AZERBAIJAN: THREAT OF RIPPLE EFFECT IN NAGORNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT
Financial Times, UK
March 12 2015
Tony Barber
The “frozen conflict” between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the territory
of Nagorno-Karabakh is heating up, erupting in regular bursts of
violence that threaten regional stability and risk triggering ripple
effects beyond the southern Caucasus.
January’s casualty toll of 12 killed and 18 wounded was the highest
confirmed number of victims in the first month of a year since
a ceasefire halted a 1992-94 war between the two former Soviet
republics. That conflict killed at least 20,000 people and turned
more than 1m into refugees.
The latest clashes are on a less frightful scale, but international
monitors say the 2014 death toll of about 60 people was the worst for
20 years. “The risks are increasing. The nature of the confrontation
on the front line is becoming more dangerous. It’s not just snipers
any more. It’s attack helicopters, artillery and more,” says one
European official.
Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev, the Armenian and Azerbaijani
presidents, met on three occasions between August and October 2014
for talks brokered by Russia, then the US, then France. But none of
these meetings advanced the prospects for a lasting peace settlement.
Instead, military expenditure, political intransigence and
state-fuelled propaganda are intensifying on both sides of a dispute
that concerns the EU, Russia, Turkey and the US, not least because
oil and gas pipelines important to Europe’s energy security lie close
to the Karabakh front line.
Mr Aliyev and his government are displaying more frustration with
the lack of diplomatic progress than for many years. At February’s
annual Munich security conference, he complained that western powers
were guilty of double standards, by imposing sanctions on Russia
for its actions in Ukraine, yet taking no meaningful steps to secure
Armenia’s compliance with UN resolutions that call for its withdrawal
from Azerbaijani land.
Azerbaijan has increased military spending over the past decade so
that it is now double the size of Armenia’s entire state budget. Among
Baku’s main arms suppliers are Israel and Russia.
In commercial, military and political terms, however, Armenia is more
closely aligned with Moscow. Russia’s 102nd Military Base is located at
Gyumri, Armenia’s second city. In January Armenia, unlike Azerbaijan,
joined Russian president Vladimir Putin’s cherished Eurasian Economic
Union, which unites Russia with several other former Soviet republics.
Having seized control of Karabakh and seven adjacent districts from
Azerbaijan in the 1992-94 war, Armenia now relies heavily on its
economic and security relationship with Russia to deter any attempt
by Baku to reclaim its lost territories by full-scale war.
What is unclear is how Russia might react if Azerbaijan launched an
attack but took care to confine its forces strictly to its side of
the internationally recognised border with Armenia.
For Baku, a related consideration is the exposed position of
Nakhchivan, an autonomous exclave that is vulnerable to Armenian
pressure because Armenian land, next to the occupied territories,
cuts it off from the rest of Azerbaijan to the east. Russia and Turkey
view themselves as guarantors of Nakhchivan’s status.
With the US and France, Russia leads the Minsk Group, which, under the
auspices of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE), has tried without success to broker a Karabakh settlement for
22 years. Moscow’s alliance with Armenia, its arms sales to Azerbaijan
and its 2008 military strike in Georgia, which resulted in that
republic’s de facto dismemberment at Russia’s hands, raise questions
about the Kremlin’s true intentions in the Minsk Group. However,
western officials say acute tensions between Russia and western
governments over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in
eastern Ukraine have not hindered co-operation on Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh (which means “mountainous black garden”), a mainly
Armenian-populated enclave of Azer-baijan in Soviet times, is today,
for most practical purposes, an appendage of Armenia. However, like
the Turkish Cypriot breakaway state in northern Cyprus, Karabakh is
isolated in the international community. Its officials are excluded
from the peace process, being represented by Armenia — a shut door
at which they chafe.
Since 2007, mediators have tried to build an agreement on the so-called
Madrid Principles, which foresee a phased Armenian withdrawal from most
of the occupied lands around Karabakh and an eventual popular vote
on the region’s status. At bottom, it may be that neither Armenian
nor Azerbaijani society is psychologically ready for the concessions
necessary to achieve a non-military solution.
“Given the breadth and depth of the propaganda on both sides, the
younger generations may not be receptive to compromise,” says an
official from an OSCE nation.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b8513050-be99-11e4-8036-00144feab7de.html#axzz3UCsIxPg8