Author: Nahapetian Samvel

In the course of just one week in late September, the entire population of ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan launched a full-scale invasion of Nagorno Karabakh (also known as Artsakh) on September 19, bombing towns and villages. According to a statement issued by the Russian Socialist Movement (RSM), the invasion was carried out under the pretext of an “anti-terrorist operation”.

“Aliyev’s militarist regime has overtly fomented nationalist hysteria and prepared for a new war aimed at ethnic cleansing,” wrote RSM.

“[A]ccording to the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Artsakh, Gegham Stepanyan, 200 people were killed and 400 wounded,” including children, women and the elderly.

The invading force demanded the withdrawal of Armenian troops and the dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh’s authorities.

After 24 hours of fighting, the region’s authorities laid down their arms and agreed to a Russian-brokered ceasefire. This precipitated an agreement to dissolve the region’s state institutions by the end of this year, and caused the mass exodus.

The Lachin corridor — the only highway connecting the territory of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia — had been blockaded by Azerbaijan since December last year, leading to shortages of critical supplies. Gas supplies to Nagorno Karabakh were also suspended, threatening a humanitarian catastrophe.

This blockade and invasion follows the 2020 war, and continues a long, complex and violent history in the region.

These events represent a shifting hegemony in the region, and the diverging political economies of Armenia and Azerbaijan over the past 30 years. The conflict fuses imperialist power contests, the building of nation-states in the post-Soviet period and the ravenous competition for resources stirred by capitalist globalisation.

In Azerbaijan, the ruling Aliyev family has been in power since 1994, when former KGB officer and Azerbaijani SSR leader, Heydar Aliyev, took over. His son Ilham Aliyev came to power in 2003, and has cemented a longstanding authoritarian regime propped up by oil and gas revenues.

The power of the Azerbaijani state and its crony-capitalist political elites goes beyond its massive arms trades and security infrastructure, extending to offshore money laundering and the corruption of political elites globally.

New extractivist British-owned projects in Artsakh, in which the Aliyev’s have their own stakes, is characteristic of this complicated, but profit-driven pattern. As Sevinj Samadzade, writing in Jacobin, points out, “the pursuit of blockade, war, and control becomes a tool to serve its interests at the expense of the working class and broader society. The family’s authoritarian governance of the nation-state secures the population’s compliance for its stabilizing and overseeing capitalism.”

The ruling class of Armenia on the other hand, while also couching political and social discontent in nationalistic language, took the path of a “mild imitation democratic” regime, according to Dmitri Furman.

The first post-Soviet president of Armenia was removed by a bloodless military coup in 1998. The Robert Kocharyan (1998‒2008) and Serzh Sargsyan (2008‒18) presidencies tethered political legitimacy to a hard line on Nagorno-Karabakh, fuelling violence and serving to weaken legitimacy in the wake of recent events.

While the economies of the two countries after the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, (1988‒94) were more or less of equal size, the Azerbaijani economy today is 10 times that of Armenia’s. Azerbaijan, known as “the land of fire” for its immense oil resources, has attracted Western capital. Armenia on the other hand, has remained economically and diplomatically subjected to Russia.

I travelled to Armenia’s capital Yerevan in October last year, just after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “mobilisation speech”, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Accommodation was booked out, as 100,000 Russians had fled there since the invasion — making up 10% of a Yerevan’s one million population.

A vestige of historic Russian-Armenian ties, the Russians I spoke to in Yerevan felt much safer there than in neighbouring Georgia or Azerbaijan.

Russia’s stance proved crucial in the recent invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Aliyev’s speeches have mentioned that “the status quo is dead” — his government’s new central idea for the resolution of the conflict — in other words, no autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh.

Since 2020 Russia has supplied a “peace-keeping” force in Nagorno Karabakh. But its role and allegiance has shifted since its invasion of Ukraine. Its historic ally Armenia has drifted toward the West and Russia’s changing relationship with Turkey may have sent a signal to Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan that it had a green light to assert complete dominance over Nagorno-Karabakh.

As a result of weakening Russian power, the region is now embedded in layers of contradictory arrangements.

The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku–Tbilisi–Erzurum natural gas pipeline — both comissioned in 2006 — pass through Turkey and Azerbaijan, but intentionally bypass Armenia, Russia and Iran.

In the context of the war in Ukraine, this has enabled Azerbaijan to present itself as a reliable supplier of energy to Europe. Last year the European Commission signed a deal for Azerbaijan to double its natural gas supply to the European Union over the next five years. Despite this, Azerbaijan augments its own exports with Russian gas, helping Putin circumnavigate sanctions.

On top of this, Azerbaijan’s contentious relationship with Iran has endeared it to Israel and Washington. Turkey has further propped up and supported Azerbaijan, and Aliyev’s long-demanded Zangezur corridor — which would connect it with Turkey and cut-off Armenia from its smaller border with Iran — is seeming increasingly likely.

