Author: Lilit Nahapetian

President Ilham Aliyev said on Sunday he had achieved a decades-long "dream of Azerbaijani people" by taking control of Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic Armenia separatists.

"We achieved what we wanted. We fulfilled the dream the Azerbaijani people have lived with for decades," Aliyev said in a speech in Karabakh's main city. "We took back our lands," he said, adding that the country had "waited 20 years". for the moment.

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On September 19, Azerbaijan initiated a significant “anti-terrorist operation” in Nagorno-Karabakh. The conflict lasted only 24 hours, but Azerbaijan achieved its goal: The local defense forces surrendered and agreed to engage in discussions regarding potential integration.

Five days later, Baku opened the Lachin Corridor that links Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and thousands of residents of Armenian descent fled to Armenia for refuge and are unlikely to return.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Armenia’s ambassador to Israel, Arman Akopian, said Azerbaijan has been using Israeli weapons to maintain its power over Nagorno-Karabakh, including against civilians.

In an earlier interview, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Israel, Mukhtar Mammadov, told the Post that the Armenians have been smuggling weapons into the region that would eventually be used against his country. He also said that Azerbaijan is not forcing anyone to leave Karabakh but would like to integrate the residents into Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, representatives of Armenia and Azerbaijan are meeting to reach a final peace agreement. The Post spoke to Akopian over the weekend to discuss how his country views the situation.

This interview has been modified only for length and clarity.

Ambassador Arman Akopian: What is going on is classic ethnic cleaning. We see the indigenous population of the region of Armenia, people who were there for 3,000 years, leaving their homes and their spiritual and national heritage behind, leaving the graves of their loved ones behind. 

They have no choice but to leave Nagorno-Karabakh because their lives are unbearable. Just a week ago, 120,000 Armenians lived there. Today, about 100,000 have already left.

The official number of people who left is 95,000. Do you believe there were 95,000 military in that region? You can see the videos on TV: Women and children are being expelled because they see no future there. There is no guarantee for their lives. Even the Azeri people do not have guarantees because they live under an autocracy. How can the rights of the Armenians be guaranteed?

[Azerbaijan considers itself a democracy, with free elections and three branches of government operating independently: legislative, executive and judicial. However, some political analysts often characterize the country as authoritarian for its lack of genuinely democratic elections and a significant concentration of power in the hands of President Ilham Aliyev and his extended family.]

These were self-defense forces to protect local Armenians against the Azeris. There were two wars [in 1990 and 2020], and the people's safety was not guaranteed. Any community has a right to protect itself. Who else would have protected them?

Azerbaijan claims these units were part of the regular army of the Republic of Armenia. It is a lie. There are no standard army units of the Republic of Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. 

I would not, no. It does not make sense to compare conflicts. Each conflict is unique. 

Any war ends with peace, and we remain optimistic that we will reach an agreement. But under the current conditions, when Armenians are expelled from their ancestral homeland, [it is hard to foresee]. I hope this meeting [between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on October 5] will take place because there is no other alternative but to sit at the table and talk.

I don't believe Israel has Armenia on its agenda. We have seen a lot of military cooperation: Azerbaijan buying Israeli weapons worth billions of dollars, and there is cooperation on military defense and intelligence. Iran, of course, is a factor in that. I would not say Israel is 'pro,' but cooperation is very strong, and the strategic partnership is very strong. Every time there is an escalation in our region, from the second war in 2020 until September 19, we know that Azerbaijan's Silk Way Airlines is making frequent flights to Israel to import weapons. Before this last escalation, a flight went directly from Israel to the city of Ganja, situated just north of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Any country can sell and buy weapons. The issue is that these weapons end up on our borders and are fired at peaceful civilians. 

So, if you ask whether Israel is pro-Azerbaijan, I cannot answer. But the countries' strategic, military and intelligence cooperation is strong, and it is no secret. It is something both sides declare with pride. 

No. The civil society is very pro-Armenia in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh and recognition of the Armenian genocide. 

[Israel has yet to recognize the Armenian genocide officially.]

We can find parallels. Armenians and Jews have so many things in common. We are two peoples who suffered terrible genocides: the Armenians during WWI and the Jews in WWII. 

Raphael Lemkin, creator of the world' genocide,' referred to both the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in parallel in an interview with CBS. 

We are witnessing a terrible human tragedy unprecedented in the 21st Century. Armenians are being forced out of their historic homeland, leaving their heritage, churches, monasteries, and tombstones behind. I see no hope for them. As long as Azerbaijan remains an autocracy, we will continue to witness this tragedy.

