s “leadership has yielded results” and that Armenia and Azerbaijan had made “progress on a peace agreement that could stabilize the region.”
Mr. Kim warned that America “will not countenance any action or effort — short term or long term — to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. …We have also made it abundantly clear that the use of force is not acceptable.”
Five days later, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh. In response, almost all of the 120,000 Armenians in the separatist region fled to Armenia. One week after the attack, Mr. Aliyev met with Mr. Erdogan in Nakhchivan, the Azerbaijani exclave sandwiched between Armenia and eastern Turkey. The two studied maps for a cross-Armenia corridor.
On Thursday, the Azerbaijani leader snubbed 40 European leaders and backed out of a planned meeting in Granada, Spain with his Armenian counterpart, Mr.Pashinyan. Mr. Aliyev skipped the meeting alleging that Europe is pro-Armenian and complaining that Mr. Erdogan was not invited.
Undeterred, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, invited the Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders to Brussels by the end of this month to resume talks on a peace treaty.
Mr. Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Mr. Pashinyan in Granada.
The two European leaders declared their “unwavering support to the independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of the borders of Armenia.” Earlier, at the United Nations, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said: “Baku broke its repeated assurances to refrain from the use of force, causing tremendous suffering to a population already in dire straits.”
In Brussels, the European Parliament passed a resolution accusing Baku of “ethnic cleansing” and urging the EU to impose sanctions on Azerbaijani officials responsible for violating the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The European statements reflect widespread fears that Azerbaijan may launch another military assault. Last week in Brussels, the Armenian envoy to the EU, Tigran Balayan, told Reuters: “It’s not only the opinion of the Armenian government, but also of many experts — also some of the EU member states — that an attack on Armenia proper is imminent.”
After the 2020 ceasefire, Azerbaijan conducted a series of military testing operations, sending troops across the border to seize and hold a total of 50 square miles of Armenian land.
“There is a long history of Azerbaijan saying that this area was granted to Armenia unfairly,” an Armenian-born political scientist at Lehigh University, Arman Grigoryan, tells the Sun. “There is a lot of this irredentist talk at the semi-official level. If a country has the capability, if a diplomatic solution is not found, it may move.”