Category: 2023

Oct 4 (Reuters) – Embattled prime minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Wednesday he would resign instantly if that would solve Armenia's problems, but that he believed it would only make things worse.

His comment to an opposition member of parliament reflected the mounting pressure on Pashinyan since neighbouring Azerbaijan seized control of its Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh last month.

Since then, more than 100,000 people – most of Karabakh's population – have fled and sought refuge in Armenia, a country of just 2.8 million.

Pashinyan, in power since 2018, said Armenia had always faced challenges.

"I’ll say it straight: If I know that, for example, by my resignation or removal all these challenges will be resolved, I'll do it the very next second because, unlike you, I do not cling and have never clung to my chair," the state news agency Armenpress quoted him as saying.

"But all my analysis shows that this will lead to exactly the opposite result. And this is also the reason why it isn't happening."

Protesters have called for Pashinyan to quit over the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh, which most Armenians see as a national tragedy that has forced them to abandon ancestral lands.

The region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but its ethnic Armenian majority had enjoyed de facto independence since breaking away in a war in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Pashinyan said earlier he would attend European Union-brokered talks in Spain on Thursday even though Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had pulled out, according to Azerbaijani state media.

The two neighbours have fought two wars over Karabakh in the past 30 years, and efforts by the EU, the United States and Russia have yet to convince them to sign a peace treaty.

The EU and UN must take positive steps and stop the region from descending into yet more violence.

On Sunday, the UN arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh – 30 years too late.

The exodus of almost the entire population, as well as the culmination of a decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse the breakaway region, is almost complete.

For months, a brutal blockade of the ethnic-Armenian enclave by Azerbaijani military forces left the region on the brink of famine. After years of using “lawfare” as a weapon, and failed peace talks, Azerbaijan launched a final surprise attack.

Following a day of heavy shelling, sweeping advances, and desperate scenes, the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities agreed to a ceasefire.

By the morning of 28 September, they announced that the Republic of Artsakh, as Armenians refer to it, will be officially dissolved on 1 January 2024.

A False Friend in Moscow

While it remains unclear what the results will be from peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Brussels, what is clear is that the Armenian people placed their trust in the wrong person.

Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine has distracted Russia from stopping the Azerbaijani blockade as obligated under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). And this wasn’t the first time: Russian forces failed to come to Armenia’s aid during the war in 2020, as well as during fierce clashes last year when Azerbaijan invaded and occupied parts of eastern Armenia.

Before this latest attack, Armenia openly questioned Russia’s status as an effective security guarantor.

In developments that angered Russia, Armenia sent aid to Ukraine and held its first military exercises with the United States. Armenia even recalled its CSTO representative and on 3 October, parliament ratified the Rome Statute – the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes in Ukraine.

Traditional Conflict Resolution Has Failed

But Armenia has been hedging its bets, knowing the West has also been a poor interlocutor.

For months U.S. and EU officials tried and failed to pressure Azerbaijan into lifting the blockade of the Lachin corridor. This failure is why Armenia also made overtures to Iran, a deeply troubling development for Western powers who must stop this latest bout of fighting from collapsing into a much more destructive proxy war.

Because even if the ceasefire holds and Nagorno-Karabakh is reintegrated into Azerbaijan without further violence, Armenia will be desperately searching for new allies to respond to public pressure and maintain control over what land it has left.

There are already fears that Azerbaijan won’t stop after it has taken full control of Nagorno-Karabakh. Rhetoric around creating a “Zangezur corridor” between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan across the southern Armenian district of Syunik has escalated since the latest offensive.

On 2 October, Armenia urged the EU to enact sanctions against Azerbaijan, warning the worst of the violence is yet to come.

Given Azerbaijan’s close military ties to Israel, and the possibility of Israel using Azerbaijani territory to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran has a vested interest in limiting Azerbaijani influence. In late September, Iran warned that any change to borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan would be a “red line.”

How far Iran is willing to go is unclear. But traditional mechanisms to solve territorial disputes are increasingly yielding to violence. For example, international arbitration – hailed as an alternative to military intervention – aggravated tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia for years by putting Nagorno-Karabakh at the center of an environmental and energy conflict.

And elsewhere this blunt tool has radicalized critical partnerships between Turkey and Iraq and in the South China Sea. These cases underscore the need for careful multi-level diplomacy in addressing Armenia’s challenges.

International Help Urgently Needed

In fact, the future of the Caucasus rests on whether Western institutions can offer a robust alternative to already tested mediation efforts.

This means that the EU must ensure this latest Azerbaijani offensive is its last. A permanent peace agreement between both sides, guaranteeing the safety, rights, and freedoms of ethnic Armenians inside an Azerbaijani- controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, must be implemented.

This must also include deploying an international body of human rights observers to ensure the war crimes of 2020 (and in recent days) are not repeated – a plea Armenia echoed in the UN Security Council.

Crucially, the UN and EU must leverage Azerbaijan’s supporters in Turkey and Israel to permanently commit to peace. If this strategy fails, then Western leaders must be prepared to impose sanctions on Azerbaijani oil and gas exports to hamper Baku from purchasing more weapons and political influence from its allies.

At the same time, security and economic support must be increased – offering Armenia an alliance which builds a more resilient and prosperous economy instead of one hooked on remittances from Russia.

This could mean supplying Armenia with modern weaponry alongside expanded military exercises that level the playing field with Azerbaijan. Greater investment in Armenia’s economy, and opening the EU labor market to Armenian workers, would also provide Armenians alternatives to their current exploitative economic relationship with Russia.

If European powers fail to negotiate a permanent peace deal in the Caucasus and cannot offer an alternative to Russia’s waning influence, then the region will be lost to more violence.