The ongoing ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians is now prompting action from Europe and the West.

In a resolution adopted on October 5, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) condemned Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh and called for targeted sanctions against officials in Baku. MEPs said the attack “constitutes a gross violation of international law and human rights and a clear infringement of previous attempts to achieve a ceasefire”. The resolution said the current situation “amounts to ethnic cleansing” and called on “the EU and member states to immediately offer all necessary assistance to Armenia to deal with the influx of refugees … and the subsequent humanitarian crisis”.

However, with the entire ethnic population having fled, is it a case of too little too late, where immediate material interests have blinded diplomatic and humanitarian solutions?

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/ethnic-cleansing-nagorno-karabakh-and-jostling-sea-powers

The world watches in suspense as the aftermath of the conflagration unleashed by Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel unfolds. This is the umpteenth outbreak of violence in the vicinity of the European Union. Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, Israel and Gaza, Libya, the Sahel: a crescent of terrible conflicts borders the EU on its eastern and southern flanks. The triggers are of course different in each case. But in all of them an era of instability has played a role, with changes in the attitudes of large and medium powers seeming to encourage violent escalations. The entire arc of crisis, with the exception of Ukraine, shows the very limited ability of the EU to have an influence on this environment.

This period of volatility is one in which Russia has sought to forcibly reconfigure the world order, China has gained strength, the United States has reoriented itself to address the rise of Beijing, Iran has reaffirmed its antagonism to the West, and the Global South has mobilized against Western dominance in new ways. This geopolitical panorama influences the arc of instability.

Let’s start with the violence unleashed by Hamas’ attack on Israel. This is a criminal decision by its leaders, in which there are no ifs or buts. This does not mean that we should not analyse the context in which it has arisen, and which will have undoubtedly influenced its planning. This shows, on the one hand, Iran — a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah — fully aligned with the attitude of open defiance to the West, of an unleashed Russia, and an increasingly assertive China. Tehran’s position must also be read in light of the collapse of the perspective opened by the nuclear treaty sealed with the Obama Administration and torn up by the Trump Administration. On the other hand, Israel has not suffered any significant pressure to modify its abusive occupation policy.

Without doubt, the prospect of growing normalization of relations between Israel and Arab countries has also played a role, which Washington has promoted to improve Israel’s security but also as a tool to shore up its waning influence in the region. This is the context of vulnerability and a change of attitude in which Hamas’ decision was taken. At none of these levels has the EU (in favor of pursuing the path of a nuclear pact with Iran) had, nor does it have, an important role.

Of course, the war in Ukraine has taken center stage in this era of political uncertainty. It is the episode that embodies the frontal challenge to the global primacy of the West from Russia, which believed itself to be strong again after the dissolution of its empire and the turbulence of the nineties. The Russian offensive in Ukraine is one of the keys to reading what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh a few weeks ago. With Moscow completely occupied on that first front, Azerbaijan (backed by Turkey) has taken the initiative to forcefully resolve the conflict with Armenia, traditionally protected by the Kremlin. The political weakness and shift in the general balance of power undoubtedly incited action, opening a window of opportunity. The EU was almost irrelevant here.

Russia and Turkey are also key actors in Syria and Libya, albeit on opposite sides. Moscow has supported Bashar al-Assad in the first conflict and Marshal Khalifa Hafter in the second. Ankara is on the other side. In neither case has a war been unleashed like it was years ago, but there is still violence and bombings in Syria and a lot of unpredictability in Libya. In the first case, the Kremlin took advantage of the geopolitical absence of the US and the EU to intervene and determine the future of the conflict. In the second, there was indeed a Western intervention, but the disinterest of Washington — busy with other issues — and the limits of the EU have paved the way for the chaos into which Moscow and Ankara have inserted themselves.

The crises in the Sahel, like the others, has largely arisen from local problems. In this case, they stem from a lack of prosperity and democratic maturity. But, here too, the era of global instability has undoubtedly been a context that has encouraged turbulence. Russia, once again, has offered the prospect of support to rebellious and authoritarian sectors of those societies that have continued to harbor anti-colonial suspicions. They perceive Moscow, a power that seeks an imperial and colonial projection in its own environment, as the heir of the USSR, which supported various processes of decolonization in the last century. Here too, the EU — with France as the protagonist — has suffered a harsh reality check regarding its ability to influence and interact in the region.

Not even a superpower can control how certain crises develop. Nobody expects the EU to do it. But the outbreak of conflicts in Europe and its surroundings in this time of uncertainty, of changes in forces and attitudes, should make us think. The Union has had a reaction worthy of the circumstances in the case of Ukraine, achieved with good will and ingenuity, but it remains ill-prepared in structural terms to act in this new, white-hot context. The path to achieving this is not easy and does not guarantee being able to avoid or protect itself from certain crises. There are many questions, but the answer is almost always more common foreign and security policy.