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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he promised a call with President Trump about Turkey’s role in intensifying the confrontation in Nagorno-Karabakh and then became ill.
By Andrew Higgins
When Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, spoke on Thursday with President Trump’s national security adviser, he raised a delicate question: why is nothing being done to save Turkey, a long-time U. S. ally?-16 planes? Against ethnic Armenians in a disputed mountainous region?
Pashinyan’s call to national security adviser Robert O’Brien followed an eruption of intense fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote territory at the center of the maximum and poisonous “frozen conflicts” of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The separatist enclave, which is a legal component of Azerbaijan but controlled through Armenians for more than three decades, has noticed army increases over the years, but the existing fighting, Pashinyan said in a telephone interview, has become much more damaging due to Turkey’s direct military intervention in favor of Azerbaijan , your Ethnic Turkish ally.
On Sunday, according to press reports, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, two former Soviet republics, exchanged rocket fire, and missiles fell on Azerbaijan’s largest city, Ganja, and the Armenian-controlled capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Each aspect accused the other of civilians, while denying carrying out attacks in potential areas.
On Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross denounced “a wave of heavy explosive weapons attacks in populated areas,” which said it is “wreaking fatal havoc on civilians. “He said that lots of homes, as well as schools and hospitals, had been destroyed or damaged, forcing families to flee or retreat “underground to heated basements, protected day and night from violence. “
The crash has raised alarms about the dangers of a broader war and put the United States, with its giant and politically influential Armenian diaspora, in the awkward position of seeing Turkey, a major NATO ally, deploy F-16 aircraft in Armenia. Enemies.
“The United States,” Pashinyan said in an interview, “must know if they handed over those F-16s to bomb non-violent towns and villages. ” He said O’Brien had “listened and acknowledged” his considerations and promised to hold a verbal exchange by telephone between the Armenian leader and President Trump.
This opportunity to unite the United States on the appearance of Armenia faded hours later when Preaspectnt Trump announced that he had conducted tests to detect the coronavirus.
But Trump’s fitness issues, analysts say, have only deepened his administration’s disconnect from a confrontation that does not offer mere diplomatic victories, but has led decades of effort to a dispute that has left Armenians under the control not only of Nagorno-Karabakh. , but large areas of Azerbaijani outdoor territory of the separatist enclave.
Mr Pashinyan refused to say whether Armenia could be in a position to cede any occupied Azerbaijani territory as a component of a peace agreement imaginable, insisting that it is not yet his duty to the most sensible leadership. -Karabakh, a theoretically independent entity run by ethnic Armenians.
Turkey said Sunday that Azerbaijani forces had recaptured Jabrail, the newest of a number of villages occupied in the past through Armenia, which are now under Azerbaijan after last week’s fighting. The indictment may not be independently confirmed.
The Trump administration, distracted by other more vital disorders such as China, “simply paid no attention and disintionrated completely,” said Thomas de Waal, a British expert in the region and an e-book about Nagorno-Karabakh, “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war. “
For Armenia, Pashinyan said, the existing fighting, which began on 27 September after months of escalating tensions, posed an “existential threat” due to the role of Turkey, whose forerunner, the Ottoman Empire, killed about 1. 5 million Armenians at the end of World War I. The U. S. Congress and many countries have declared the bloodthing as a “genocide,” a label that Turkey strongly rejects.
Armenia also has selective memories of the past, and Pashinyan called the worst neighborhood of the Karabakh War of 1991-1994 – the 1992 killing of a lot of Azerbaijani civilians through Armenian fighters near the city of Khojaly – as a “pure propaganda trick”. . »
Armenia and Azerbaijan have long minimized or ignored each other beyond trauma, a trend that has virtually caused either party to accept valid grievances and thwarted external efforts to resolve its Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
“Each part focuses exclusively on its own traumas and depreciates those on the other side,” Mr. From Waal said. “This crash will last at least a generation unless it can be suffocated by a foreign security operation” like the one that ended. war in the Balkans in the 1990s. This, he added M. de Waal, “is highly unlikely in the existing external situation. “
Azerbaijan, Pashinyan said, has long harbored hopes of for recovering Nagorno-Karabakh by force, but has been “encouraged” through Turkey to launch its offensive opposed to the Armenian-controlled enclave.
“This is a continuation of Turkey’s genocidal policy opposed to Armenians,” he said. He accused Turkey not only of offering air support, but also of recruiting Syrian fighters, whom he described as “mercenaries and terrorists,” to Azerbaijani army forces on the ground.
Turkey has denied Armenia’s accusations, adding insurmountable claims that a Turkish F-16 shot down an Armenian plane last week. Instead, he attributed the escalation of violence to Armenia, with Ankara’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday that “Armenia is the biggest impediment to peace and stability in the region. “
Although obscured by a fog of propaganda everywhere, the clash has obviously degenerated beyond a local ethnic dispute in a larger struggle as an assertive Turkey exerts its muscles in a region historically ruled through Russia.
Russia has a military base in Armenia and, in retrospect of the United States, Moscow has taken the lead in diplomatic efforts, in the future, to calm the fighting while avoiding direct contact with Turkey, with which it is already waging wars for powers in Syria and Libya.
Describing nagorno-Karabakh’s confrontation between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan as a “civilizational front line”, M. Pashinyan said the confrontation “wasn’t afraid of the territory,” but he was referring to much more important issues.
“Armenians in the south of the Caucasus are the last impediment to Turks in the north, south and east,” he said.
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