By LAURENCE BROERS*
World Politics Review
This year, while Europe commemorated 100 years since the beginning of World War I, a long-forgotten conflict on the edge of the continent rumbled on. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a contest for control over Nagorno-Karabakh for more than 25 years. Beginning as an obscure conflict in a remote Soviet province during perestroika, the Nagorno-Karabakh stand-off has evolved into an enduring rivalry between two independent states, profoundly affecting both and casting a consistent shadow of insecurity across the South Caucasus.
The conflict began in 1988, when a movement formed by the local Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, then an autonomous province within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, called for unification with Armenia. Armenians see the conflict as a self-determination struggle by the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh against their unjust incorporation into Soviet Azerbaijan in the early 1920s, and against heavy-handed Azerbaijani rule ever since. Azerbaijanis portray the conflict as a campaign of territorial conquest waged by Armenia. Rejecting any Azerbaijani component to Soviet misrule, they point to Karabakh’s historical inclusion within an Azerbaijani Muslim space long before the Soviet takeover in 1921. The conflict progressed from intercommunal violence in 1988-1990 to a war between the newly independent Armenian and Azerbaijani republics after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. The conflict was transformed by the outcome of the war, in which Armenian forces took control not only of virtually the entire territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, but also of most of the seven adjacent regions, resulting in massive waves of Azerbaijani internal displacement.
Twenty years after the cease-fire and 11 years into the presidency of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s transformation from the shattered and defeated country of 1994 into a confident and influential petro-state is complete. The oil boom may have peaked already, but still-considerable revenues and growing gas production mean that Azerbaijan’s star looks set to keep rising. This is reflected in a widely publicized military spending program aimed at solidifying the perception that the military balance is shifting in Azerbaijan’s favor.
Armenia, enjoying none of the fruits of Caspian oil and gas development, must use other means to maintain its rivalry with Azerbaijan. In September 2013, President Serzh Sarkisian surprised everyone by abandoning a two-year negotiation for a European Union association agreement and pledging to join Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Customs Union. This volte face precipitated a new phase of concern over the impact of Russia’s massive gravitational pull on Armenia’s foreign policy and domestic political landscape. The payoffs, however, are a Russian military base, discounts on Russian arms purchases and a military alliance casting a Russian shadow of containment over Azerbaijan.
The principal outcomes of the 1991-1994 Armenian-Azerbaijani war remain in place: Armenian forces, in violation of four U.N. Security Council resolutions, retain control of 14 percent of de jure Azerbaijani territory, including seven wholly or partially occupied regions outside of the originally disputed area. Some 600,000 Azerbaijanis, the vast majority of them from these occupied regions, remain internally displaced. A de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), unrecognized by any state and economically dependent on Armenia, has existed in the disputed territory since 1991. Stasis is usually interpreted as evidence of a “frozen conflict.” This metaphor is, however, misleading: Accretion is the predominant dynamic, as over the past quarter-century an ever-larger number of policy spheres and international actors have become implicated in the conflict or the effort to resolve it. Debates concerning self-determination and territorial integrity, let alone history and identity, have long been superseded by the complex interactions among a crowded and unwieldy superstructure of mediators, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaderships prioritizing power over peace and disempowered societies bearing most of the cost.
Following a particularly dismal stretch of the peace process over the past two years, tensions have come to a head this year in a summer of violence along the front line. Yet while front-line casualties have dominated the headlines, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has also become a formidable weapon for both governments to securitize politics, exclude opposition and explain away the absence of reform.
A Summer of Tension and Violence
Expectations of an upturn in relations following the confirmation of incumbents in presidential elections in both Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2013 were thoroughly dashed this year by ever-more-frequent cease-fire violations and a scale of casualties not seen for some time.
With no interceding peacekeeping force, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces confront each other along a heavily militarized 160-mile Line of Contact. The Line of Contact cuts deep into de jure Azerbaijani territory and demarcates the limits of what Azerbaijan and the international community describe as “occupation,” and what Armenians increasingly call “liberated territory” that functions as a buffer zone around Nagorno-Karabakh. If the self-regulating nature of the cease-fire line was previously taken to be a positive feature instilling caution, the events of this summer have challenged that assumption. Misinformation regarding incidents and casualties along the Line of Contact is rife, but the reported combined death count of 20-30 soldiers after several weeks of skirmishes, cross-line raiding parties and counterattacks in July and August significantly exceeds that for any similar period in recent memory. These and earlier episodes in January and June point to a much more severe casualty toll for 2014 as compared to the annual average of 30-40 for recent years.
