Ha’aretz, Israel
April 11 2015
David and Goliath in the Caucasus
The Armenian-Azerbaijan ‘soft war’ over the Nagorno-Karabakh region is
still claiming lives. A recent visit there provoked questions
concerning Azerbaijan’s close ties with Israel.
by Yair Auron
YEREVAN ` Ever since I learned that I would be traveling to the
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, my ears have hummed with the words of a
song that I’d heard in my youth and that was still etched in my
memory, though it had been many years since I heard it. The song was
`At the Edge of the Volcano,’ written by Dan Almagor and Danny Litani
in 1972; I remembered Chava Alberstein’s hauntingly evocative
rendition well. Even 40 years ago, the song left me restive and edgy.
Since rediscovering it, I have been listening to it nonstop, singing
the lyrics: `Why don’t they run away from there, and seek a safer
place, where they can finally live in peace, once and for all¦ ‘
I thought I was traveling to a dangerous, sad, perhaps forlorn and
hopeless place, a place where again people are being persecuted due to
their ethnic Armenian identity.
Now, after six extraordinary days in Nagorno-Karabakh, I think I know
the answer to the question of why they don’t run away from this small
republic in the southern Caucasus: It is an incredibly beautiful
place; legends say it is the entrance to paradise.
Still, even a beautiful place, in my opinion, it is not worth dying for.
Three-hundred-and-fifty kilometers separate Yerevan, the capital of
Armenia, from Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, at
opposite ends of a road that traverses a flat plain, and most of which
passes through stunning mountains bisected by deep canyons. Most of
the mountains are covered in snow ` snow that fell on us as we drove
and even more heavily once we’d arrived in Stepanakert.
About 51,000 people live there, all of them Armenian. It is a small
but beautiful city, astonishingly clean and well designed. Stepanakert
is the seat of an elected parliament, an elected president, a
government and a cabinet.
Nevertheless, not a single country in the world recognizes the
Nagorno- (Russian for `mountain’) Karabakh Republic. Even Armenia
cannot recognize the de-facto independent state, because then
Azerbaijan would cut off the tenuous channel of communication it
maintains with Armenia in the hope of furthering conciliation, via
mediating parties.
The republic was established on May 12, 1994, following a cease-fire
agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Its total population is
140,000 ` 98 percent of whom are ethnic Armenians. (The total
population of Armenia is approximately three million.) The cease-fire
ended a bloody war that had begun in 1988, and that ended with the
Azeris being driven out. At the time, military observers and experts
assessed that Armenian Karabakh would not survive for long. They
estimated that it would vanish within days and that the region would
be reoccupied by the army of Azerbaijan, a force that is better
equipped and more advanced than that of Armenia.
Approximately nine million persons live in Azerbaijan, which defines
itself as a secular Muslim state (although it has recently exhibited
some extremist Islamic phenomena). The border between it and
Nagorno-Karabakh is 370 kilometers long; along it, on the Karabakh
side, are hundreds and perhaps thousands of bunkers.
I have no doubt that I am being subjective, and also probably
partisan: My prolonged efforts in favor of the State of Israel’s
recognition of the Armenian genocide have forged deep bonds between me
and the Armenian people.I am currently teaching at the American
University of Armenia in Yerevan, and enjoying myself immensely. From
my first day here, I have felt at home.
I decided to go to Karabakh for a few days. I am an `official
visitor,’ if that can be said about a state that has no official
visitors. For even when senior-level visitors from other countries
arrive, they take pains to emphasize that they are on a private visit,
so as not to antagonize neighboring Azerbaijan. I was received by the
president, Bako Sahakyan and the head of parliament; I toured the
border zone and spent a few hours in an Armenian bunker, where I was
able to speak with complete freedom with the soldiers.
A sign at the entrance to the bunker read, roughly: `If we lose
Artsakh [the Armenian name for Karabakh], we will be sealing the fate
of Armenian history.’ This feeling is shared by many of the Armenians
with whom I spoke.
A `prolonged war’ ` or `soft war’ ` is now under way, one that is
liable any day to develop into a full-scale conflict. This is the
tensest and most difficult period since the cease-fire was declared,
21 years ago. Twelve Armenian soldiers were killed in January alone,
and farmers working their land along the border are also killed every
so often. Thirteen soldiers serve in the military position I visited;
the Azeri military post is a mere 200 meters away. The Armenian
outpost was clean and orderly and heated; the temperature outside was
below freezing.
The Armenian soldiers are forbidden to shoot without explicit orders.
