DANGEROUSLY EXPLOSIVE

Russia Profile
id=International&articleid=a1259170209
Nov 25 2009

Baku and Yerevan’s Confrontation Over Nagorno-Karabakh Can Potentially
Turn into a War of Global Proportions

At first glance it can be said that the four-hour long meeting of
Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan with his Azerbaijani counterpart
Ilham Aliyev, which took place in Munich on November 22, brought no
results. The meeting followed the same agenda as the previous ones
of this format: closed negotiations, heightened expectations coupled
with militaristic rhetoric on the eve of the event, followed by the
intermediary diplomats’ general statements regarding the progress
made. And most importantly – the absence of any concrete results,
such as signing legally-binding documents.

However, some circumstances surrounding the meeting in Munich
allow us to decipher nuances that are important to understanding
the peacekeeping process in the oldest ethno-political conflict in
Eurasia. Let’s start with Aliyev’s harsh announcement–he and his
allies have never taken the question of a possible military solution
to the Karabakh problem off the agenda. The exceptions are the three
months that followed the "five day war" in August of 2008, when Baku
temporarily suspended its belligerent rhetoric. But it was renewed at
the end of last year, despite the fact that Azerbaijan’s president
signed the Meiendorf Declaration, which presupposes exclusively
peaceful ways of settling all controversial issues. But Aliyev’s
announcement on the eve of the meeting in Munich was drastically
different from this leader’s other bellicose speeches. "This meeting
is supposed to decide the fate of the negotiation process. Numerous
meetings took place this year, but none of them generated any results.

If this meeting also fails to bring results, our hopes for productive
negotiations will have been exhausted. If our hopes for negotiating
a solution get depleted, we won’t have any other options. We have to
be prepared for this. Azerbaijan has the full right to liberate its
lands using military force. This right is guaranteed by international
legal norms," Aliyev said.

On the one hand, this harsh statement should not be overestimated.

Aliyev’s rational way of thinking has traditionally set him apart,
and unlike Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili he has proven
that in his case rhetoric meant for domestic consumption does not
translate directly into action. Today, when Armenia and Turkey have
come unprecedentedly close to reconciliation, Azerbaijan is interested
in maintaining its plummeting "geopolitical share capital" by the
extravagant means of building up belligerent rhetoric. Secondly, Baku
is trying to put diplomatic pressure on the intermediary diplomats
from Minsk’s OSCE group. In order to cool passions, diplomats from
the United States, France and Russia are going to be more demanding
of Yerevan, especially since each of these mediator countries is
interested in quickly untangling the Karabakh knot.

However, the implications of Aliyev’s harsh statements are not
limited to the issue of selecting the right diplomatic instruments. It
unequivocally shows that the only solution to the Karabakh conflict
acceptable to Baku would be in a "return of territory" format. The
people who live there today are of no interest to Azerbaijan. Baku is
willing to consider humanitarian problems there, but only the problems
of ethnic Azerbaijanis who became refugees during the military campaign
of 1991 to 1994 in Karabakh and seven nearby regions. Only they are
considered a legitimate population: there is no place for ethnic
Armenians in the "Azerbaijani Karabakh" project.

Now, I am not prepared to justify the excesses and ethnic cleansings
that the Armenian armed groups conducted against the Azerbaijanis in
the early 1990s (although back then, violence was not unilateral,
either). But a call to bring Karabakh back without the Armenians
(and this can be derived from Aliyev’s latest statement) will lead
to nothing but exponential growth in multilateral (not bilateral!)
violence. A military conflict taking place in the vicinity of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the Iranian border (considering the
bilateral Iranian-Azerbaijani problems), Turkey (given the fact that
the peace process between it and Armenia is not complete), with the
involvement of a CSTO member (Armenia) and two NATO partners (Baku
and Yerevan), as well as two members of the European Council, will
not be easily settled. Many parties will get dragged into it, and
its resolution will be much more complex than in the case of Georgia.

Even if we can imagine an Azerbaijani military blitzkrieg, nobody
said that guerilla warfare, acts of terrorism and effective sabotage
are impossible in Karabakh. Certainly, the recently strengthened
Azerbaijani army is nothing like those formations that tried to
forcefully quell Armenian resistance in the Karabakh in the early
1990s. But even if the Azerbaijanis succeeded in completely or
partially destroying the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic’s
military-political infrastructure, it does not mean that Yerevan
(and the leaders of the republic) would accept this fate. And even
"appeasing" Yerevan doesn’t mean that groups outside the official
government’s control won’t start acting against the Azerbaijani armed
forces. In this case, we will end up with something similar to the
Middle East with its "intifadas" that occasionally spring up. Thus,
the potential for conflict will be doubled, if not tripled.

Today, one of the main issues in Russia’s relations with the West
is finding a basis for a new European security architecture. Common
ground is being sought in settling the conflicts in the Balkans and in
the Caucasus. Meanwhile, this ground is obvious–both Russia and the
West are interested in stabilizing the situation around Karabakh, and
unlike Georgia’s case, there is consensus between Moscow, Washington
and Brussels. It is thus easier to put an end to military rhetoric,
whoever it comes from (Yerevan shouldn’t be allowed any indulgences
in this regard either), with a common effort. It is necessary to turn
negotiations from a fruitless argument about the status and the flag
on particular territory into creating real mechanisms for the non-use
of force. It makes sense to commonly impose (and this word shouldn’t
scare anyone) legally binding documents banning the use of military
force on all sides. Only having rejected war as the main way to settle
the conflict will it be possible to turn to discussing other issues.

It is time to realize that until the battle axe has been buried and
the threat of new violence remains, there can be no compromise, either
on status or on repatriating refugees. Not in the least because there
is a real risk of the status being forcefully revised and of more
refugees appearing.

Sergey Markedonov is an independent political analyst and expert on
the Caucasus.