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Efforts are being made to end 30 years of confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But will they work?
September 13: Relatives of wounded Armenian foot soldiers wait in the open at a Yerevan hospital
(c) Sipa USA / Alamy Image Banks. All Rights Reserved
“We are now creating an independent and sovereign state, and this is a precise moment. It can be risky and painful,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned in late September.
One of the “painful” decisions is Armenia’s willingness to negotiate normalization with Azerbaijan and separate this peace procedure from the talks on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Almost a month after the Azerbaijan attack, the Armenian Security Council announced on October 12 that there would be a peace agreement between the two countries, as well as the demarcation of borders, until the end of the year. But no mention was made of Nagorno-Karabakh.
At the same time, the EU sent a “civilian project” to Armenia’s eastern border for two months, Azerbaijan said it would not allow the project to enter its territory. The findings of the project will be used in the joint border demarcation projects between Armenia and Azerbaijan. .
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The demarcation commissions were first established during an Armenian-Azerbaijani joint assembly with Russian President Vladimir Putin in November 2021. Moscow boasts more data on the borders of post-Soviet states than it has.
Armenian security leader Armen Grigoryan the urgency of demarcation. “Azerbaijan can use the so-called undemarcated border as an excuse to attack Armenia,” he said.
In mid-September, Azerbaijani forces attacked the border resort of the city of Jermuk.
(c) Zuma Press / Alamy Image Bank. All rights reserved
In September, Azerbaijani forces plunge ten kilometers into Armenian territory in one of the most intense incursions since the Second Karabakh War, Azerbaijan’s brutal offensive against the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. Azerbaijan now occupies about 50 kilometers of Armenian territory since the 2020 conflict.
At least 197 Armenian infantrymen and four civilians were killed in the September attack, and another 7,600 people were internally displaced. Azerbaijan’s army showed that 80 of its infantrymen were killed in the raid.
A ceasefire was concluded on 14 September, although it was violated. Videos of war crimes against Armenian infantrymen during the three-day offensive were recently posted online.
The existing one stems from the 2020 war, which has led to a profound shift in the balance of forces in the South Caucasus.
As a result of the offensive, Azerbaijan took control of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh (which worldwide is identified as part of Azerbaijan, has a de facto government led by its indigenous Armenians). Hostilities were halted by the Russian-brokered ceasefire, which many in Armenia saw as a “capitulation” to Azerbaijan.
The tripartite announcement saw Russian peacekeepers deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh and set out a roadmap to open the two countries’ borders to exchanges.
One crossing forces Armenia to provide a transit address connecting Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani enclave on Armenia’s western border. While bilateral talks on this factor are highly secretive, Azerbaijani officials have since claimed Syunik province in southern Armenia, the most likely location of the route. via Armenian territory.
Reacting to the recent announcement of the peace agreement, political scientist Taline Papazian told openDemocracy: “Armenia had a double challenge to solve at the beginning of its post-Soviet history [the state founded in 1991]: independence and the resolution of the Karabakh problem.
“Pursuing those two goals simultaneously has been the biggest challenge to state-building. “
Armenia’s struggle for independence from the Soviet Union coincided with the demands of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh for Azerbaijan’s self-determination in the 1980s. Papazian believes that Armenian national identity and state establishments have been deeply affected by the confrontation with Azerbaijan and the cause of independence of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. Last month, protests took place in Nagorno-Karabakh against Armenian clients ceding disputed territory to Azerbaijan.
Ending this deep confrontation through peace treaties would possibly be feasible, Papazian believes. Either way, he argues, it’s better to have a set of legal documents signed with an adversary than to not progress for decades and be locked in a permanent state of war. .
He believes that whether the agreements will guarantee Armenia’s sovereignty and security will depend only on their actual details, but also on the mechanisms that ensure their implementation and, ultimately, on whether the parties are sincerely interested in peace.
Armenia now hopes that the rights of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh will be guaranteed through mechanisms, as the country’s own government has had no influence on the territory since the 2020 war.
Yerevan’s Yerablur Cemetery, where Armenians are buried/Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
Image: Eliza Mkhitaryan
Pashinyan’s Civil Contract Party had promised an “era of peace” in its 2021 election campaign. But in light of Azerbaijan’s recent offensive, the government has begun preparing the Armenian public for a new war.
On the day of the September raid, Armenia’s parliament passed a new firearms law, aiming to “cultivate gun culture for self-defense and expand fighting skills. “On September 20, the government said bomb shelters across the country needed to be renovated. .
The Armenian government made military education (25 days) compulsory for each and every male reservist, with a plan to come with women later.
But beyond military education and shelters, the weapon source factor has a hot topic of public debate. The day after Azerbaijan’s incursion, Pashinyan admitted that Armenia lacked weapons and spoke of the disorders he faced in obtaining them.
Some “allies” had not delivered the weapons that had been ordered, even though “millions of dollars” had been paid in advance, Pashinyan said in late September. Although he did not call which allies he was referring to, it is transparent that the prime minister’s complaint about Russia, Armenia’s main security guarantor. Neither Russia nor its military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, intervened in the September Azerbaijani offensive.
Soon after, it reported that India had sold rockets, missiles and ammunition worth about $245 million to Armenia. Around the same time, Nancy Pelosi, the US congresswoman, visited Armenia and said the US was in a position to “listen to the wishes of the son” in terms of Armenia’s ability to protect itself.
“We will expand our cooperation in the military-technological field,” Pashinyan said.
September 26: French President Emmanuel Macron and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at a joint press conference
(c) Abaca Press / Alamy Photo. All rights reserved
There is a feeling that the diplomatic procedure and the army between Armenia and Azerbaijan have accelerated in recent weeks. While Russia gained influence in diplomatic negotiations after the 2020 war, the EU’s own efforts evolved in parallel.
Papazian connected the West’s existing interest in the region with Russia and the war in Ukraine. “With Russia’s weakness in Ukraine, the West is looking for this opportunity to ‘return’ to the South Caucasus,” he said.
At the same time, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders accuse each other that the existing relations between Russia and the West are advantageous for them.
For Papazian, the possibility of Armenia becoming more fully integrated into the South Caucasus region, adding Azerbaijan, is a path to greater security amid the external interests of Russia and the West.
“I know it sounds fantastic right now, but the region will be more powerful as a whole. . . And that will help him satisfy the appetites of ancient empires,” he said.
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