However, the Azeris fire indiscriminately, and one mustn’t walk erect
through the tunnels of the outpost. The Azeris also employ snipers. I
was allowed to peer toward the Azeri lines for only a few seconds.
The Armenians are also forbidden to use aircraft other than
helicopters in Karabakh: Azerbaijan has vowed to shoto down anything
else. Several weeks ago, an Armenian helicopter was shot down during a
training flight, and crash-landed inside the 250-meter-wide
no-man’s-land that separates the two armies. For 10 days, the Azeris
refused to return the bodies of the three pilots. International
mediation efforts failed. It was then decided at the highest levels of
Armenian and Karabakh officialdom to enter the border zone in the
darkness and extricate the frozen corpses of the three pilots from
where they had been left in the field, and bring them home for
burial.Two Azeri soldiers were killed during the rescue operation,
which could have served as the trigger for all-out war. The Karabakh
army was placed on high alert.
A civilian airfield that was built in recent years near the capital
city of Karabakh and that is ready to commence operations has been
paralyzed, because Azerbaijan has openly declared that it will shoot
down any civilian aircraft flying in proximity to it.
Seeking peace,¨ready for war
The biblical story of David and Goliath stayed with me all through the
week. The Karabakh David is certain of the justice of his ways and of
his eventual victory. Everyone shares this feeling of certainty, from
the president to the head of the parliament and senior army officers,
down to the lowest-ranking soldiers. The prevailing sentiment is “We
want and we seek peace, but we are ready for war and we will win it.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan told me he is prepared to make
significant territorial connection between Nagorno-Karabakh and
Armenia. Armenia has only held off from officially annexing the
enclave and the additional section of Azerbaijan it has occupied
because it knows it will lead to all-out war.
The Armenians in Karabakh receive significant aid in the conflict from
Armenia, but not from anywhere else. `We have no one to rely upon
other than ourselves,’ is another refrain I hear more than once during
my visit. `We are alone, totally alone.’
The Karabakhis exude determination, and confidence in their power and
in the righteousness of their struggle. They speak proudly of the
`Karabakhi spirit’ as a significant factor in bolstering their
military prowess.
Often, during my visit, I thought of my own country, Israel, in its
early years, during the 1948 War of Independence. And in the 1950s and
the early 1960s, times when the nascent country fought for its
existence. The pre-1967 years eventually gave way to an extraordinary
military victory, which has been leading us to the brink of an abyss
ever since. Today Israel’s is no fighting for its existence, but is
rather in a struggle over control of territory. I am nagged by the
thought that we Israelis, too, are fighting a David and Goliath war,
only with the roles reversed from what they were a half-century ago.
I told this to the Karabakhis I met ` students, men of letters and
writers with whom I had fascinating and instructive conversations.
They were familiar with the story. They belong to the Armenian
Apostolic Church, and they know the Bible; some even know it well. But
the thought ` which I share with them ` that in our dispute with the
Palestinians we are like the Azeris and the Palestinians are the
Karabakhis ` this thought is disconcerting.
The Israeli weapons that are shipped to Azerbaijan, valued at billions
of dollars, and the denial over the years by the State of Israel of
the Armenian genocide have in the past few weeks been supplemented by
new developments in the complex relationship between Israel and the
Armenians.
Rafael Harpaz, Israel’s ambassador in Baku, Azerbaijan, told a press
conference there in January that Israel would not recognize as
`genocide’ the killings of Armenians perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire
100 years ago. (He did not, however, use the word `never,’ as some
Armenians charge.) No Israeli diplomatic representative has ever said
such a thing. Asked who gave him the authority to make this statement,
the envoy replied, `I am not saying anything new. Foreign Minister
Avigdor Lieberman has said the same thing.’
I have found no evidence of that claim, but there is no doubt that the
ambassador’s position meets with the approval of the Israeli foreign
minister.
This is another `gift’ from the State of Israel to the Armenian people
on the occasion of the centenary of the genocide, which has not been
recognized by most of world’s other countries either. But it’s not
only that the genocide is merely `not recognized’ ` it is denied by
Israel, a country of many Holocaust survivors. Without a doubt, the
prime minister, defense minister and president all know that the
sophisticated Israeli arms sold to Azerbaijan are intended to achieve
a single goal: that of defeating and occupying Karabakh. Of banishing
the Armenians from there.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has publicly reiterated this
objective, in nearly every speech he has made in recent months.
Nonetheless, as early as 2012, there were published reports that
Israel had agreed to a colossal arms deal, valued at $1.6 billion, by
which it would supply drones to Azerbaijan.
