BAKU (Reuters) -An Azerbaijan court on Thursday extended by four months the pre-trial detention of several former officials of the breakaway ethnic Armenian authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh charged with terrorism, illegal border crossing and other crimes, the general procurator said.

Azerbaijan in September retook Karabakh, which had been effectively independent with Armenian backing since a bitter war in the early 1990s, prompting a mass exodus of the ethnic Armenians living there. Azerbaijani forces arrested several of the territory’s most senior former officials amid the exodus.

YEREVAN, Armenia, Jan 25 2024 (IPS) – On July 29, 2023, Vagif Khachatryan, a 68-year-old Armenian retiree, woke up early in Nagorno Karabakh —a self-proclaimed republic in the Caucasus region—to travel to Armenia. He needed to undergo delicate heart surgery.

Despite the pressing medical emergency, it was not an easy decision. The only road that connected Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia and the rest of the world had been cut off for seven months by the Azerbaijani army. Even if he was travelling in an International Committee of the Red Cross car, Khachatryan knew he could face trouble.

He was arrested that day by the Azerbaijani border guard service. Four months later, a military court in Baku handed him a 15-year sentence for crimes allegedly committed during a war fought more than 30 years ago.

Vagif Khachatryan is yet another victim of a conflict that has its roots in the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Armenians remained the majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the enclave was officially on the territory of the newborn Republic of Azerbaijan.

A war was already unravelling in Karabakh. The Armenian victory also led to the forcible displacement of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis. In September 2020, the latter launched an offensive through which they took over two-thirds of the territory under Armenian control.

But there were still more than 100,000 Armenians left.

In December 2022, Baku blocked the only road connecting Artsakh with Armenia and the rest of the world, depriving its inhabitants of the most basic supplies including food and medicines. It was that lack of medical assistance that pushed Vagif Khachatryan to his fate seven months later.

With Khachatryan already in prison, the blockade on Nagorno Karabakh was lifted in September 2023 in the wake of a new Azeri attack. The road was opened so that the Armenians remaining in the enclave fled en masse to Armenia.

Senior international bodies like the European Union Parliament accused Azerbaijan of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. Today, Karabakhis are restarting from scratch in Armenia, the Khachatryans among those.

“The fact that my father has a heart disease gives me hope that he will not be tortured in Azerbaijani custody,” Vera Khachatryan told IPS by telephone from Jermuk, 170 kilometres southeast of Yerevan.

Her father’s arrest, she said, has also had an impact on her mother. “She suffers from new health and psychological problems which only add to those derived from forced displacement,” explained the displaced woman.

On September 28, Karabaj authorities issued a decree dissolving the self-proclaimed Nagorno Karabakh Republic as of January 1, 2024.

Secrecy

On December 13, 2023, a prisoner exchange took place: Azerbaijan released 32 Armenian soldiers in exchange for the last two Azerbaijani soldiers under Armenian custody. Armenia’s support for Azerbaijan to host the United Nations Climate Summit in Baku was also part of the deal.

Both sides described it as “a sign of goodwill.”

“Azerbaijan uses the prisoners´ issue as a political tool to put pressure on Armenia or to obtain something in return,” Siranush Sahakyan, representative of the Armenian prisoners’ interests at the European Court of Human Rights told IPS by phone.

“No repatriation conducted by Baku other than the prisoner swap was held under an amnesty or any other legal procedure,” stressed Sahakyan.

Armenia claims that more than 100 prisoners of war and civilians remain in Azerbaijan, including three former presidents of Nagorno-Karabakh, the speaker of parliament and members of the cabinet. Baku says the total number of Armenian prisoners in its custody is 23.

Other than the contradicting figures, their state also poses a major source of concern. In a March 2021 report, Human Rights Watch denounced that the Armenian prisoners of war suffered abuse in Azerbaijani custody and called on Baku to release “all remaining prisoners of war and civilians.”

Faced with Baku’s inaction, Yerevan appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

“Azerbaijan is obliged to submit a report on arbitrarily detained senior officials to the ECHR before the end of January 2024,” Hasmik Samvelyan, spokesperson for the Armenian Representation for International Legal Affairs, reminded IPS in a telephone conversation.

For the time being, the International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent body that has access to Armenian prisoners.

“Our representatives have visited all the captives detained in Baku and checked the conditions in which they are held,” Zara Amatuni, ICRC communications officer in Armenia, told IPS by telephone.

