by Uzay Bulut
Middle East Forum Observer

On February 13, 2024, less than a month after both Turkey and Azerbaijan threatened Armenia with renewed war, Azerbaijan killed four Armenian soldiers in Armenia's Syunik province. It was not an isolated incident. With Turkish backing, Azerbaijan attacked southern Armenia in September 2022 and has since occupied several dozen square miles of Armenian territory. Between 2020 and 2023, Azerbaijan also conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign in Nagorno-Karabakh to drive out the indigenous Armenian Christian population. While both Turkey and Azerbaijan have long cited the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute to explain their hostility to and rejection of Armenia, Azerbaijan's capture of the entire territory has not brought peace. Rather, in the months since, Azerbaijan's probing attacks on Armenia's frontier have continued.

What then motivates Azerbaijan and Turkey's hostility toward and rejection of Armenia?

Their efforts are doomed to fail, however, because they ignore the two ideologies driving the conflict: Pan-Turkism and Islamism.

While National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken negotiate with their Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts to win peace between the two former Soviet republics, they focus on supposed grievances: Resolving Armenia's requests for the return of prisoners of war, addressing increasingly fanciful Azerbaijani territorial claims, or encouraging economic and trade integration. Their efforts are doomed to fail, however, because they ignore the two ideologies driving the conflict: Pan-Turkism and Islamism.

Pan-Turkism (or pan-Turanism) promotes the superiority of a supposed Turkish race and seeks to unite Turks from the Balkans across Turkey and Central Asia to portions of China and Siberia. In 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan enthusiastically received a map of "Grand Turan" from coalition partner Devlet Bahçeli, leader of Turkey's National Movement Party (MHP). The Azerbaijani leadership, meanwhile, embraces the same ideology. Heydar Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, often described the relationship between Turkey and Azerbaijan "as one nation, two states," a mantra his son and successor Ilham also embraces.

For both Erdoğan and Aliyev, Armenia's independence is the main impediment to realization of Greater Turan for a simple reason: Armenia blocks Turkic territorial continuity. This is the main reason why Azerbaijan rejects any recognition of Armenia despite the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute in Azerbaijan's favor. Increasingly, both Aliyev and Azerbaijan's media refer to Armenia as "western Azerbaijan," indicating a rejection of its very legitimacy.

Erdoğan's Islamism imbues pan-Turanism as religious mandate. During Azerbaijan's 2020 war on Armenians, Erdoğan declared, "We support Azerbaijan until victory … I tell my Azerbaijani brothers: May your ghazwa be blessed." His reference to ghazwa refers to battles in which Muslims engaged non-Muslims to expand Muslim territory. Azerbaijan's systematic destruction of Armenia's religious heritage further demonstrates this aspect, as do Islamic State-like beheadings and mutilations of Armenian prisoners by Azerbaijani soldiers. Often, Aliyev rewards such atrocities, as when he personally awarded the Azerbaijani officer who beheaded a captured Yezidi in 2016. Turkey also transported Syrian and Libyan Islamic State veterans from the Islamic State to supplement Azerbaijani forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. What the United States sees as a land and legal dispute, Ankara and Baku see as jihad.

Against this backdrop, it is imperative that neither the United States nor Europe view the death of four Armenian soldiers yesterday on Armenian soil as an accident to overlook as Washington seeks a broader peace deal.

For too long, wishful thinking hampered U.S. policy toward Turkey. Successive administrations and a generation of diplomats saw in Erdoğan what they wished he would be rather than what he was: a populist and Islamist who prioritized his Muslim Brotherhood exegesis and personal wealth above the constitution and the welfare of the Turkish people. Today, the same pattern repeats with Aliyev, who presents himself as a secularist but, behind-the-scenes, pursues an irredentist and Islamist agenda in concert with Erdoğan.

The two countries today act in concert against Armenia. Both blockade Armenia. Neither has diplomatic relations, and both deny its legitimacy and historical legacy as the first Christian country. The Turkish Army continues to train and often command its Azerbaijani counterpart.

