Shurnukh (Armenia) (AFP)
Stepan Movsisyan has been told his house remains in Armenia but half of his cow shed now falls under Azerbaijan’s control after a war last year dramatically shifted the boundaries between the ex-Soviet foes.
“Apparently GPS says that the border runs right through here,” says the former forest ranger, 71, standing in the mud of his front yard.
“But how can that be?”
A few metres away two young Armenian border guards with Kalashnikov rifles keep constant watch.
Next to them a freshly planted sign says you are entering Azerbaijan, and just beyond that the country’s flag flaps over a border control camp.
Up until a few months ago the nearest Azerbaijani presence east of the village of Shurnukh was dozens of kilometres away.
Between the two sides lay the territory of the self-declared state of Nagorno-Karabakh, that Armenian fighters seized in a war almost 30 years ago after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
But the balance of power was upended by six weeks of fighting that exploded last September and saw Armenia bludgeoned into agreeing to handover swathes of territory to Azerbaijan.
An agreement, brokered by Russia, has meant a return to an internationally recognised border between the two countries that for decades had existed only on paper.
– ‘Living with the enemy’ –
In Shurnukh the border has been staked out more or less along the road that runs through the middle of this impoverished farming village of 28 families.
Across it, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces now eye each other nervously.
In between them stands a small contingent of Russian border troops with an armoured personnel carrier parked up.
On the lower side of the village, a dozen houses have been claimed by Azerbaijan and the Armenian families who lived there forced to leave.
“An Azerbaijani general came and said it was their land,” says farmer Khachik Stepanyan.
Now his family has moved into a neighbour’s house just across the road, and look out of their window every day at the abandoned home they left behind metres away.
“Of course it feels painful,” Stepanyan says.
“This is Armenian land — and now we have to live with our enemies nearby.”
Delineating to whom each scrap of this land belongs is a bitterly contested task.
Much of the problem dates back a century ago, when Soviet leaders drew lines on the map with little concern for old enmities or historical claims.
Azerbaijani families lived in the disputed homes until the late 1980s, but they left as the USSR frayed and long-suppressed ethnic tensions boiled over across the region.
Now the villagers of Shurnukh point to old Soviet maps they insist show the entire village should be in Armenia.
But the Azerbaijani side have used far more modern techniques of satellite mapping to pinpoint where they say the border should be — and so far they have got their way.
– ‘Suffocates you’ –
Village head Hakob Arshakyan cannot contain his bitterness at the sudden reversal in fortunes.
Standing on a frigid outcrop, he lets out a stream of swear words when he spots an Azerbaijani border guard in the near distance below.
Arshakyan also had to leave his home and is currently living with his wife and daughter in his office.
“It suffocates you — we lived there for more than thirty years,” he says.
“It was our lives, all our memories.”
The Armenian government is building new houses for those displaced further up in the village — but the villagers insist they want their old land back.
While there has not been any violence reported so far, even the smallest incident requires international mediation and it is difficult to see how the current standoff is sustainable.
“One day someone’s pig crossed over onto the other side,” explains Arshakyan.
“Our border guards, the Russians and the Azerbaijanis had to agree to watch as the owner was allowed to go and fetch it back.”
Even if the residents are allowed back to their homes, having the Azerbaijani troops so close by has put the village on edge.
“Of course it’s frightening having them so close — it’s scary for everyone,” says Arshakyan’s wife Nune, a maths teacher at the village school.
The presence of the Russian troops gives some peace of mind but she worries about the situation if they move out.
“I don’t know what would happen if they left,” Nune said.
“I don’t know how life would be then.”
TEHRAN, Mar. 08 (MNA) — Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mojtaba Zonnour said that transferring ISIL terrorist groups from Syria and using them in Karabakh conflict is worrying.
Speaking in his meeting with Armenian Ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Iran Artashes Toumanian on Monday, he reiterated that the news of transferring ISIL terrorists from Syria and using these terrorists in the recent clashes erupted between Azerbaijan Republic and Armenia is worrying.
Referring to the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis and expressing concern over the use of Takfiri terrorism as a tool in regional conflicts, Zonnour said that news of the transfer of ISIL terrorists from Syria and use them in the recent conflicts is worrying.
There is a long-standing friendship between Iran and Armenia, he said, adding, “Armenian people have also viewed Iran as their second homeland and Armenians living in Iran have always cooperated with the Islamic Establishment in ups and downs of the country.”