No independent armed groups operate in the Line of Control area, only national armies with narrow hierarchies of command. Skirmishes do not happen autonomously, and their military strategic value is minimal. Azerbaijan appears to be testing Armenian capabilities, while a strategy behind Armenian violations is less obvious since the status quo suits Armenian interests. This summer’s spike in violence has been connected to an emboldening of the Azerbaijani side, frustration with the diplomatic impasse and possibly the desire of Azerbaijan’s new minister of defense, Zakir Hasanov, to make his mark. Armenian attacks may be attempts to demonstrate response capability after multiple probes from the other side.
Escalation is also reported along the de jure international boundary between Armenia and Azerbaijan, to the north of Nagorno-Karabakh, where numerous villages lie within easy range of the border on both sides. In this area, Armenian and Azerbaijani NGOs working with the U.K.-based NGO Saferworld and 14 local communities are reporting and documenting cease-fire violations affecting civilians and their property. They paint a grim picture of civilians on both sides frequently being targeted by sniper and strafing fire, unable to tend to their fields and property by day and building defensive walls to survive. Avaz Hasanov, who manages this initiative on the Azerbaijani side, told this author that such incidents “have become much more prominent over the last two years. Before that we had military posts firing at each other, now villages have become targets too.”
Amid heightening tensions along the Line of Control, it is rarely noted that noncombat-related deaths in the Armenian and Azerbaijani militaries have in recent years exceeded deaths as a result of enemy action. Research conducted by Doktrina, an Azerbaijani NGO that monitors that country’s military, has documented a total of 728 deaths in the Azerbaijani military between 2003 and 2013, only 186 of them combat-related. Doktrina reported 13 combat-related deaths for the first seven months of 2014, as compared to 37 noncombat-related deaths; of 98 reported cases of injury, only 27 could be attributed directly or indirectly to enemy action. Noncombat-related deaths have also been consistently reported on the Armenian side in recent years; Human Rights Watch documented at least 17, 44 and 29 such deaths in the Armenian army for 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. These statistics suggest that behind the images of military parades and soaring arms budgets that observers of this conflict are encouraged to focus on, there is a different reality of indiscipline, poor training and questionable morale. The onset of full-scale war would surely reveal stark deficits between expectations of military prowess cultivated over recent years and the reality of destructive yet undisciplined fighting.
Domestic and international actors have repeatedly called on both sides to withdraw snipers and increase international monitoring capacity of violations. Yet Azerbaijan, wary of embedding a cease-fire line beyond which lies substantial parts of its legally recognized territory and, more broadly, of the ease with which a status quo can be naturalized as “frozen,” has rejected these calls. At present the Line of Control is monitored under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) by a six-person team, required to warn of its visits in advance; visits have been interrupted and canceled in the past because of shooting. The inability of this small group to effectively monitor and deter cease-fire violations is increasingly apparent, yet officials close to the process report that both sides have repeatedly vetoed attempts to alter and increase the mandate of the OSCE monitoring mission.
Peace Talks at a Standstill
The Nagorno-Karabakh peace process has wound a long and tortuous route since its inception in 1992. The OSCE’s Minsk Group, representing France, Russia and the U.S., has over the intervening years presented several peace proposals. Although at times characterized by daring thinking at the level of presidents and foreign ministers, since the late 1990s this has never translated into elite-society dialogue or official advocacy in favor of peace. Furthermore, although they retain considerable spoiler power on the ground, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians are not formally represented at the negotiating table and hence feel little responsibility for decisions taken there.
The longevity of the current proposal, the “Madrid Principles” originally presented at a 2007 OSCE summit in the Spanish capital, is already an indication of the fundamental dilemma at play. The persistence of the Madrid Principles indicates agreement on many of the basic parameters for a peace deal: withdrawal of Armenian forces to an agreed-upon line, a right of return for all displaced communities, secure access between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and a possible peacekeeping operation. Yet neither the Madrid Principles nor any of the preceding proposals have been able to determine the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.
Sensibly, the Madrid Principles propose an interim status for the territory, guaranteeing its security and participation in negotiations during an intervening period before a popular vote on final status. The Madrid Principles, however, have been poorly publicized, and leaders have made no effort to advocate for them, least of all in Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Moreover, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians reject interim status as trading security and de facto independence from Azerbaijan for no clear benefit; Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has offered only a vague and unspecified “autonomy” as an alternative. As former Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has highlighted, inconsistent and selective international responses to self-determination movements around the world have undermined core assumptions about the resolution of such conflicts, allowing belligerents to dig in behind diametrically opposed positions.