Several of the prisoners’ relatives confirmed to IPS that they had the opportunity to speak with them. The ICRC mediates to facilitate communication by telephone every 30 to 40 days. The organisation avoided giving more details after appealing to the importance of confidentiality.

“We present our observations only to the competent authorities,” the ICRC press officer stressed to IPS.

Repatriated prisoners have also consistently refused to talk to journalists about the conditions of their imprisonment, and that´s also the Armenian state´s policy. Many see it as a way to avoid triggering a reaction from Azerbaijan that could worsen the imprisonment conditions.

Waiting for justice

During an international forum on the future of Nagorno Karabakh held on December 6 in Baku, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev declared that the Armenian prisoners “are waiting for Azerbaijani justice to rule.”

The recent wave of repression against the media and any voice critical of the Government does not invite hope. Last December, Amnesty International denounced the arrests of at least six independent Azerbaijani journalists in just one month on “fabricated” charges.

In its latest world freedom report, the Freedom House claimed Azerbaijan is one of the 57 countries classified as “not free” out of the 159 studied. The Washington-based NGO denounced “numerous arbitrary arrests and detentions”. It also described Azerbaijan’s judiciary as “corrupt and subordinate to the executive.”

Another of those waiting for Azerbaijani justice to rule is Vicken Euljeckjian. This Lebanese who also has Armenian nationality was captured along with Maral Najarian —another Lebanese Armenian— by Azerbaijani soldiers while driving from Yerevan to Nagorno-Karabakh on November 10, 2020, a day after the Russian-brokered ceasefire was announced.

Four months after their arrest, Beirut secured Najarian´s release, but not Euljeckjian´s. The latter was sentenced to 20 years in prison in June 2021. His name, however, appeared on the list of prisoners to be swapped on December 13, 2023, but a last-minute surprise prevented it.

“After three years of separation, pain and despair, we were very excited to hear that he would finally be released. Suddenly, his name was replaced with that of another prisoner three hours before the exchange,” Vicken´s wife Linda Euljeckjian recalled to IPS by phone from Beirut.

Hoping to ease the process, Linda and her daughter travelled to Yerevan to meet with Armenian officials. But the latter could do little, so the family also approached senior Lebanese officials.

“After pressure from the local media, the Lebanese government appears to be interested in discussing the issue of my husband’s repatriation with Azerbaijani officials,” said Linda.

While she waits for the release of her husband, the issue of Armenian prisoners of war and civilians in Azerbaijan remains among those to be settled in a conflict inherited from the 20th century.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2024/01/jailed-limbo-armenian-prisoners-azerbaijan/

Three decades of conflict, ethnic cleansing, and border disputes are over for Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus. 2024 will be a breakthrough year for Armenia’s relations with both its Turkish and Azerbaijani neighbors.

But it took a long time coming.

In 1988-1992, Armenia and Azerbaijan were embroiled in the bloodiest conflict among the fifteen Soviet republics. Armenia, with Soviet and Russian military assistance, defeated Azerbaijan and occupied a fifth of its territory. Armenian nationalists declared this territory to be ‘reunited’ in perpetuity in their dream of a greater Armenia (miatsum).

Three decades of UN resolutions, mediation by the OSCE Minsk Group and involvement of the US, France and Russia failed to achieve any change in this situation and breakthrough to peace. This frozen conflict was only unfrozen in 2020 when Azerbaijan won a 44-day war and re-took most of its occupied territory. Last year, Azerbaijan completed the process of re-taking its territory when it removed Armenian control over Karabakh in a one-day war.

These two short wars returned Armenia and Azerbaijan to the common boundary that had existed within the Soviet Union from 1922-1988; that is up to the launch of the First Karabakh War. With the signing of a peace treaty this former Soviet boundary will become the international border between two independent states. Armenia and Azerbaijan would then open full diplomatic relations.

Unfortunately, the conflict in Georgia remains frozen. After Russia invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008, the Kremlin recognized the so-called ‘independence’ of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia’s invasion and blatant violation of Georgian sovereignty was undertaken by President Dmitri Medvedev whom Western governments wrongly dubbed a ‘liberal.’ Medvedev, reputedly an alcoholic, never was a liberal. As Deputy head of Russia’s Security Council he is one of the most hawkish of Russian leaders in his vitriolic demands for aggressive military action in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine and use of nuclear weapons against Western countries and NATO.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1992 at the end of the First Karabakh War. Negotiations towards what has been called the ‘normalization’ of relations between Turkey and Armenia have been taking place for the past decade. But these could only hope to have a breakthrough after a peace treaty will be signed between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The opening of the border between Turkey and Armenia would be followed by the establishment of full diplomatic relations.

