Why are Armenia and Azerbaijan fighting and what are the implications?

Emma Nadirian 2020
The Guardian, UK
Sept 28 2020

Tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh region have caused one of Europe’s ‘frozen conflicts’ to erupt

Michael Safi

Early on Sunday, Armenia announced it was declaring martial law, mobilising its army and ordering civilians to shelter. It claimed its neighbour Azerbaijan had launched a military operation inside a disputed region called Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan said it attacked only in response to Armenian shelling.

Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised internationally as Azerbaijan’s territory but has a mostly Armenian population who have resisted Azerbaijani rule for more than a century. In 1991 the region declared independence and since then it has ruled itself – with Armenian support – as the unrecognised Republic of Artsakh.

Despite signs in the past two years of possible progress towards peace, one of Europe’s “frozen conflicts” has erupted again. Since Sunday, forces from Nagorno-Karabakh along with the Armenian military have been fighting Azerbaijani troops, armour and aircraft. At least two dozen people have been killed including civilians, and hundreds more are said to be injured. Azerbaijan has claimed to have taken territory inside Nagorno-Karabakh, a claim the Armenians dispute, and it appears to be a fluid situation on the ground.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inside the borders of Azerbaijan, has been a source of dispute since before the creation of the Soviet Union. Tensions were suppressed when both Armenia and Azerbaijan were Soviet states, but they re-emerged as the cold war ended and Communist party control of the bloc dissolved.

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A war between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces ended in a ceasefire in 1994, with Armenia in full control of Nagorno-Karabakh and other smaller enclaves of Azerbaijan’s territory.

The border between the two is considered one of the most militarised in the world, said Laurence Broers, the Caucasus programme director at Conciliation Resources, a peace-building group.

“We have a situation where we have trench warfare going on in Europe more than 100 years after the first world war,” he said. “In some areas the lines are so close they can hear and potentially talk to one another.”

Azerbaijan is majority Muslim and Armenia is majority Christian, and some elements on both sides seek to cast the conflict in religious terms, though analysts say this angle is exaggerated (Azerbaijan, for example, maintains strong defence ties with Israel).