Given the role and position of parliaments in governing structure of Iran and Armenia, Iranian Parliament is ready to strengthen its relations with the Armenian Parliament at various levels, Zonnour added.
Elsewhere in his remarks, he pointed to the recent conflicts erupted between Azerbaijan Republic and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh region and stated, “What happened between our two neighboring countries was unpleasant, because, Islamic Republic of Iran does not consider the war in interest of people of the region. Therefore, maintaining the current security and stability is of great importance.”
Armenian envoy to Iran, for his turn, welcomed the development of parliamentary cooperation between the two countries and said that strengthening cooperation between the two countries and increasing the number of delegates will play an important role in strengthening relations between the two countries of Iran and Armenia.
Islamic Republic of Iran is one of Armenia’s important and long-standing neighbors in the region, he said, adding, “Therefore, we welcome the greater role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the developments in the region.”
MA/FNA13991218000747
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/170870/Moving-ISIL-terrorists-from-Syria-to-Karabakh-row-worrying
Participation Of French Fighters In Armenian Military Action Sparks Investigation – OpEd
March 8, 2021
By Roza Asgarova*
Armenian diaspora organizations at home and abroad played a key role in the Second Karabakh war, contributing manpower and financing to Armenian military, and the involvement of foreign fighters by the Armenian side throughout the conflict has received wide coverage in both local and international media. Armenian organizations all over the world circulated ads for the recruitment of military forces, and one such organization named VoMA (short for Armenian “Ողջ Մնալ ու Արվեստ” – “the art of staying alive”), operating in Yerevan, launched accelerated military training courses with the aim of establishing a mountain rifle battalion under the command of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia. As a result, at the end of the war the Azerbaijani side petitioned relevant law enforcement agencies to launch investigations into the illegal participation of their citizens in the military actions in Karabakh.
As foreign combatants recruited for the purpose of “undermining the territorial integrity of a State” fall under the definition of “mercenaries”, deployment of these fighter is considered a violation by the Armenian side of the international laws of war under the Article 47 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Articles 1 and 5 of the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries of 1989.
According to several media agencies, an indeterminate number of French citizens joined the military operations against Azerbaijan, among them a French Armenian by the name of Artur Oganisyan, who, in his interview to Russian outlet “Новая газета” mentioned that he and his two brothers arrived in Armenia, received automatic assault rifles without providing any identification or requiring any permissions, and were swiftly added to the army. Such cases were also highlighted by the “France24” news agency, which published video materials validating the stories of a number of volunteers heading to Armenia to join military action, among them a veteran referred to as “Vardan” and a 28-year-old French citizen Sipan Muradyan. Information on the French citizen Marc de Cacqueray-Valmenier participating in military training by the Armenian military forces was disseminated by “The French Liberation” news agency. A photograph published on social media by Cacqueray-Valmenier, a notorious neo-Nazi and the leader of the far-right group Zouaves Paris (ZVP), verified his presence in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.
Accordingly, the embassy of Azerbaijan to the French Republic appealed to the state’s prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation into the potential violations of local and international laws committed by French citizens of Armenian descent who fought in Karabakh for several weeks.
As was publicly reported, Armenian government spread the information on the recruitment of foreign citizens of Armenian origin into the army. Among those who joined the trainings were citizens of Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the US. The diaspora organizations widely disseminated the calls to join military operations among their members. For instance, despite the fact that the Article 208(2) of the Criminal Code of Russian Federation prohibits the participation of its citizens in an armed force that is not ordained by a federal law, and states that such actions may carry up to five years in prison, the head of the “Armenian Union of Russia” (“Союз армян России”) Ara Abramyan on 28th of September 2020 announced that 20 thousand Russian Armenians were eager to fight for the Armenian separatist regime in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result, on 29th of September, members of Armenian diaspora in Russia, including a few representatives of the ARF Dashnaksutyun party, traveled from Sochi to Yerevan with the aim of joining military operations as volunteers.
Similar cases took place in several European states: according to the “Sputnik Hellas” news agency, at least 30-35 Greek Armenians, as well as 10-15 ethnic Greeks departed for Armenia to join the military actions against Turkish armed forces. A similar case was covered by the Spanish “El Confidencial”news agency.
Additionally, an information leak revealed that members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from Syria and Iraq, as well as 1,500 Kurdish mercenaries joined the Armenian military.
