‘FROZEN CONFLICT’ BETWEEN AZERBAIJAN AND ARMENIA BEGINS TO BOIL

New York Times

June 1 2011

BAKU, Azerbaijan – In a mostly empty Soviet-era building here on a
recent morning, a 29-year-old woman pressed her eye against the scope
of a sniper rifle, brown hair spilling over her shoulder, and took
aim at virtual commandos darting between virtual trees.

Gathered around her were fellow students – a decommissioned soldier,
teenage boys with whispery mustaches, a 34-year-old communications
worker in Islamic hijab. When sniper training was offered here
in April, by an organization that provides courses on military
preparation, the classes were a sensation, attracting three times as
many students as the instructors could handle.

The logic behind this can be traced to a grievance that festers below
the surface of everyday life, permeating virtually every conversation
about this country’s future.

Since the early 1990s, Azerbaijan has been trying to regain control of
Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave within its
borders, and secure the return of ethnic Azeris who were forced from
their homes by war. A cease-fire has held since 1994, and officials
remain engaged in internationally mediated negotiations with Armenia,
a process that will receive a burst of attention this month when the
two sides meet in Kazan, Russia.

But the window for a breakthrough is narrow, and people here say
their patience is gone.

“I’d rather go to war than wait another 20 years,” said Shafag
Ismailova, 34, a student in the sniper course, who fled the Zangelan
region outside Nagorno-Karabakh, one of seven adjacent territories
that are under Armenian control. Asked about war, her friend Shafag
Amrahova, a recent law school graduate, did not hesitate.

“War is bad for everyone,” she said evenly. “But sometimes the
situation demands it.”

It is tempting to forget about the “frozen conflicts.” The enclaves
of Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniester in Moldova, and Abkhazia and South
Ossetia in Georgia are among the most headache-inducing legacies of
the Soviet Union. The Soviets granted them a sort of semi-statehood,
a status that ceased to exist just as nationalism flared in the
ideological void. But the 2008 war in Georgia serves as a reminder
of how quickly and terribly they can come unfrozen.

One of the reasons Nagorno-Karabakh has not is that neither party
has an incentive to fight. Armenia controls the territories, so it
is interested in maintaining the status quo. Azerbaijan sees little
way forward: though it could easily drive out Armenian forces, Russia
could send its army to help Armenia, its ally in a regional defense
alliance, just as it did in South Ossetia.

But conditions have been shifting, slowly but surely, in a dangerous
direction. Negotiations mediated by the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe faltered last year, leaving a “basic principles
agreement” that was five years in the making unsigned by either side.

Both countries are engaged in a steep military buildup; Azerbaijan,
by far the richer of the two, has increased defense spending twentyfold
since 2003, according to the International Crisis Group.

With frustration building, threats of war have become so entwined
with negotiations that it is difficult to say where one begins and
the other ends.

“There is no guarantee that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow a
war between Azerbaijan and Armenia won’t start,” Ali M. Hasanov, a
senior presidential aide here, said in an interview. “It’s peaceful
coexistence that we need, not a war. We need peaceful development. But
nothing will replace territorial integrity and the sovereignty
of Azerbaijan. If necessary we are ready to give our lives for
territorial integrity.”

He said Baku had been bitterly disappointed by international mediation
efforts. “The United States, France and Russia do not do what they
promised,” he said. “America now thinks Afghanistan and Iraq are more
important – and North Africa, and the missile defense shield in Europe
– than such regional conflicts as Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Among the forces driving Baku are refugees who have spent nearly
two decades in limbo. The United Nations says there are 586,013 –
7 percent of Azerbaijan’s population, which is one of the highest per
capita displacement rates in the world, according to the International
Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Though conditions vary widely and some resettlement is now taking
place, a visit to a dormitory in Baku found children growing up
in squalor. Roughly 100 refugees were living along a dank, fetid
hallway, on one floor of a former office building. Three rough,
foul-smelling holes in the concrete floor served as toilets for 21
families, residents said. The hallway was open to the elements,
exposing residents to bitter cold in the winter. In the summer,
mosquitoes breed in stagnant water in the building’s basement, rising
in a cloud to the floors above them, they said.

“They cannot stand it anymore, they want war,” said Jamila, 41,
of her neighbors. “They don’t believe the promises anymore.”

Just then, a man took her aside, rebuking her for speaking to Western
journalists who could, he warned, be pro-Armenian. “Our children look
at other houses, they see that other people live well, and they are
ashamed,” she said when she returned, refusing to give her last name.

“Write that the cursed Armenians are guilty of this.”

In this charged atmosphere, Nagorno-Karabakh has become “the one
issue on which there is total social consensus,” said Tabib Huseynov,
a political analyst based in Baku. A visitor here a few years ago
would have heard “Karabakh or Death,” a rap anthem that accuses
the United States, Russia, Turkey and Iran of turning a blind eye,
exhorting the world to “either put an end to this, or stand aside.”

Cease-fire violations – every year, snipers kill roughly 30 people
on either side of the so-called line of contact – can take on huge
proportions. In March, Azerbaijan announced that an Armenian sniper
had killed a 9-year-old Azeri boy, Fariz Badalov. Though Armenia’s
president denied that his forces were responsible, Azeri television
featured the boy’s pitiful life story. One broadcast noted that the
single bullet that crossed the line of contact that day was the one
that lodged in the boy’s head.

The story inspired Valid Gardashly, a publicist for the Voluntary
Military Patriotic Sports-Technical Association, which offers military
training from a headquarters in Baku that is reminiscent of a V.F.W.

post. The organization sketched out a plan for a 45-day course
that would include sniper training, free of charge for about half
the students.

“We thought we had to do something,” he said. “We are not preparing
for war. But this was a poor boy – what did he do wrong? He was not
a soldier. He was just watching cows.”

The course touched a nerve – both in Armenia, where some expressed
outrage at the idea, and in Azerbaijan, where an overflow crowd was
winnowed down to the 32 most promising marksmen. One who made the
cut, a 15-year-old boy, offered his own reason for taking the class:
“I am getting ready to fight in Karabakh.” Ms. Ismailova, one of the
students, looked anxious as she listened to him. She, too, grew up
among Karabakh refugees. But the younger ones are much more ardent,
she said.

“These young guys, they have been waiting their whole lives,”
she said. “We had a genocide, and no one helps us. Not America,
not Russia.”