Against this backdrop, it is imperative that neither the United States nor Europe view the death of four Armenian soldiers yesterday on Armenian soil as an accident to overlook as Washington seeks a broader peace deal. Rather, they are a sign Erdoğan and Aliyev will never sacrifice their core ideology nor honor any piece of paper in which naïve Western officials demand they affix their signatures.

Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist formerly based in Ankara.

ECW First Emergency Response grant delivered by UNICEF will support the Government of Armenia's Refugee Response Plan and improve access to early learning services for refugee and host community children.

NEW YORK, Feb. 15, 2024 /PRNewswire/ – In response to the recent mass influx of refugees into Armenia, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) announced today US$1 million in new grant funding to reach children who need support the most.

For three decades, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been accusing each other of violating the ceasefire agreement signed between the two countries in 1994 following the first Karabakh war. Following the second Karabakh war in 2020 and a military operation in September 2023, Azerbaijan regained all previously occupied territories as well as full control over Karabakh, the breakaway region that has been at the heart of the dispute between the two countries.

Since the second Karabakh War in 2020, both countries have been engaged in a peace process centered around reaching a final bilateral agreement and settling the remaining disagreements between them. But there has been little substantial progress. Although the war is over, tensions remain — this time, with accusations that the other is manipulating the peace process or feigning commitment towards it.

Meanwhile, the deadly flare-ups continue. On February 13, at least four Armenian servicemen were reportedly killed and one wounded in the first fatal incident since the September 2023 military offensive. Azerbaijan accused Armenia of provocation — on February 12, one Azerbaijani serviceman was reportedly wounded, justifying the next day's shooting as retaliation to provocation and dubbing it “operation revenge.” Armenia had an entirely different opinion on the escalation, calling it a “pretext” to attack Armenia, according to the latter’s Foreign Ministry statement.

There were high hopes in the aftermath of the Second Karabakh war that perhaps the two nations could reach peace at last. But even with countless meetings mediated by international stakeholders plus numerous statements and expressions of goodwill, it seems that the lack of trust and frosty relations between the two countries run deep and are here to stay — at least for now.

The most recent meeting between senior officials from Armenia and Azerbaijan took place in January 2024, when the sides discussed the delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The latter remains a key hurdle to a comprehensive bilateral peace deal proposed by Azerbaijan in May 2022. That deal consisted of five principles, including recognizing each other's territorial integrity, the absence of territorial claims, abstaining from threats, demarcating the border, and opening transportation links.

The matter of transportation routes is also important. Specifically the route across Armenia to Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhchivan — sandwiched between Armenia, Turkey, and Iran. Azerbaijan’s territorial demands over the region Armenia refers to as Syunik (Azerbaijan refers to the region as Zangezur) have stoked Armenian fears that Azerbaijan is plotting an invasion of southern Armenia's region Syunik, where the said route passes through.

Just three years ago, in 2021, President Aliyev said, “We are implementing the Zangazur corridor, whether Armenia likes it or not. If they do, it will be easier for us to implement; if not, we will enforce it. Just as before and during the war, I said that [Armenia] must get out of our lands, or we will expel them by force. And so it happened. The same will apply to the Zangazur corridor.”

The February 13 exchange of fire took place near the village of Nerkin Hand in Syunik.

According to Tom de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, the negotiations over Zangezur/Syunik transport route may put Armenia “under big pressure from both Baku and Moscow, using different methods, to accede to a plan for the Zangezur Corridor that suits neither Yerevan nor the Western powers.” Armenia wants sufficient international presence for security reasons and to ensure the final bilateral peace deal is implemented fairly. This is important, especially as international peace agreements often have a tendency to fall apart in the course of five years, according to de Waal.

The diplomatic language of the government of Azerbaijan adds further questions about whether it is indeed interested in establishing peace. In response to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Relations and Security Policy, Joseph Borrell’s statement on February 14 following the shooting, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry accused Armenia of deploying mercenaries with the EU’s blessing. Borrell’s statement called on both sides “to exercise the utmost restraint and de-escalate the situation.”