The materials published in the above-mentioned reports and articles strongly imply that Armenian armed forces employed mobilized diaspora members from foreign states in the Second Karabakh War in violation of both the international law and the criminal codes of the diaspora members’ host countries. Whether this investigation will be mirrored by other states or result in sanctions against the Armenian government and diaspora organizations remains to be seen. Investigation of potential violations of this sort are the fallout of the enduring war over the Karabakh region -and potentially the last few steps on the path to peace.
*About the author: Roza Asgarova is a research fellow at the Center of Analysis of International Relations (Air Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The November 10 ceasefire for the Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, is unlikely to bring any long-term peace. Post-conflict measures mainly focus on military and security issues, with the recent launch of a Turkish-Russian joint military facility in Azerbaijan and the Russian peacekeeping mission committed to preventing flare-ups of the tensions as well as dealing with protection of returnees and exchange of prisoners and bodies. Yet, the security dilemma in the region is inevitably intensifying, especially after the circulation of videos showing war crimes and Azerbaijan’s plan to sue Armenia for the cost of the reconstruction process. The tensions in the Syunik region between Armenian villagers and the Azerbaijani authorities are only the tip of an iceberg. The top-down format of negotiations – with the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia meeting in Moscow to discuss the construction of new joint transportation infrastructure – will do little to defuse tensions.
Such an authoritarian management of the post-conflict scenario not only neglects humanitarian issues, but also generates two crystallised, isolated societies. Negotiators are missing the point by creating cross-border projects to unblock interregional movement without preparing the population for coexistence. That will be the hardest challenge once displaced people are allowed to come back to their territories. Ignoring women’s needs is a powerful common denominator of such joint enterprises. According to some local women peacebuilders from both Armenia and Azerbaijan, interviewed by OBCT, women are not only the victims of the war, but also of gender discrimination, exacerbated by war.
At the sound of sirens following the bombings, people living in the areas surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh were forced to flee to Armenia. Most were set up in improvised shelters, forced to sleep in cars, or hosted in the same house with other families. Women report the lack of gender-sensitive humanitarian assistance. “Many IDPs were placed in schools, however schools are not a place to live long-term, particularly as some of them have poor sanitation”, explains Afag Nadirli, consultant with the Azerbaijan Youth Foundation, international relations department. “People don’t receive basic healthcare. Most people whose houses were destroyed by shelling have not had a shower since they were displaced. Women, especially mothers, are a vulnerable group among the IDPs due to lack of access to healthcare. The numbers are large and the assessment missions of both the government and the UN Agencies take time”.
The transgenerational character of the humanitarian crisis emerges in the words of Saadat Abdullazada, an Azerbaijani activist who organises trainings on women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive health. “My friends visited some shelters and they said that people, especially women, are desperate. They had to flee their homes as children and now their children have to do the same, which is a psychological trauma”. She tells about a pregnant woman who grew up in a refugee camp – now her baby too will be born as a refugee. ‘’I cannot imagine how they feel’’, she adds.
Violence against women goes beyond the direct impact of the conflict on their living conditions; it is structural and has to do with the securitisation process perpetuated by governments, which made the military apparatus the cornerstone of the political, economic, and cultural system. Militarist, macho culture pours out on women in the form of a patriarchal structure that affects their everyday lives not only in wartimes, creating what feminist scholar Cynthia Cockburn defines a continuum of violence. However, this does not mean that women are aware of the poisoning effects of war culture on their rights and freedom.
‘’There was so much warmongering by women in Armenia’’, explains Arpi Bekaryan, peace activist and freelance journalist. ‘’They would push men to fight. If you were not in the army, if you had not served, if you had not fought, you were not a real man. Some women shared Facebook posts like: ‘why don’t you go? Why are you still here?’. There was also a Facebook group where women shared photos of soldiers, debating on ’who is more handsome?’, this kind of things’’.
‘’In Azerbaijan’’, tells Saadat, ‘’most women want war, they say ‘we want our lands back! We have to go! We have to continue this war!’. I remember that, when news came that they had conquered one of the villages, I heard a lot of people go out on their balconies and shout. Most of them were women, crying out ‘Karabakh is Azerbaijan!’. I could not sleep that night. It is not surprising though, because most of it is propaganda from school. We had no choice. Women and men were raised pro-war’’. Saadat also reports many shocking Facebook posts by Azerbaijani women and men, inviting women to marry disabled soldiers coming back from the front and to give birth to more children to support the army, even in exchange for monetary compensation from the government.
