Karabakh Tensions Part of New Great Game
By John Antranig Kasbarian
Moscow Times, Russia
March 14 2005
As the United States and Russia continue their uneasy struggle for
influence across the CIS, a remote corner of the southern Caucasus is
gaining prominence once again, part of a series of regional subplots
that could aid or impede any grand designs for power. The corner in
question is Nagorny Karabakh, a tiny mountainous enclave inhabited
predominantly by Armenians, which was the scene of a brutal armed
struggle in the 1990s when local separatists successfully ended
Azerbaijan’s rule. Since that time, Karabakh’s Armenians have
controlled the enclave and its borderlands, having fashioned their
own republic, which enjoys significant support from neighboring
Armenia. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan refuses to acknowledge any change,
instead seeking Karabakh’s return to its full control.
Emerging in 1988, the Karabakh struggle was once heralded as a
test case for Soviet nationalities policy under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Karabakh’s Armenians, with the support of Armenia, initially sought
to secede from Azerbaijan, citing their constitutional right to
self-determination. However, when these demands met with violent
reprisals against Armenians across Azerbaijan, peaceful rallies and
petitions were replaced by low-intensity conflict pitting Armenian
partisans against Azerbaijan’s special forces, amid the rapid demise
of Soviet power.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Karabakh struggle quickly
spiraled into all-out war. By 1994, it had left tens of thousands
dead and hundreds of thousands uprooted on both sides. The conflict
also drew in a host of regional actors — Armenia and Azerbaijan, of
course, but also neighboring Turkey and Iran, as well as Russia and
eventually the United States. This made for a complex geopolitical
equation. Indeed, depending on whom you speak to, the Karabakh
issue is framed differently. For native Karabakhtsis, it is a
pure-and-simple national liberation struggle that seeks to remove
foreign occupation. For politicians in Yerevan and Baku, Karabakh
is an apple of discord vied over by competing states. For regional
powers, it is a political playing card, through which ethnic tensions
can be stoked, suppressed or otherwise manipulated depending on the
interests at stake. The problem, of course, is that all four levels
operate simultaneously within a hierarchical nest of power relations.
Following a 1994 cease-fire, the Karabakh conflict has subsided
to a large extent. True, border skirmishes continue, and military
preparedness remains a priority for Armenians and Azeris alike. Yet
all concede that a tenuous “not-war, not-peace” environment has
slowly set in. The war on the ground has been largely replaced by
a war of words, as all sides press for advantage at the negotiating
table. Meanwhile, these sides seek to create new facts-on-the-ground
that will bolster their positions in the future. For example, the
self-declared Nagorny Karabakh Republic has consolidated its de facto
independence by establishing firm links to Armenia, on which it now
relies for substantial economic and political support. At the same
time, Azerbaijan has skillfully parlayed its trump card — massive
Caspian energy reserves — into a strong multilateral foreign policy
that has steered away from dependence on Russia and toward friendly
ties with Turkey and the United States, thus creating a favorable
mix of anxiety and dependence among those who seek favor with Baku.
Diplomacy aside, there are also concerns that oil and gas money now
entering Baku may contribute to its remilitarization, thus leading
to renewed hostilities.
In this war of maneuver, uneasy coexistence has been the norm for the
last decade or so. In Baku, Soviet strongman and former President
Haidar Aliyev made some noise occasionally, but generally remained
low-key, as he favored negotiated solutions and steered clear of any
destabilizing developments that might upset investors. In Yerevan,
the dovish President Levon Ter-Petrosyan and his successor, the
slightly more hawkish Robert Kocharyan, have been even less prone to
belligerence, given the ongoing pressures they face from neighboring
Turkey and the United States, which have scarcely concealed their
support for Azerbaijan. Perhaps most compelling has been the rivalry
between the United States and Russia, as the two have evinced markedly
different approaches to the region. The former seeks a negotiated
settlement within an East-West integrated sphere of influence that
would extend from Turkey to Central Asia, effectively cutting off
Iran from Russia. The latter has sought permanent instability in
Karabakh and elsewhere that would ensure the Caucasus’ continuance
as its primary zone of influence.
This slow-motion dance has faltered only twice: once in early 1998
when Ter-Petrosyan was ousted after becoming too conciliatory in
his talks with Aliyev and again in 2001 when Kocharyan and Aliyev
agreed to a tentative compromise that blew up when Aliyev returned
to Baku and apparently changed his mind. Today, however, things
appear to be changing: Ilham Aliyev, recent successor to Haidar, has
retained his father’s authoritarian habits at home while demonstrating
increasing belligerence abroad, both in his pronouncements and concrete
initiatives. He is emboldened by Russia’s seeming retreat, coupled with
the United State’s recent involvement in the region, as well as its
present attempts to court Baku in the campaign to isolate Iran. Thus,
with wind in his sails, Aliyev has combined periodic threats to retake
Karabakh by force with diplomatic offensives designed to paint Armenia
as the conflict’s aggressor. The most recent initiative is a proposed
UN resolution decrying Karabakh’s hold over “occupied territories”
surrounding the enclave, in which Baku demands that Armenians evacuate
these lands before negotiating anything regarding Karabakh’s status.
Armenians reply that these are buffer zones, required as a cushion
against possible future attacks — a claim supported by the occasional
war cries that still emanate from Baku. Moreover, Karabakh’s
authorities report that their “occupation” hardly resembles the West
Bank or Baghdad; rather, Karabakh’s borderlands have been settled
sporadically and unevenly, in many cases by itinerant refugees driven
from Azerbaijan during the war years. These claims, too, have been
borne out, most recently by French mediator Bernard Fassier, who was
in Karabakh as part of an OSCE monitoring team in January. Fassier
notes in part, “In many areas there is no electricity and poverty
predominates. I wouldn’t say people live. Rather, they are surviving
in half-destroyed walls topped by a tin roof.”
Not surprisingly, Armenians have rejected Baku’s territorial
preconditions for a settlement, saying that the central issues —
guarantees of Karabakh’s security and, ultimately, its political
status — must remain at the forefront of any negotiating process.
Azerbaijan replies by stressing Karabakh’s illegitimacy as a party in
negotiations, insisting it will only deal in state-to-state scenarios
involving Armenia.
So what is to be done? Having spent a good deal of the past decade
in Karabakh, I know first-hand that native Armenians are stubbornly
distrustful of Azeri authorities, and would sooner die than return
to the pre-1988 status quo. Accordingly, Azerbaijan must take the
fundamental steps of acknowledging Karabakh’s right to exist and
allowing its inclusion as a side to the negotiations. No solution —
no matter how clever — can work without local involvement.
A second issue, however, is perhaps even more thorny: It involves the
regional balance of power and, specifically, how Russia intends to
react to growing U.S. aggressiveness in and around the Caucasus. If
Russia retreats, leaving matters in the hands of U.S.-led interests,
more blood may be spilled before a solution is reached. On the other
hand, Russia must acknowledge that it cannot use the blunt instruments
and blatant manipulations of its recent past, if it is to maintain
influence. Rather, Moscow’s intentions must become more transparent,
aiming to build trust within a framework of regional cooperation
rather than by perpetuating instability among vassal states. Otherwise,
the stalemate will continue well into the next decade.
John Antranig Kasbarian holds a Ph.D. in geography from Rutgers
University and serves as Nagorny Karabakh program director for the
New York-based Tufenkian Foundation. He contributed this comment to
The Moscow Times.