…

George Meneshian is a Greek-Armenian international relations and security expert specializing in the Middle East and the Caucasus. He currently works as a researcher at the Washington Institute for Defense and Security and heads the Middle East research group of the Institute of International Relations (IDIS) in Athens.

https://tol.org/client/article/armenia-urgently-needs-helping-hands.html

MOSCOW, Oct 4 (Reuters) – Russia exchanged views with the United States and the European Union on the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh ahead of the lightning military operation by Azerbaijan last month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Politico reported earlier that top officials from the United States and the EU met their Russian counterparts in Turkey for emergency talks about Karabakh just days before Azerbaijan launched its operation in the breakaway region.

"The U.S. and EU approached us and asked us to hold a meeting," Zakharova told reporters. She said the sides exchanged views on the situation in Karabakh.

"There was nothing secret about this meeting; it was an ordinary exchange of views. We shall see how the West will present all this now."

U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters the meeting was not a secret and "came together to address specifically urgent humanitarian issues and the provision of potential humanitarian aid in Nagorno-Karabakh."

"The U.S. remains deeply engaged on the situation and we continue to be committed to helping the parties achieve a lasting peace in the South Caucasus," he said.

Azerbaijan will not attend an EU-brokered event in Spain where its president, Ilham Aliyev, was set to hold talks with his Armenian counterpart over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Aliyev had been considering taking part in a meeting to discuss the breakaway region – which has largely emptied out after the mass exodus of ethnic Armenians – with the leaders of France, Germany, Armenia and the EU Council president, Charles Michel.

Azerbaijani state media said Aliyev had wanted Turkey to be represented at the meeting with Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, which was scheduled for Thursday, but that France and Germany had objected.

Baku felt “an anti-Azerbaijani atmosphere” had emerged among potential participants, according to reports.

The Azerbaijani news outlet APA said Baku had been angered by French officials and France’s decision, announced on Tuesday, to supply Yerevan with military equipment.

“Any format involving France is not acceptable for Azerbaijan, Baku will not participate in such a platform,” APA said, citing an unnamed Azerbaijani official.

Accounts from within Nagorno-Karabakh have revealed the dramatic aftermath of the region’s defeat by Azerbaijani forces in a lightning-fast military operation last month.

“The city is now completely deserted. The hospitals, more than one, are not functioning,” Marco Succi, who travelled to the region this week as part of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said. “The medical personnel have left. The water board authorities left. The director of the morgue … the stakeholders we were working with before, have also left. This scene is quite surreal.”

Succi said his ICRC team were scouring the regional capital, Stepanakert’s, abandoned streets with megaphones looking for the last residents who had been unable or unwilling to leave.

Succi said they found Susanna, an elderly cancer patient confined to bed, who was reportedly showing signs of malnutrition and was taken by ambulance to Armenia.

A video published on Wednesday by the Russian peacekeeping mission from Stepanakert similarly showed empty streets littered with debris left by former residents.

International media outlets have been refused entry to Stepanakert because the area is not yet secure, Azerbaijani officials have said.

Estimates of ethnic Armenians still in the Karabakh region ranged from only 50-1,000, after more than 100,000 fled in recent days, the first UN mission to the area in 30 years reported on Monday.

One of the few men left was thought to be a farmer from a village near Stepanakert. Speaking in Yerevan, his daughter Ani – who asked that her second name and father’s name be withheld for security reasons – told the Guardian he had decided to stay for now because he “could not leave his cattle behind”.

“He told me that he does not want his cattle to die, they are his life,” Ani said.

Ani last spoke to her father on Monday, when he described how fleeing neighbours had left food and other provisions that would last for three weeks. “I am not sure what he will do after that. There are no shops, no food. He is all alone there.”

Western officials have urged Baku to provide the ethnic Armenians who left Nagorno-Karabakh with security guarantees that would ensure their eventual return.

During a visit to Armenia on Tuesday, the French foreign ministry said that Paris was working on “a draft resolution aimed at guaranteeing a permanent international presence in Nagorno-Karabakh” that would enable Armenians “to return to their lands” in due course.

But several refugees said they saw no way for them to go back to their homes, mindful of a long history of bloodshed between the two sides.

“We will not return, no matter what the promises are,” said Tigran, a Nagorno-Karabakh native, in an interview from Dilijan, a town north of Yerevan where his family had been housed in a temporary shelter. “We just don’t trust Azerbaijan. We don’t want to live under their rule.”

Azerbaijani officials have emphasised that they would guarantee “the equal rights and freedoms of everyone” in Nagorno-Karabakh, “regardless of ethnic, religious or linguistic affiliation”.

But the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, pointing to the mass exodus, wrote in a report this week that “the [Azerbaijani] promises made are insufficient to build trust”.

“While it should be a goal of international diplomacy that the displaced can safely visit and, eventually, return to the enclave, that is likely to require a long-term effort,” the report said. “More immediately, residents of Nagorno-Karabakh will need help to start new lives in Armenia, where they may be for some time, if not permanently.”

It also remains unclear whether Azerbaijan is planning to repopulate the mountainous region with its own citizens.

Between 1988 and 1994, about 500,000 Azerbaijanis from Karabakh and the areas around it were expelled from their homes, according to Thomas de Waal, a Caucasus scholar and senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe thinktank.

The ethnic Azeri population made up about 25% of the total population of Nagorno-Karabakh before a Russian-brokered ceasefire signed in 1994 that left Karabakh, as well as swathes of Azeri territory around, it in Armenian hands.

Baku previously said it had resettled some districts in Nagorno-Karabakh that it had retaken from Armenia after six weeks of fighting in 2020, in a programme that the authorities called the “big return”.