As a follower of Armenian news for the past fifteen years now, the developments of the past week in Karabakh feel like a culmination of a long talked-about eventuality. Or perhaps like a train derailment in slow motion. Through the years of the early 2000s, we watched as Azerbaijan’s military budget grew and grew, as they bought more weapons from Russia, then from Israel, as their war drums grew louder. Article after article over the years spoke of the ominous threat of this military build-up, what disasters might come to pass when and if the “frozen conflict” ever thawed, but it was always a theoretical future situation. That time has finally come, perhaps not to the level of all-out war, but we are finally seeing a bursting of the dam which we all saw coming.
Nagorno-Karabakh
is truly a Gordian Knot, in which both sides are vindicated by the dual
internationally accepted principals of territorial integrity and
self-determination. Not surprisingly, what can be seen now on Twitter are both
sides screaming at each other from their opposing platforms, totally
invalidating the other or particularly trying to understand it. If you walk it
back to the Soviet era, with Armenians and Azerbaijanis living in Karabakh in
peace, albeit with some enforcement from on high, it is an obvious rebuke to
the notion that these two people are somehow inherently not compatible, an argument
which is sometimes made. The problem is that today we are looking at a Soviet
construction and expecting it to fit into this post-Soviet system.
Nagorno-Karabakh was an oblast, a unique whim of the Soviet system which gave a local people some
autonomy within their Soviet Socialist Republic. Yet ultimately, the Soviet
Union was all one country which dictated from the top, and borders were meaningless,
so much of these distinctions are irrelevant compared to the modern day. The
fall of the Soviet Union was unforeseen, so there was no reason to ever
consider the messy business of how these sometimes arbitrarily-drawn republics
with all their cookie-cutout oblasts would hold up as independent states. Just
look at the Armenian-Azerbaijan border itself, especially in the northeast
Tavush region which looks more like Swiss cheese in which individual exclave
islands of each country exist completely within the other. They were a result
of trying to accommodate villages mainly populated by one ethnicity which ended
up in the other SSR, but now that those populations fled as a result of the Karabakh
war and subsumed into the nation which surrounded it, there is no reason for
them to exist anymore. Yet they remain on maps as a point of deference to
territorial security until this whole situation gets “figured out”, but it is
all but certain that any settlement would not return these island’s to their
internationally-recognized owners. This isn’t the Soviet Union anymore, and we
need to adjust to that.
Which
is exactly the reason I believe Karabakh should be recognized internationally
as an independent nation (which would then join Armenia). If one takes
territorial integrity into account for a country in another part of Europe,
those borders are much more historic. They go back a few centuries and were
independent throughout that period. They were drawn to be independent, and
while there were certainly upheavals and changes through the years, they are
what they are. This is not the case with the former Soviet republics, whose
borders were not drawn to be independent and had far less practical meaning. To
continue to insist that Karabakh is and must be Azerbaijan’s, that it always “was”
Azerbaijan’s due to a whim of the Soviets in the 1920s, just doesn’t make practical
sense today. There is a great deal of precedent for such a move of independence
as well. While the West often blames Russia for its meddling in places like
Georgia’s own oblasts, it was their decision to recognize Kosovo which struck
the first and biggest blow to the principal territorial integrity. More
recently, we saw a negotiated separation of South Sudan as well, proving that
maintaining a country’s borders above all else is not vital. One must also
consider what is a country really?
Based
on their propaganda, Azerbaijan’s plan for Karabakh is planting gloating signs
all over it reminding you that you are in Azerbaijan, reverting the village
names to the Azerbaijani, and placing some of their patented Heydar Aliyev
statues. Aliyev is mainly concerned with complaining how wronged he has been by
the international community and that he is “owed” Karabakh. Yet what has he
done to earn the trust and allegiance of the people of Karabakh? The 2012
release of Ramil Safarov and the hero’s welcome he received was the most
painful reminder to date of the absolute disdain Aliyev has and encourages
within the nation he dominates. Having disagreements with Armenians is one
thing, but to celebrate the brutal murderer of his Armenian colleague at a
peaceful gathering is absolutely unfathomable. Aliyev has never once made a
positive statement about those who would be his Armenian subjects if he got his
way, nor has made any contingencies on trying to incorporate them back into
Azerbaijan. This has been about conquest, plain and simple, and one can only
assume his plan for Karabakh would result in a total ethnic cleansing.
I agree that concessions need to be
made on both sides, but at the moment I don’t know what the Armenian side can
really do rationally. I was an advocate of returning some of the “buffer zone”
around Karabakh, and still do when the time is right, but after the recent
actions it is certain that such a time is a long way off. Yes, if Armenia had
shown more political will in the 1990s, or if the H. Aliyev hadn’t backed off the Key
West talks at the last moment, perhaps a solution would have been possible, yet
everything about the transition to I. Aliyev has been aimed at building his own
credibility with his people on the Karabakh issue and that means taking a hard
line. As has been apparent in the Twitter world, Azerbaijani hyperbolic
propaganda has no connection to rationality or reality. Unfortunately, due to
Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s national identity has been built upon the conflict and thus hatred
of Armenians, which has now broken out into an all-out frenzy with
the latest violence, which Azerbaijan blames on Armenia despite obvious
evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile Armenia has been subject to the gradually
building frustration from periodic attacks and breaks in the cease fire, the
horror of the initial Safarov incident, and the further insult-to-injury of the
2012 pardon with the immoral assist by Hungary. If one was to just examine the
past decade, it is hard to blame the Armenians of today for their distrust and
anger towards Azerbaijan, sad as it is to say.
I want there to be a swift
resolution to this conflict, I want Azerbaijani refugees to be able to return
to their towns (unfortunately Armenians from Azerbaijan will never have that
luxury, nor is it even considered an option), but even the most dovish of
people must concede how exactly this can happen anytime soon is unclear. Even
before the recent attempt at conquest by Azerbaijan, giving up buffer zone land would only make Karabakh more vulnerable to assault and encourage war, unless it could be done as part of some utopian
pact which created guarantees for the Armenian side. Now, with the occasional
Azerbaijani attempt at infiltration turned into brazen fighting, what can be
expected from Armenia in the face of it? The murder of elderly Armenian
villages and beheading of captured Armenian soldiers is the latest of these
heinous acts which leaves it impossible to imagine any Armenian safe under
Azerbaijani jurisdiction. I am lost as to what a fair and sustainable solution
would be- the status quo is not tenable and yet what else is there? Nobody
wants war for Karabakh, but Aliyev most certainly doesn’t want peace. In fact,
with his reign more unstable than ever, he can’t have peace, because peace
means concessions, while he helped build a situation in which those are impossible. As
we saw with President Ter-Petrossian, Armenians were not open to compromise
even back then, let alone now. I don’t want to despair, but this problem is
more intractable than ever, and barring some major upheaval on either side,
there is no way to peace. The lines are drawn, the pieces are set, and the
barriers are higher than ever, and unfortunately the only way to break them
down is through violence.