Over the past three years, the peace process has effectively ground to a halt after a much-anticipated but ultimately unsuccessful meeting of the presidents convened by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Kazan, Russia, in June 2011. Since then, numerous factors have roiled Armenian-Azerbaijani relations. In 2012 the Ramil Safarov case, in which an Azerbaijani army officer convicted of murdering an Armenian counterpart at a Budapest NATO training course in 2004 was extradited from Hungary to serve out his sentence in Azerbaijan, only to be then released and lionized, caused a furor in Armenia. In 2013 Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli was publicly disgraced in Azerbaijan and his books burned after his novel “Stone Dreams” was accused of portraying victims of anti-Armenian pogroms in 1988-1990 too sympathetically.
Russia’s interventions this year in Crimea and eastern Ukraine have further raised the stakes across all of Eurasia’s unresolved conflicts. Telescoping the events of the late 1980s and 2014 into a single narrative of Russian-driven violence and encroachment, Azerbaijanis now refer to Nagorno-Karabakh as their “own Donetsk and Luhansk.” Furthermore, the annexation of Crimea has demonstrated how easily some of the mechanisms foreseen for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal, such as a referendum, can be staged and manipulated.
Russia has in the past seen its mediation role on Nagorno-Karabakh as an opportunity to improve its wider relationship with the West. Putin’s convening of a trilateral meeting with Aliyev and Sargsyan in Sochi in August seemed to reprise Medvedev’s 2008 intervention in the wake of the war between Georgia and Russia. Yet expectations of presidential breakthroughs ignore fundamental contradictions between the needs of a functional peace process and the realities of Azerbaijani and Armenian societies.
Azerbaijani Civil Society’s Long, Cold Summer
Against the backdrop of bad news from the front, a wide range of independent voices in Azerbaijan have been silenced this summer.
The season began with the April 19 arrest of Ankara-based Azerbaijani journalist Rauf Mirkadirov on charges of espionage and supplying confidential information to Armenian intelligence and, in connection with his case, the arrests of renowned human rights activists and conflict specialists Leyla and Arif Yunus. Although released two days later, the Yunuses were deprived of their passports and subjected to a smear campaign. In May, eight activists from the youth group N!DA and elections monitor Anar Mammedli received prison sentences. On July 14, civic activist Hasan Huseynli was sentenced to a six-year term on charges of “hooliganism.” After writing a series of open letters to Aliyev over the summer, Leyla Yunus was again arrested on July 30, followed by her husband Arif on Aug. 5, on specious charges of espionage and financial wrongdoing. Two more activists, Rasul Jafarov and Intigam Aliyev, were arrested on charges of tax evasion and financial abuses on Aug. 5 and Aug. 8 respectively. Searches were carried out in the offices of other well-known rights watchdogs, such as the Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety, and a number of other independent organizations and think tanks were investigated for alleged financial wrongdoing.
These concerted moves against independent civil society were preceded by a presidential amendment to legislation in February that imposed a Byzantine paper trail on any NGO receiving foreign funding, requiring an extremely cumbersome paper trail between grant-receiving NGOs, donors, notaries, translators, banks and the Ministry of Justice, applying to both current and new grants. Independent NGOs’ bank accounts, many of them holding substantial funds intended for ongoing activities, were meanwhile frozen, leading to staff layoffs and skeleton operations through the summer.
The response on the part of Western observers and partners to the increasingly arid climate for political pluralism in Azerbaijan has been lackluster. Although some gestures, such as U.K. Minister for Europe David Lidington’s condemnation of the sentence handed down to Hasan Huseynli, have been well-received, local activists regret the decline in support emanating from diplomatic missions in Baku. “We aren’t asking anyone to fight our corner for us, and we understand the pressures diplomats are under here,” Avaz Hasanov told this author in August. “But we have been under a blockade for four months, and not once has a Western ambassador convened a meeting to hear our concerns as a collective. What is the point of European integration, if actually Azerbaijan is allowed to behave like Belarus, rather than a member of the European community albeit with some authoritarian tendencies? Independent NGOs now live under a regime of dread: who’s next?”
