The Guardian, UK

Oct 10 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Any hope for a truce in the long-running conflict in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh was short-lived

 

Bethan McKernan in Stepanakert

 

Sat 10 Oct 2020 19.39 BST Last modified on Sat 10 Oct 2020 22.07 BST

 

An elderly woman leaves her apartment during a lull in shelling in Stebanakert. Photograph: Achilleas Zavallis/Achilleas Zavallis for The Guardian

 

The streets of Stepanakert were quiet as a ceasefire went into effect on Saturday afternoon, but the local population’s ears are still ringing from shelling and drone strikes that have decimated this highland town over the past 13 days.

 

The peace – and any hope of a lasting truce – was short-lived. Air-raid sirens in Artsakh, a de facto Armenian republic inside Azerbaijan’s borders, were screaming again before nightfall. Residents who have refused to flee the assault retreated back into bomb shelters and basements, bracing for another sleepless night.

 

More than 10 hours of talks between Armenian and Azerbaijani officials brokered by Moscow on Friday resulted in a ceasefire agreement designed to assist humanitarian relief efforts, as well as exchange prisoners and the bodies of the dead. Statements from officials didn’t say how long it would last; within hours, each side was accusing the other of violations.

 

Further escalation risks drawing in regional powers Turkey, Russia and Iran into a battle for influence in the sensitive south Caucasus. The new war that has erupted between the these neighbours, however, is actually an old one: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, the mountainous border region legally considered to be part of Azerbaijan, declared their independence as the republic of Artsakh.

 

Nagorno-Karabakh

 

A bitter war stained by ethnic blood-letting ensued, killing 30,000 people and leaving about one million citizens, mostly Azerbaijanis, displaced from their homes.

 

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When Russia brokered a ceasefire in 1994, Armenians remained in charge of Nagorno-Karabakh. For almost 30 years, peace talks have made little progress, and Azerbaijanis have nursed the injustice of losing their lands to what they see as an occupation.

 

Sporadic clashes along the heavily militarised 100km line of contact have ensued, but the latest outbreak of fighting is different. Yerevan has always relied on Russia’s military support, and for a long time this gave Armenia the upper hand over its neighbour.

 

Over the years, however, the three-million-strong nation’s Soviet military hardware has become outdated, while Azerbaijan’s population has swelled to 10 million and its wealth as an oil producer has allowed it to buy state-of-the-art weaponry from Israel and Turkey.

 

The Azerbaijani desire to win back Nagarno-Karabakh is not, as often portrayed, a machination of the corrupt ruling elite. Tired of the impotent diplomatic process and energised by earlier border clashes in July, Azerbaijanis of all stripes have taken to the streets of Baku to demand that their president, İlham Aliyev, reclaim their homeland.

 

Buoyed by new and strident support from its Turkic brother, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the opportune moment for Azerbaijan to reclaim Nagarno-Karabakh by force may finally have arrived.

 

While Armenia has also attacked Azerbaijani cities, killing civilians, Stepanakert – the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, home to about 550,000 people – has been hit relentlessly by rockets and kamikaze drones over the past two weeks.

 

Dozens of civilians have been killed along with hundreds of military personnel, although exact figures are almost impossible to obtain as both Baku and Yerevan seek to overstate successes and downplay losses.

 

Looking at the remains of a Soviet-era apartment block opposite his own home in the centre of Stepanakert, Gnadi Harkoyan, 61, smoked a cigarette as plastic sheeting that has replaced his broken windows flapped in the chill autumn wind.

 

“They have definitely become more professional since the days I was laying mines for them to pick up and they couldn’t defuse them properly,” he said of the Azerbaijani armed forces.

 

“But they’re just fighting from the sky. At first it was infrastructure but then they just started doing it indiscriminately, killing civilians with drones. They need to come and face us as men. Then we will win.”

 

The war effort has galvanised Armenia, an already heavily militarised society, in what many see as an existential battle. Buildings and cars across the country blast out patriotic songs; one cafe owner in Yerevan is keeping a tally chart of Azerbaijan’s losses on a chalkboard that used to advertise the day’s specials.

 

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Smoke rises after shelling in Stepanakert on 9 October. Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

 

In a theatre in Goris, the last town in Armenia before the Lachin mountain corridor that connects Artsakh to the motherland, boxes of food, clothes and toiletries donated by the rest of the country and Armenia’s vast diaspora are stacked three metres high as volunteers sort out their contents for displaced families.

 

Ruzanna Arustamyan, her daughter-in-law Gohar, and grandchildren Gor and Tigran, fled their home in the village of Martuni at daybreak last week after their neighbour’s house was hit by shelling.

 

Ruzanna’s son dropped them off at a shelter in Stepanakert before driving to the frontlines to offer his services.

 

“All he said when he left was, ‘Keep safe, see you soon’. This is what life is like for Armenians,” she said. “If we let them take even a little bit, if we don’t defend ourselves, they will come for all of us.”

 

Arustramyan’s fear is shared by many the Observer spoke to: the long shadow of the Armenian genocide, which Turkey refuses to recognise, as well as Azerbaijani pogroms in the 1980s, are a core and sombering element of Armenian national identity.

 

Help, however, does not appear to be immediately forthcoming, as the stillborn ceasefire shows.

 

Russia appears to be wary of honouring its military pact to assist Yerevan in the event of an attack on Armenian soil outside the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

 

Moscow is already facing off against Turkey in the conflicts in Syria and Libya. A third theatre in the Caucasus, created by Turkey’s increasingly assertive stance on the world stage, could find two of the countries keenest to exploit the power vacuum left by Donald Trump’s inward-looking America unable to maintain an already brittle relationship.

 

Iran, which has a sizeble Azeri population and shares borders with both Armenia and Azerbaijan, is also watching keenly from the sidelines.

 

In the meantime, convoys of ambulances stream back from the line of contact to military bases, but their lights and sirens are switched off. Those inside are no longer clinging to life: instead, the vehicles are bringing back scores of bodies retrieved from the frontline. Their arrival in the thin afternoon sunshine is greeted by stone-faced men and women with red eyes. Many of them have already been crying for hours.