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BRIEFING: ARMENIAN-AZERBAIJANI CONFLICT (1914 TO PRESENT)

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On Sunday, September 27, a ceasefire was violated and fighting broke out along the front lines of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. (Credit: Pikist).

Tensions that have been simmering below the surface have erupted into full-scale conflict on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

As of publication, over 95 people have been killed since fighting broke out on Sunday, September 27th, 2020, including 11 civilians.

How did these two countries in the south Caucasus reach this point? To understand the full context, we need to go back over one hundred years, when the first world war was raging.

THE FALL OF THE OTTOMAN AND RUSSIAN EMPIRES

On the eve of World War I, there were 2.1 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, but by 1922, there were 387,800 survivors of a genocide that ravaged the Armenian community.

The crumbling Ottoman caliphate was faced with revolts on all sides, from Christian subjects in the Balkans to Arab nationalists in Damascus and Aqaba.

As the first world war began in 1914, the Turks sided with Germany and pushed East with the intentions of capturing Baku, (the current day capital of Azerbaijan) but were soundly and disastrously defeated by Russian forces. During these eastern campaigns, some Armenian nationalists sided with Russia and fought against Ottomans. This led to Armenians being branded as traitors and spies and treated as enemies of the state.

On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian intellectuals and leaders were rounded up in Constantinople (now Istanbul), arrested, and executed, marking the beginning of the Armenian genocide. The Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire had been subject to massacres before in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909 but nothing on this massive scale.

In the wake of World War I, the Armenian genocide, and the collapsing Ottoman and Russian Empires, new states emerged from the chaotic Caucasus, one being the first Republic of Armenia and another being the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. However, these fledgling states were invaded by the Soviet Red Army a mere two years after they had been founded, and by 1923 both states had been fully annexed into the Soviet Union.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE USSR

Joseph Stalin, who was the Soviet commissar of nationalities in 1923, had the job of setting boundaries and regions within the USSR. He was responsible for carving out a parcel of land called the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) as an autonomous enclave within Azerbaijan near the Armenian border, despite the region’s 90 percent ethnic Armenian population. This small area, about the size of the US state of Connecticut, would be the flashpoint of a bitter conflict that would stretch out over the next century.

Though Armenia raised the issue of this ethnically Armenian region being put in the boundaries of Azerbaijan many times over the course of the sixty years of it being a member republic of the Soviet Union, it was not until the beginning of the disintegration of the USSR when the matter came to a head.

When both Azerbaijan and Armenia were ruled by Moscow, the matter of who had control of Nagorno-Karabakh was an issue of secondary importance, but in 1988, as nationalism began to rise throughout the Soviet bloc, mass demonstrations took place in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, calling for Karabakh to be detached from Azerbaijan and made a part of Armenia.

Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan, anti-Armenian sentiments fueled by the claims to Nagorno-Karabakh were rising to the surface. In the city of Sumgait, a mere 30 kilometers from the capital of Baku, ethnic Azeris formed groups that attacked and killed Armenians in the streets and in their apartments. Widespread looting and violence lasted three days, and in the end, Soviet troops imposed martial law and a curfew, going door to door to rescue survivors, collecting thousands of Armenians that had gone into hiding. With the trauma and pain of their recent genocide at the hands of the Ottomans a mere 65 years before, Armenians reacted with extreme fear, fleeing Azerbaijan and headed to the border region of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper.

It was in this tense atmosphere that the Nagorno-Karabakh region voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Azerbaijan and to join the territory of Armenia, but their ambitions were not realized. Soviet forces spent the next three years conducting violent and haphazard crackdowns in Armenia and Azerbaijan in a futile attempt to stop the violence.

POST-SOVIET INDEPENDENCE AND THE NAGORNO-KARABAKH WAR

As the Soviet Union fully and finally crumbled in 1991, Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence, and full-scale war erupted. Azerbaijan had the historical claim from the stroke of Stalin’s pen and internationally recognized sovereignty of the disputed territory on their side. Armenia, on the other hand, supported Nagorno-Karabakh’s right to self-determination and felt responsibility to protect the ethnically Armenian region.