The securitizing of Armenian-Azerbaijani dialogue appears to have crossed a new threshold. Practitioners have in the past faced intimidation and self-censorship. But the use of espionage and treason charges against figures as well known as Leyla and Arif Yunus appears to mark a twofold change: first, the criminalization of dialogue, and second, the use of dialogue as a means to silence critics on other issues. The extent to which association or partnership with any Armenian organization is now a freedom-threatening liability is a serious consideration for any Azerbaijani NGO. If they continue, these trends point to a collapse of Track-2 dialogue between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and the institution of a monopoly on the process by elites. As a result, the diverse grass-roots perspectives from activists, NGOs, academics, veterans, displaced and border communities, students and others—sometimes contradictory, sometimes controversial yet reflecting real grievances and ideals—are being drowned out by a single narrative told by the state. This is a sacrifice of long-term legitimacy for short-term control, and runs the risk that Azerbaijan’s Karabakh narrative fuses with the interests of a specific elite.
Armenian Mission Creep
Armenian civil society does not face the same penalties for engagement across the conflict, mainly because participation in Track-2 dialogue is often seen as a way to promote and advance the existence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as a de facto state. Yet Armenian civil society is caught in a different trap created by the creeping consolidation of Armenian territorial gains in the conflict.
Originally covering the same territory as the Armenian autonomous region in Soviet Azerbaijan, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has over the past decade absorbed the seven adjacent Azerbaijani regions occupied by Armenian forces in 1992-1994. Redefined in the early 2000s and bearing new Armenian toponyms, the republic’s internal boundaries make no distinction between territory disputed from the outset and wartime conquests. Infrastructure further integrating the region with Armenia has been added, including a second road running through the occupied Kelbajar region from Vardenis in Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. A historical Armenian presence in these territories, in the form of archaeological digs, churches and monasteries, is also increasingly alleged and popularized. In what for centuries has been a zone of mixed ethnic settlement, an Armenian heritage in these regions is not surprising; more disturbing is their promotion in a context where Azerbaijani heritage and settlements have been effaced and reduced to ruin.
It is striking that Armenian civil society has made little effort to publicly question the occupation of territories beyond the former autonomous region—in other words, to distinguish between self-determination of Nagorno-Karabakh’s majority Armenian population and occupation of Azerbaijani territory. It can easily be countered, with some justification, that the Line of Control situation and Azerbaijani rhetoric preclude any such nuances. Yet if there were a sense of reality to the return of these territories, perhaps the incentive to keep them unstable would reduce. Furthermore, the blurring of civil and military-occupational jurisdiction; the embedding of mass displacement within the foundations of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic; and the now ubiquitous visualizations of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied territories as a seamless unit in Armenian cartography are all evidence of severe mission creep on the Armenian side that needs to be questioned. The extent to which this is not the case indicates serious restrictions on the Armenian leadership’s ability to negotiate compromise with Azerbaijan, almost always framed in terms of territorial withdrawals.
Conclusion: The Dangers of Securitizing Dialogue
There is no prospect of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the terms of the current peace proposal in the near future. Sincere, strategic and multipolar commitment to transforming this conflict seems at present unlikely to trump the usefulness of Russian-Western cooperation in managing the status quo as a contrast to otherwise rock-bottom relations. Between international inertia and distraction with other conflicts, and both sides’ apparent determination to retain control of the Line of Control as a means to send messages to the wider world, periodic front-line clashes will continue, especially at sensitive times in the peace process. Hence, managing the conflict in order to minimize casualties and damage to civilian property along the Line of Control, and avoid an accidental escalation, are more realistic ambitions.
Yet a further realistic ambition could be to cease willfully ignoring the contradictions between the needs of a viable peace process and the direction of state-society relations in Armenia and Azerbaijan. This neglect, bordering at times on complicity, thrives on a fundamental and abiding illusion: that peace and reconciliation are possible without public participation. Neither an elite fix, however opportunely timed to coincide with geopolitical winds, nor any amount of mediation, however creative or forceful, can address the powerful dysfunctions that have been building up over the past two decades to sustain the attractiveness of closed, securitized politics to today’s incumbents in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Enabled by the consistent sense of danger and insecurity generated by the conflict, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders have averted fundamental transformations of state and society and the overhaul of governance that any resolution to this conflict would entail. Fragmented and emasculated civil societies are a key symptom of these dysfunctions, depriving Armenian-Azerbaijani dialogue of its most skilled and professional advocates. Looking to the future, for as long as the political process to transform this conflict excludes the societies it affects, it will remain shaped more by the needs of regime survival than by a sincere desire for peace.
*Laurence Broers is the editor of Caucasus Survey and a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.