“During the war, I started noticing how many in Armenia started to say that we need to give birth to more children to support the nation”, recalls Knarik Mkrtchyan, coordinator of projects on Women, Peace, and Security. “Patriarchal militarism treats our bodies as incubators, to give birth to soldiers. I heard friends of mine say, ‘I don’t care if I don’t get married, I want to have a child to avoid a demographic crisis’. Can you imagine such a patriarchal society coming to that, accepting unwed mothers? On the other hand, many have started talking about compulsory military service for women.
Mothers have embraced the mission of putting the nation before their own children, accepting their death as a necessary sacrifice, to the extent that women even consider to sacrifice their own lives. This pro-war mentality, while pushing women to reproduce, also affects their reproductive rights. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan rank in top positions worldwide for sex-ratio at birth, with a ratio of 113 per 100 girls , signalling a high rate of selective abortions.
Armenia and Azerbaijan also present alarming rates of gender-based violence (GBV), which are likely to increase in times of emotional distress and frustration. In both countries, feminist associations organised protests advocating for the ratification of the 2011 Istanbul Convention against Violence against Women. This shows how countering macho culture could create a common ground to engage the population in deconstructing the pro-war narrative. Yet, gender issues are not a government priority. According to Saadat: ‘’the war started in September and we had scheduled training on gender and reproductive health issues in Azerbaijan. It was supposed to end at the end of November, but when the war started the youth centre we worked with, which is under the government, said that they had to organise training on historical and militaristic issues and would not be able to do gender-related training. People, they said, might get angry: ‘we have war and you’re talking about gender-based violence?’’’.
‘’In Armenia’’, reports Knarik, ‘’peacebuilding is not popular now; it is really infamous work, as peacebuilders are much criticised. At this point, peacebuilding is all about tracking the consequences of the war, showing the consequences of the war on people and, indirectly, pointing out that peace is the only solution. We do not use a direct lexicon. It is not safe and, as I said, martial law remains valid in Armenia. We have to be careful with wording, with everything, with interviews’’. She adds: ‘’No woman was at the official negotiations. There was no interest in engaging women. My vision is to foster dialogue on different levels. This is the solution if we really want to have peace’’.
It is this very kind of elitist international politics behind closed doors that undermines the perspectives for stability in the region, inflaming reciprocal distrust and hate. The new status quo is a win for Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkey, but not for the international community – especially OSCE and the Minsk Group – that has seen its political role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict sharply diminished. OSCE could relaunch its role adopting an integrated multi-track approach, namely opening channels of communications between mediators and civil society, as also recently stressed by Caucasus expert Thomas De Waal . Likewise, innovative approaches should move beyond a Western vision of liberal peace, with the enforcement of rule of law and democracy as the only way toward stabilisation. International donors, instead of sticking to a narrow audience – for instance through cross-border meetings exclusively between journalists or leading political figures – should address the basic needs of the population in a post-war scenario. Projects should be pragmatic and bottom-up in order to produce communities in practices, namely communities of people who share some advantages in engaging in ongoing joint enterprises.
Current critical humanitarian issues in the post-conflict scenario include the reconstruction process and the management of the large numbers of displaced persons and refugees, including some psychological aspects such as assistance to victims of war trauma. These intertwine with other delicate issues such as rehabilitating arable land and pastures, sharing water resources between the Armenian and Azerbaijani villages along the international borders and, last but not least, contrasting gender discrimination, clearly exacerbated by war. Listening to local women can point international actors to the right direction an incremental approach should take. “Talking about really basic issues, such as electricity, children’s education, and not directly about the conflict”, Afag suggests, “these are the good things that build common ground. I hope that women’s problems can be one of these things”.
At the time of writing, it is unreasonable to imagine a convergence between the two populations. Demining and reconstruction processes will probably be completed before the end of the decade. Then, some Armenian and Azerbaijani people will inevitably find themselves living door to door. It is time to start empowering the population in cross-border projects. Women’s needs could be a starting point. Women could gain many benefits from being engaged in gender-sensitive projects of common interests on critical issues, e.g. shelter coordination for victims of violence, physical or psychological support programmes, development of an early-warning system aimed at countering GBV, and awareness-raising campaigns. Finallly, international actors like OSCE should pursue the establishment of a women’s council assisting the negotiations process. Never before has the adoption of a gender perspective in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution been not only a humanitarian matter, but also a prospect of change.
