By Stefanie Glinski*
New Eastern Europe
The South Caucasus has recently seen a rollercoaster of events amidst gunfire, Twitter wars and subsequent peace talks. Tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan flared up over the past weeks, as casualties rocketed on both sides in what has been the worst fighting in two decades. Both parties have now agreed to “compromise” and a peaceful solution to the conflict.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Minsk Group, co-chaired by France, Russia and the United States, expressed a “deep concern” regarding the violence, calling for a necessary and thorough observation on the front lines, urging the two sides to remove their snipers from the line of contact and implement the “Sochi agreement” for an investigation mechanism for each of the shooting incidents.
The disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian enclave attached to Soviet Azerbaijan in July 1921 that has seen both war and ongoing military confrontations since the last years of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan didn’t accept the 1991 Nagorno-Karabakh referendum voting for independence. The Bishkek ceasefire agreement was signed in 1994 by all parties, terminating the six-year long Nagorno-Karabakh War that left more than 30,000 dead. The conflict is still ongoing with no long-term solution in sight.
Classified as a stalemate, the situation has never been frozen and regular bullets are fired across the line of contact from both sides. The number of casualties has risen in the past weeks, including civilians, but families living near the Armenia-Azerbaijan border remain in their homes.
“Armenian and Karabakhi civilians living in the area become sniper targets in this conflict, which is worrisome,” says Eduardo Lorenzo Ochoa, the Director of European Friends of Armenia.
Recent developments peaked as Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev declared on Twitter last Thursday that “just as we have beaten the Armenians on the political and economic fronts, we are able to defeat them on the battlefield,” causing an uproar in many of the social media responses, with Twitter users calling the President “drunk” and exclaiming that he will “fail big”. Aliyev continued to make similar statements, threatening that Azerbaijan “will restore its territorial integrity either by peaceful or military means”. His war-mongering tweets attracted wide international media attention.
On August 10th 2014, the Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, confirming to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict.
“I was particularly pleased to hear both Presidents reaffirm their commitment to resolving the conflict through peaceful means and to continue their dialogue. We are hopeful that the situation along the line of contact stabilizes and that the sides find the political will to work with the OSCE Minsk Co-Chairs to bring about a settlement,” said the United States Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group James Warlick after the meeting.
But Nagorno-Karabakh’s conflict has never ceased and the parties remain hostile towards each other, especially in recent years. “There have been ongoing skirmishes and periodic hostilities growing during the last two years,” reports the International Crisis Group.
The OSCE is now focusing on trust-building measures, including sniper removal and investigations into sniper incidents, hoping for the Sochi statements to turn into concrete measures and eventually sparing the loss of human lives.
*Stefanie Glinski is a Brussels-based Foreign Correspondent covering the EU and the South Caucasus and frequently travels to Armenia.