A pro-government platform created recently, the Western Azerbaijan Community, accused the EU mission of “creating military and intelligence cover for the Armenian side.”

The EU first deployed the EU Monitoring Capacity in Armenia (EUMCAP) in October 2022 following a joint meeting in Prague between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev facilitated by the EU Council President Charles Michel and French President Emmanuel Macron. Both the meeting and the decision to deploy the mission came a month after Azerbaijan launched an offensive inside Armenia. According to statements by both countries, more than 200 service personnel were killed as a result. On September 15, 2022, the two countries signed a ceasefire mediated by Russia.

In December 2022, Armenia requested another mission with the hope that its presence along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border would prevent further military escalations like the one in September 2022.

In February 2023, the EU deployed the EU civilian mission in Armenia (EUMA) with a two-year mandate. In December 2023, it announced it was increasing its presence on the ground from 138 to 209 staff. Both Russia and Azerbaijan criticized the deployment of the second mission. In their statements, officials of both countries questioned the purpose of the mission. Speaking at a news conference in Baku, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the purpose of the mission was dubious “in terms of its legitimacy, functions, mandate, and duration,” echoing on its earlier claims that the EU monitors “can only bring geopolitical confrontation to the region,” and accused the EU of pushing back “Russia's mediation efforts at any cost.”

Azerbaijani officials have also changed their view of Western diplomacy. Emboldened with its victory in September 2023, these days, the state narrative is focused on the two countries reaching a final agreement on their own. “The normalization process between Armenia and Azerbaijan must be dropped from the international agenda. Because everyone who has nothing else to do wants to get involved with this issue. Why don't they go and mind their own business,” President Ilham Aliyev said on February 14 while taking an oath after securing a victory in a snap presidential election held on February 7.

Since 2021, the EU has taken on a more active role in mediation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with European Council President Charles Michel spearheading meetings between Pashinian and Aliyev.

But the Western-mediated peace process stalled following the September military operation in 2023. The offensive was launched despite Azerbaijan's reassurances to Western mediators that it won't resort to such measures.

Beyond official statements, there is also the issue of hostile attitudes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians. Addressing a high-profile House of Lords session in the UK on January 10, 2024, Marina Nagai, the Caucasus program Director at the International Alert, highlighted that the looming peace deal is not just between the governments but between the people too, and that “bringing those people together will take more than a piece of paper,” given the negative feelings as a result of thirty years of enmity. The bellicose state narrative does little to help in changing hostile feelings, especially in the Azerbaijani context.

In a statement, Azerbaijan's Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsman), Sabina Aliyeva, called the February 12 flare-up part of Armenia’s “insidious policy.”

The Nagorno-Karabakh area has been under the control of its ethnic Armenian population as a self-declared state since a war fought in the early 1990s, which ended with a ceasefire and Armenian military victory in 1994. In the aftermath of the first war, a new, internationally unrecognized, de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was established. Seven adjacent regions were occupied by the Armenian forces. As a result of that war, “more than a million people had been forced from their homes: Azerbaijanis fled Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the adjacent territories, while Armenians left homes in Azerbaijan,” according to the International Crisis Group.

The tensions lingered over the following decades, culminating in the second Karabakh war in 2020 and the military operation in September 2023. The latter paved the way for Azerbaijan to regain full control over Karabakh. However, despite reassurances that Karabakh Armenian rights’ would be protected and preserved, 104,000 Karabakh Armenians fled following the September 2023 offensive, according to the most recent data. It is unlikely they would return under the current circumstances. “They might want to visit, get their property back, they might want to visit family graves or move those graves to Armenia. But I don’t think anyone is talking about the right to return anytime soon,” de Waal told Radio Azatutyun, Armenian Service for Radio Liberty, in an interview.

Whether these recent developments further derail prospects for peace depends on steps taken in the coming months; for now, once again, peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is hanging by a thread.

https://globalvoices.org/2024/02/16/armenia-and-azerbaijan-the-most-recent-flare-up-puts-peace-prospects-on-the-backburner/