A ceasefire was finally brokered in 1994, after 3 years of bitter fighting resulting in 20,000 deaths, 1 million people displaced (about 70 percent of them Azerbaijanis fleeing Armenian-held territory, and the rest Armenians fleeing Azerbaijani-held territory), and an unresolved status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia had won the war, despite being a country roughly a third the size of Azerbaijan, and they retained control over the Nagorno-Karabakh in addition to seven regions beyond its administrative borders. Armenia treated the region as the de facto independent Republic of Artsakh and kept it under Armenia’s protection. This, however, did not change the internationally recognized borders that put the area inside the territory of Azerbaijan, and no international entity recognized the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan did not take their loss well. The territorial loss of 20% of their country and the suffering of Azeris expelled by Armenian troops led to widespread resentment and conspiracy theories of American backing of Armenia. The loss of face in the conflict saw an oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan begin to invest even more heavily in its military, building up defenses along the ceasefire lines to the point that it is one of the most militarized borders in the world. Trenches and berms line both sides of the contact line, and soldiers are so close they can often hear the conversations and talk to their counterparts across the lines.

In the 26 years since 1994, the ceasefire has been broken nearly 300 times, without much change to the dangerous status quo. Armenia has no desire to give up de facto control and thereby enter potential negotiations from a weakened position and create potential security threats along their borders. Azerbaijan has no incentive to relinquish its claim, especially after having lost so much in the first war.

In 2016, a major confrontation broke out that has been called the “Four Day War.” Each side blamed the other for violating the ceasefire. According to Azerbaijan, Azeri forces sought to prevent continuous Armenian shelling of civilian areas in Azerbaijan and therefore were forced to start a military operation. (There was no evidence of Armenian shelling, however.) By the time the dust had settled, around 350 military personnel and civilians had died, and both sides returned to an uneasy status quo.

CURRENT CONFLICT

While 2019 saw an increase of fierce and nationalistic rhetoric reinforcing the claims of each party, it was not until the summer of 2020 where these sentiments found expression in another outbreak of hostilities. The pattern of the 2016 war was followed: unclear origin of the conflict and high-casualty fighting, only to return to a precarious status quo with no resolution. However, these clashes occurred along lines far away to the north from the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. Most of the world was focused on the Coronavirus pandemic, though, and the clashes barely made international news.

So it is with this latest round of clashes that began September 27, though the number of deaths (at least 95, including 11 civilians) in a relatively short period of time makes this latest violence the worst since 2016. True to form, the cause of the resumption of these deadly attacks remains unclear. The Azeris claim Armenian artillery suddenly opened unprovoked fire, while Armenians claim that its forces fired on a military truck attempting to cross the border.

Social media has been flooded with images from the ministries of defense of both Armenia and Azerbaijan, showing drones, tanks, and artillery being used by both sides. If these images are to be believed, it looks like Armenia has the initial advantage. They hold the higher ground, and have highly trained armed forces, while Azerbaijan has a poorly disciplined Soviet-style conscription army that has a desertion rate of 20%.

While it is likely that this current conflict, like so many before it, will end without any substantial changes to the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, there are two major concerns from the international community should hostilities escalate further.

The first major concern is Turkish intervention causing the conflict to spread. Turkey, perhaps the closest ally of Azerbaijan, has its hands in escalating several conflicts in the region including Libya and Syria. Turkish President Erdogan has pledged unconditional support of Azerbaijan and already deployed mercenaries from Syria to join the fight. This action follows his playbook from Libya, where he turned the tide in the ongoing civil war by supplying weapons and Syrian mercenaries.

Armenia, on the other hand, is part of the Moscow-led CSTO Collective Security Treaty Organization, which declares that an attack on one member is an attack on all members. So far, Russia has tried to keep a neutral and mediating position, but should Armenia press their rights on this treaty, Russia could find themselves fighting Turkey in yet another proxy war.

Meanwhile, Iran, which borders both states, the EU, the US, and the UN have all called for a cessation of hostilities, although these words ring hollow to an international community that has been unable to resolve the century-old, deep-seated conflict.

The second international concern is the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline connecting Azerbaijani natural gas to Europe and Turkey. This strategic resource pipeline supplies at least 5% of Europe’s natural gas needs and runs through areas near the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zones.

The conflict concerning the Nagorno-Karabakh region is really a conflict between two principles: territorial integrity and self-determination. The Armenians see themselves as the guarantors of Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence and its ethnically Armenian population protection, and Azerbaijanis see themselves as rightfully asserting sovereignty in territory that historically and according to international consensus is theirs. The deadlock between these two principles has led to a bloody conflict that has lasted almost thirty years, with no resolution in sight.

FAI