I am also thankful to all the Israelis who call the embassy, write open letters, and place ads in local papers supporting the Armenians. I am grateful for all the goodwill and support. 

Athirty-five-year war reignited last week. Hundreds of people died. Tens of thousands may have been displaced. The world, focussed on the United Nations General Assembly and the war in Ukraine, barely noticed. On September 19th, Azerbaijan started shelling towns and military bases in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that had long fought for independence. In less than a day, the self-proclaimed republic was effectively disarmed and forced to capitulate. Russian forces, ostensibly there to prevent just this kind of outcome, offered little or no resistance. The most generous reading of the situation is that they were caught unawares. The least generous is that Russia had given its approval to the attack, perhaps in exchange for maintaining a military presence in the region.

The Karabakh conflict dates back to 1988. It prefigured a dozen others that would erupt in what was then the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Nagorno-Karabakh was, legally, an autonomous region within Azerbaijan, a constituent republic of the U.S.S.R. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s government loosened political restrictions, Karabakh Armenians demanded the right, which they argued was guaranteed to them by the Soviet constitution, to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, also a Soviet constituent republic. Moscow rejected the demand. Meanwhile, shoot-outs between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh sparked violence elsewhere. In February, 1988, anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait left dozens dead. Two years later, a week of anti-Armenian violence in Baku, Azerbaijan’s historically multiethnic capital, killed dozens more. Thousands of ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, where their families had lived for generations. Some left on a plane chartered by the chess champion Garry Kasparov, probably the best-known Azerbaijani Armenian, who was also leaving his motherland forever.

In 1991, the Soviet Union broke apart and each of its fifteen constituent republics became a sovereign state. For Karabakh Armenians, this meant that any legal basis for their secessionist aspirations had vanished. Nagorno-Karabakh became one of several ethnic enclaves in the post-Soviet space that was fighting for independence from the newly independent country of which they were a part—South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to break free from Georgia, the Transnistria Region fought to separate from Moldova, Chechnya wanted out of Russia. In the early nineteen-nineties, each of these conflicts became a hot war. In every case outside its own borders, Russia supported the separatist movements—and, in most cases, used the conflicts to station its own troops in the region. Two decades later, Russia used the same playbook to foment armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh lasted until 1994. Both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing: the deliberate displacement and killing of people based on their ethnicity. Moscow secretly supported Azerbaijan in the conflict. The war ended with a de-facto victory for the Armenians, who were able to establish self-rule on a large part of the territory they claimed, even though not a single country—not even Armenia—officially recognized the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. Whether it was because the Armenians won, or because the conflict ended when Russia had been destabilized by its own bloody constitutional crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh was the only conflict region in the former empire where Russia did not station its troops.

For the next three decades, the political paths of Armenia and Azerbaijan, two neighbors inextricably linked by blood and war, diverged. Azerbaijan transitioned from Soviet totalitarianism to post-Soviet dictatorship, with a ruling dynasty, censorship, and widespread political repression. One of the world’s original oil powers, Azerbaijan also grew comparatively wealthy. It nurtured diplomatic, economic, and military ties with neighboring Turkey and with Israel, which views Azerbaijan as an ally in any confrontation with Azerbaijan’s next-door neighbor Iran. Armenia, at least formally, undertook a transition to democracy. That transition hit a dead end in October, 1999, when a group of gunmen burst into the parliament and assassinated nine people, including all the leaders of one of the two ruling parties. The leader of the surviving party, Robert Kocharyan, led the country for another decade, and his clan remained in power until 2018, when a peaceful revolution seemed to start a new era. The new leader of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, is a former journalist.

In both countries, Nagorno-Karabakh remained the focus of political life. For Azerbaijan, the pain and humiliation of the 1994 defeat formed the centerpiece of the national narrative. “Azerbaijan got its independence in parallel with the war, so Nagorno-Karabakh has played a major role in shaping Azerbaijani national identity,” Shujaat Ahmadzada, an independent Azerbaijani political scientist, told me. “There was the memory, the images of internally displaced people, adding to the narrative of having suffered injustices. And conflict is important to keeping and solidifying power.”

In Armenia, what became known as the Karabakh Clan has held power for most of the post-Soviet period. Kocharyan is a former leader of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Armen Martirosyan, an Armenian publisher and longtime political activist, told me that, in 2018, he had hoped that Nikol Pashinyan would finally represent a “party of peace.” But even Pashinyan, who was born in 1975, was compelled to claim that he had got his political start in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Seven out of eight of our political parties are parties of war,” Martirosyan said.