Gayane Mkrtchyan
Leader condemns army interference after military chiefs demand his resignation.
Monday, 8 March, 2021
Manya Israyelyan
Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan continues to fight for his political survival amid a worsening stand-off with the country’s military leadership.
Pashinyan has been in a perilous position since last year’s Karabakh war ended in a humiliating defeat for Armenia. Analysts warn that demands from senior military figures that he resign and ongoing opposition protests are unlikely to be appeased by Pashinyan’s suggestion of early elections and constitutional reform.
Tensions escalated between the government and the army after Yerevan announced that comprehensive reforms would follow the war, including the investigation of alleged army corruption going back decades.
This was further fuelled by Pashinyan’s criticism of the Russian-supplied Iskander-E missile complex systems which he said had “failed to explode, or exploded in only 10 per cent of cases” when used against Azerbaijani targets during the war.
Matters came to a head when deputy chief of staff Tiran Khachatryan was fired on February 24. The following day, military leaders issued a call for Pashinyan and his government to resign.
In response, Pashinyan condemned what he described as an attempted coup and ordered that Onik Gasparyan, chief of the general staff, be dismissed.
At a rally in the capital’s Republic Square, he told supporters, “The army is not a political institution and attempts to involve it in political processes are unacceptable.”
Although Pashinyan has announced his willingness to hold fresh elections, the two sides have yet to agree on the conditions that will dictate them.
Pashinyan has suggested that parliamentary factions sign a memorandum to not replace him if he steps down ahead of early elections, and also insisted that the opposition must agree to a referendum over a new constitution.
Yervand Bozoyan, an analyst from the Yerevan research institute PolitEconomia, said that the crisis had been inevitable due to how Armenia’s constitution related to Karabakh.
As it dictates that the head of state guarantees the territory’s security, Pashinyan could be seen as having failed to fulfil his prime ministerial obligations. The November 9 ceasefire saw Armenia losing control over a significant proportion of Karabakh, including the city of Shushi, also known as Shusha.
Bozoyan said that this constitutional paradox left the country with a stark choice between the head of state resigning or the army taking control.
“As neither the first nor the latter happened, upheavals in the country will only continue to grow,” he concluded.
Pashinyan would only be able to continue as prime minister if he re-affirmed his legitimacy through another election, he continued.
“Not only is there no trust in him amongst the overwhelming majority of society but also amongst the state system and power structures,” Bozoyan said.
However Armen Baghdasaryan, another political analyst, said that the crisis had spun so far out of control that any kind of compromise was unlikely.
“The situation is so tense that I am not sure it will help if Pashinyan announces snap elections,” he said.
Some commentators have described the army’s intervention as in itself contravening the constitution, but Baghdasaryan said the grave situation may have merited such an extreme measure. In such a critical situation the army, as one of the country’s security guarantors, simply could not stand aside.
“Perhaps from a purely legal point of view the General Staff’s statement is anti-constitutional, but there is also another viewpoint that the activity of current authorities is rather dangerous for Armenia – both for security and state existence,” he said.
Hayk Martirosyan, a member of the National Democratic Axis opposition alliance, listed several factors he said were behind the current crisis.
“The first is the treacherous war, which was doomed to end in defeat from the beginning and the way it was conducted,” he continued. “Second is Pashinyan’s attempt to cling to power whilst also stupidly attempting to scapegoat the military elite, till now his strongest support.
“Some criminal cases have been initiated against a number of servicemen on charges of treason; people who were Pashinyan’s stalwart supporters were sacked once they showed signs of disagreement.”
President Armen Sarkissian and church leaders appealed for all parties to avoid provocation and respect the constitution. Armenia’s National Security Service also called for all sides to “refrain from actions that threaten national security”.
While Bozoyan said that the solution could lie in the formation of a temporary government, Baghdasaryan said that the crisis was beyond mediation.
First, he continued, Pashinyan needed to be given security guarantees to facilitate his resignation.
“Second, he announces snap elections on the condition that he and his party will not take part in it,” Baghdasaryan continued. “And third, the presidential institution has serious levers in emergency situations and can initiate attempts at dialogue between the different sides.
“In the meantime, the probability and scales of possible clashes continue to grow.”
https://iwpr.net/global-voices/armenias-political-crisis-heats