One of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes in the Caucasus Mountains has erupted anew after 20 people died last week in fighting on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The skirmishes began about 300km north of the contested enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh on July 12 and prompted tens of thousands of protesters to storm Baku’s parliament in anger and demand a return to full-on war. The fighting died down after two days before shelling resumed.
It was not immediately clear what caused the violence, which both countries accused each other of starting. Zaur Shiriyev, Caucasus analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the violence probably began as a small incident that escalated due to a loss of faith in a decades-long multinational peace process.
The sudden escalation comes as both countries are struggling to contain the coronavirus pandemic: Armenia, which has a population of just 3m, has recorded nearly 35,000 Covid-19 cases. Meanwhile, energy-rich Azerbaijan’s economy has taken a hit from falling oil prices.
“Negotiations aren’t yielding any results. That raises the tensions on international border areas, so each side has been expecting the other to attack,” Mr Shiriyev said.
War broke out in the final years of the Soviet Union after ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh fought against Azerbaijan’s control. The conflict raged until a ceasefire was brokered in 1994. Violence has since erupted regularly along the line of contact. Four years ago, fighting caused more than 100 deaths.
The territory of less than 150,000 people lies within Azerbaijan’s borders but is populated by Armenians who run their affairs with political and military support from Yerevan. The conflict has destabilised a vital region for oil supplies to Europe, via a pipeline to Turkey.
Russia, the main mediator in the conflict and a close ally of Armenia, called on both sides to show restraint and discussed the clashes at a session of President Vladimir Putin’s security council on Friday. Turkey, which backs Muslim-dominated Azerbaijan — as well as opposing sides to Russia’s proxies in the Syrian and Libyan wars — blamed Armenia for starting the fighting.
“There is no one capable of deterrence or restraint,” said Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center, a think-tank in Yerevan. “The real question is less about international mediation and much more about how far Armenia and Azerbaijan want to continue this escalation. Armenia now feels compelled to respond, and we are in a tit-for-tat situation that is spiralling out of control.”
Hope for reconciliation rose in 2018 after Armenia’s “velvet revolution” ousted longtime president Serzh Sargsyan, head of a “Karabakh clan” that had tightly controlled the country for years, and brought protest leader Nikol Pashinyan to power.
Armenia and Azerbaijan launched direct communication channels to minimise shooting incidents at the front lines and declared early last year they would “prepare the population for peace”.
Azerbaijan’s hopes that Mr Pashinyan, an ex-journalist with no ties to Nagorno-Karabakh, could fundamentally narrow the gap between the countries’ positions on the conflict may have been misplaced. Mr Pashinyan visited Nagorno-Karabakh a day after becoming prime minister and has returned several times since, including a trip for the inauguration of the enclave’s new de facto president in May.
“All of those moves suggest that there’s going to be no change in Armenian policy, which is received in Azerbaijan as the continued policy of annexation,” said Laurence Broers, Caucasus programme director for Conciliation Resources. “The longer the conflict goes on, the less likely it is that Azerbaijan is going to get minimal concessions or results, never mind the return of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.”
Mr Pashinyan’s rhetoric is less bellicose than his predecessor’s. His wife, journalist Anna Hakobyan, launched a social media campaign to stop the fighting. But public tensions remain high in Azerbaijan after this week’s clashes claimed the life of Azerbaijani Major General Polad Hashimov, the highest-ranking officer to be killed in the conflict since the wars.
About 30,000 pro-war protesters clashed with police in downtown Baku after a soldier’s funeral on Tuesday, demanding that Azerbaijan abandon negotiations entirely and move to open war with Armenia.
Two days later, Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev sacked his foreign minister, who he said had “been involved in some useless negotiations” trying to grant access for World Health Organization officials to help deal with the pandemic in Karabakh.
“What kind of negotiations over Covid can we be carrying out with an enemy country, and country at war with us? It’s absurd,” Mr Aliyev said. “It means we are going to start co-operating with Armenia?!”
The unexpected outpouring of pro-war sentiment presents an unusual challenge for Mr Aliyev, whose government is normally quick to stifle dissent and prevent public rallies. On Tuesday, however, police stood by before some protesters broke into the parliament building, chanting “End the quarantine and start the war!”
Mr Aliyev later said that most of the protesters were peaceful patriots led astray by opposition activists, who he said were “worse than Armenians”.
“A lot of public opinion is more radical than the government can be,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Aliyev’s riding a tiger — he’s providing this bellicose rhetoric, which he probably doesn’t really believe in, but it sets the public mood.”
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July 19, 2020 at 06:50PM
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Hostilities escalate between Azerbaijan and Armenia - Financial Times
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