Moreover, last summer, immediately after Operation Protective Edge,
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon saw fit to travel there for a visit.
Afterward, Aliyev declared to his soldiers on the border: `We have
beaten the Armenians in politics, we have beaten them in terms of the
economy. Now we will be victorious over them in the battlefield. We
will destroy their villages and cities and we will restore our lands
to us. We have the most advanced weapons in the world.’
He was referring to the weapons sold by Israel, among other countries.
For their part, during the war, the Armenians seized a substantial
amount of territory from Azerbaijan, mainly in that country’s
southwest, and they have expelled nearly all of the ethnic
Azerbaijanis from both there and Karabakh. They also lost some
territory ni the north. The Karabakhis justifiably claim that the
latter are territories belonging to historic Karabakh that were
wrested from them by the Soviet Union in the 1920s, during the rule of
Lenin and Stalin. They cite the presence of ancient Armenian churches
in the area, some dating back to the 10th century and even earlier.
The Soviet Union divided up the regions inhabited by the various
ethnic groups it controlled, as part of a well-known imperialist
policy of divide and conquer. So it was that Karabakh was annexed to
Azerbaijan, against the will of the Karabakhis, who were ethnically
Armenian, and the region was severed from the Armenian Soviet
Socialist Republic. `Soviet Karabakh,’ however, was not identical in
terms of its territory to historic Karabakh.
During the years of Soviet rule, the Azerbaijanis adopted a variety of
methods to augment the proportion of their compatriots in Karabakh and
to reduce the number of Armenians, who in the early 1920s numbered
about 95 percent of the residents.
`We’re not barbarians’
At the start of the war, in the late 1980s, war crimes and crimes
against humanity were almost certainly perpetrated by both sides. I
saw several destroyed Azerbaijani villages close to the border. The
remnants of the houses and fences now stand as monuments, in a
stunningly beautiful region. The sites remind me of destroyed cities
from other wars in other places. However, in all of the villages the
mosques were left intact. `We are not barbarians,’ one soldier told
me.
The Ottoman Empire, Turkey in its wake, and then Soviet Azerbaijan
demolished hundreds of churches ` converting some of them into
mosques.
In a wide-ranging and informal conversation with President Sahakyan
over lunch, he refused to say a bad word about the Azeris. He said
repeatedly that his country seeks peace, but is certain of victory in
the event of an all-out war. But he wishes to emphasize: Our long-term
vision is to gain independence and peace, and to take our place in the
family of enlightened and democratic peoples.
The days I spent in Karabakh were formative ones for me, and I intend
to return.I identify with the struggle of the Karabakhis for freedom
and independence, and as much as possible will endeavor to take part
in that effort. I am doing so, first and foremost as a human being,
but also as a Jew and an Israeli.
If out-and-out war breaks out in Nagorno-Karabakh during the centenary
year of the Armenian genocide, the Karabakhis will once more be alone,
with only Armenia to rely on. The world was silent in 1915, was silent
during the Holocaust, was silent during the genocide in Rwanda, and
has been silent in the face of many other similar events.
The thought of Israeli weapons going to Azerbaijan makes me lose sleep
at night. This is a betrayal of the memory of the Holocaust and the
memory of its victims; it is an act of moral bankruptcy.
While I was there, I heard from Itai Mack, an Israeli lawyer who has
been working with me to expose the Israeli arms sales that were made
to the governments of Rwanda and Serbia during the months when
genocide was occurring in those countries. Up until now, Israel’s
judicial system has rejected our petitions ` based on the Freedom of
Information Law ` for the release of information, citing security
considerations. We are now awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court,
which Mack told me has not been scheduled fro Decemebr of this year.
For the past few months, we have been raising the call to end
widespread arms shipments to Azerbaijan. The entire region is
recognized by international organizations as one of tension, where
humanitarian catastrophes and war crimes are liable to occur.
Yoram Ziflinger, the acting director of the Defense Export Controls
Agency, an arm of the Ministry of Defense, wrote us this past February
24: `Every decision embodies a variety of considerations, the common
denominator of all of them being the national interest.’
In response to a Haaretz request to address the subject of defense
industry sales to Azerbaijan, a Ministry of Defense spokesman said:
`The ministry is not in the habit of relating to issues of subjects
related to security exports.’
Prof. Yair Auron is a genocide researcher who has for the past 30
years struggled on behalf of recognition of the Armenian genocide by
the State of Israel.