As the Washington think tank Brookings Institution wrote: ‘For Turkey and Armenia, normalization and reconciliation can be seen as two sides of the same coin.’ Reconciliation primarily refers to the Armenian genocide committed in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, eight years before the founding of the modern Turkish nation-state. The coming to power of Nikol Pashinyan in the 2018 popular Armenian revolution removed the pro-Russian ‘Karabakh clan’ and made normalization and reconciliation with Turkey more likely.

2025 will be the last year of Russia’s so-called ‘peacekeeping’ presence in the Karabakh region. Since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, Russia has used its ‘peacekeeping’ forces to maintain a permanent sphere of influence over Eurasia. The Kremlin manufactured frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan and never had an interest in resolving them because Russian ‘peacekeepers’ would then be longer required.

Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of the Second Karabakh War in November 2020 which introduced Russian ‘peacekeepers’ for a five-year period. Russia’s so-called ‘peacekeepers’ were criticized by both Yerevan and Baku for their passivity and they became redundant after Azerbaijan’s liberation of Karabakh. In November of next year, Azerbaijan and Armenia will not renew the five-year mandate and Russian ‘peacekeepers’ will be forced to withdraw, the first example of a Russian pull-out in Eurasia.

A new era of peaceful relations with Armenia’s bigger neighbors, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, will bring important benefits. Peace will provide Armenia with the ability to maneuver from a pro-Russian to a more balanced, multi-vector foreign and security policy. Increased trade and energy ties with its neighbors will vastly improve Armenia’s economic prospects and encourage many of the over two million migrants in Russia to return home.

A breakthrough in peace in the South Caucasus, coupled with a potential Russian military defeat in Ukraine, would provide pro-Western Pashinyan with the ability to re-orientate Armenia away from Russia and Eurasia to Europe.  Armenia could begin the process of ‘Armexit’ of its membership from the Eurasian Economic Union and re-join the path, dropped a decade ago, of signing an Association Agreement with the EU. Further down the road, Armenia could join Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova in receiving candidate EU candidate status.

Peaceful relations between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey are good for Western strategic interests, the EU, and US, and bad for Russia and Iran who have promoted instability. Peace in the South Caucasus stands in sharp contrast to the growing conflagration in the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article belong to the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/a-breakthrough-year-for-the-south-caucasus/

Armenia’s recent attempts to diversify its security partnerships have left it with increased narratives of the country’s “Ukrainisation”.

In recent months, Armenia’s volatile security situation has motivated it to diversify its traditionally Russia-dependent security alignments and seek new cooperation with India and EU member states France, Greece, and Cyprus.

This new turn in foreign policy has made the country a target of Russian propaganda, and the official Kremlin has repeatedly accused Armenia of becoming yet another “unfriendly regime.”

Armenia, a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) since 1992, has started to question its security alliances following the 2020 44-day Armenia-Azerbaijan war.

The CSTO, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Belarus, is, theoretically, supposed to come to the aid of a member state when it is attacked per Article 4 of the Collective Security Treaty.

However, the organisation has repeatedly shown reluctance to support Armenia in its renewed conflict with Azerbaijan over the past years.

It has instead taken the role of a neutral observer, leading to open criticism of CSTO by Armenian officials.

According to Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the CSTO, contrary to its obligations, has not adequately responded to threats to Armenia’s security.

As a sign of protest, Armenian officials have systematically boycotted CSTO high-level meetings in recent months as a response to the bloc’s inaction in the face of Azerbaijani attacks while nominally continuing its membership in the organisation.

Armenia’s boycott of CSTO was followed by regular statements by Russian officials and state-controlled media, in which the country’s leadership has been portrayed as a “puppet” of the collective “West,” while the boycott of CSTO meetings was named an “an initiative” of the collective “West,” which has been trying to distance Armenia from Russia.

In November, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blamed the West for Armenia’s refusal to attend the CSTO summit.

“The West is obviously behind it [Armenia’s decision to skip the summit]. The West, whose plans in Ukraine have failed, is now gripping Armenia, trying to tear it away from Russia,” she told reporters.

In the aftermath of the September 2023 attack on Nagorno-Karabakh and the forced departure of its Armenian population from their homes, Kremlin and Russian State-affiliated media launched a renewed campaign against the Armenian government.

The campaign allegedly aimed to save the image of the Russian peacekeeper contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh by shifting the blame for its inaction on the Armenian government.

In this regard, Russian officials have repeatedly claimed that the government of Nikol Pashinyan bears full responsibility for Azerbaijan’s victory in Nagorno-Karabakh due to its rapprochement with the West.

The Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, moved to suggest on his Telegram channel that Armenia’s “fate” was predictable, as Pashinyan, who considered himself “a stranger” to Russia, first lost the war, but “strangely kept his position. Then, he decided to blame Russia for his useless defeat. Then, he refused part of the territory of its country. Then he decided to flirt with NATO…”

In media guidelines created and distributed by the Kremlin to Russian Media outlets in September 2023, while covering the Azerbaijani attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, Kremlin-affiliated media were advised to stress that the assault was precipitated by Armenia and its Western “partners.”

To justify the inaction of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Kremlin suggested media outlets, blaming Pashinyan, who, together with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, made mutual assurances of each country’s respect for the other’s sovereignty in October 2022.

“The Armenian Premier was probably pushed to make these remarks by his Western “partners,” who should now fully share the responsibility for their consequences,” read the guidelines.

The guidelines that were obtained and publicised by Russian language independent news outlets were followed mainly by both Russian media outlets and allegedly Russia-affiliated Armenian media outlets,

In parallel with attempts to blame the West for Armenia’s recent boycott of CSTO and to present Armenia’s government as a puppet of the West, in recent months, the Russian propaganda machine has accused Pashinyan of “actively following in the footsteps of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.”

These claims made headlines in Russia following the visit of Anna Hakobyan, the wife of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, to Kyiv, where she attended the “Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen” in September last year. The visit was the first open pro-Ukrainian move of the Armenian government since the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022.

On October 17, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, while speaking at the European Parliament, openly criticised Armenia’s allies for not supporting the country during the 2023 Azerbaijani campaign in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Pashinyan’s speech triggered a new wave of the “Ukrainisation” narratives in the Russian media.

“We [Russia] see how Armenia is trying to turn into Ukraine No. 3, if we consider Moldova as Ukraine No. 2, and Pashinyan is following in Vladimir Zelensky’s footsteps by quantum leaps,” Russian state agency TASS wrote, citing an unnamed high-ranking official.

The narrative of the “Ukrainization” of Armenia has also been systematically spread by allegedly Russia-affiliated Armenian language media outlets.

Some of them have in recent months regularly claimed that Pashinyan’s attempts to distance itself from Moscow is a Ukraine-style open confrontation with Russia and will turn Armenia into a shooting range and a battlefield for military activities between Russia and the West, with the inevitable “loss of Armenian statehood.”

Amidst growing Russian criticism and anti-Armenian media campaigns of Kremlin-affiliated actors, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly denied claims of an imminent change in his country’s foreign policy vector.

These reassurances of the Armenian government, however, have not stopped Russian officials and media from generating targeted attacks on the country, which many in Armenia are expecting to increase in the coming months.

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Alice Taylor]

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has become a "toy of France and the Armenian lobby," an Azerbaijani official said Thursday.

"Azerbaijan has restored its territorial integrity without anyone's help. The fact that we fulfill international law ourselves disturbs some Western circles," Adil Aliyev, deputy head of Azerbaijan's National Assembly, said in a statement.

He said that PACE has not taken steps so far against Armenia's policy of occupation and its Assembly applied double standards and acted with prejudice against Azerbaijan.

Aliyev also said the Assembly accepted biased statements against Azerbaijan due to not removing a checkpoint established on the Lachin road because Baku did not allow Armenians to "carry weapons, ammunition and explosives to Azerbaijani lands."

"But there is something they forgot. Having wrong thoughts, such as talking to Azerbaijan threateningly or forcing us to do something, will not harm anyone other than these institutions," added Aliyev.

Azerbaijan's delegation to PACE announced Wednesday it ceased engagement with and presence at the Assembly "until further notice" and expressed that it made the decision "in the face of the current unbearable atmosphere of racism, Azerbaijanophobia and Islamophobia."

Earlier, PACE refused to ratify the credentials of the Azerbaijani delegation in a vote, claiming that the country "did not fulfill major commitments" and showed a "lack of cooperation."