Armenia’s Conflict With Azerbaijan and Turkey

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The Armenian Genocide is commemorated every year on April 24. It’s the date when the mass murder of at least one million Armenians during the First World War by the Turkish Ottoman Empire began.

In that part of the world, nobody forgets anything. As the American author William Faulkner reminds us, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

When the Seljuk Turks destroyed a large Christian Armenian kingdom in the eleventh century, it began a millennium of conflict between Armenians and their Turkish and Azeri Muslim foes in Anatolia and the South Caucasus.

The 1064 siege of Ani, the former capital of the medieval kingdom of Armenia, by the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan in 1064, remains celebrated by today’s Turkish Republic. The image of defeated Armenian and Byzantine Greek communities became a key component of a Turkish nationalist argument which asserted historic rule over the region.

From the Armenian point of view, the Turkish arrival in the region reinforces the perception of a relationship that was destined to culminate in mass murder. And this animosity also includes the Azeris, closely related to Turks.

Both peoples were conquered by tsarist Russia in the 19^th century. The creation of the Soviet Union provided each with a full-fledged union republic. However, the decision in 1921 to incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh as a autonomous region into Soviet Azerbaijan separated from Soviet Armenia has been identified as pivotal in ensuing problems.

Under Soviet rule for seven decades, Armenians and Azerbaijanis maintained largely peaceful, if not always harmonious, relations. Each republic was home to significant minorities of the other nationality, but Karabakh’s status appeared ever more anomalous.

Karabakh Armenians intermittently petitioned for unification with Armenia. But it wasn’t until 1988, as Moscow’s grip began to weaken, that the enclave became a flash point within the Soviet Union.

The Armenian-dominated Karabakh Soviet made a formal request for unification with Armenia, as it become obvious the USSR was going to disintegrate. The region had retained a modicum of self-rule when Azerbaijan was a Soviet republic, but Baku revoked its autonomous status as soon as that nation and Armenia attained the status of independent states. Violence followed swiftly.

Ethnic cleansing subsequently took place within both countries following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This resulted in Armenia and Azerbaijan each becoming ethnically homogeneous, with both countries fuelled by revanchist nationalism.

The hostility continues to the present day and involves the ongoing conflict between them over the disputed territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. It remains recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan, though inhabited by Armenians.

Following the first Karabakh war that ended in 1994, most of the area is now governed by the de facto Republic of Artsakh, backed by Armenia. Between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed in that conflict and hundreds of thousands were displaced before a cease-fire was declared in 1994. It resulted in an Armenian victory and led to Armenia occupying a fifth of Azerbaijani territory.

But the Karabakh dispute, a “frozen conflict” after that period, flared up again in September 2020 as an Azerbaijani offensive re-ignited the war. Within a week, the conflict had escalated beyond the line of contact dividing Armenian and Azerbaijani forces. Stepanakert, the capital of the republic, sustained heavy shelling, while Armenia struck targets in Azerbaijan beyond the contested region in the most prolonged violence since the 1994 ceasefire.

Through 44 days of war, Azerbaijan recaptured not only the seven provinces it had lost in the previous war, but one-third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, including the fortress city of Shushi. More than 7,000 Armenian combatants were killed. It ended with a fragile Russian-brokered truce that placed 2,000 Russian peacekeeping troops between the two sides.

These battles differed from previous flare-ups, not only in intensity, but in the direct Turkish support for Azerbaijan. In the months before the conflict broke out, Turkey’s military exports to Azerbaijan rose sixfold.

Turkey has no diplomatic relations with Armenia and sealed its border with the country in the 1990s in solidarity with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. For Armenians, it heightened the connection between these events and the Armenian Genocide.

Last September, fierce clashes erupted again, with Azerbaijan launching strikes using drones and large-calibre weapons. Some observers speculated that Azerbaijan may have sought to attack while Moscow, an ally of Armenia, is bogged down in Ukraine. (Kyiv has long taken a pro-Azerbaijan position vis-a-vis the conflict.)

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in December criticized Russian peacekeeping troops for failing to keep open the Lachin corridor, the road route across Azerbaijan that links Armenia with the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Troops from Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed April 11 near the corridor.

The 120,000 ethnic Armenians depend on the Lachin corridor for supplies of food, medicine, fuel and other essential goods. Food and electricity are now rationed, gas supplies are regularly cut, and civilians are effectively under siege.

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan responded that “whoever does not want to become our citizen, the road is not closed; it is open. They can leave whenever they want.”

Russia, France and the United States co-chair the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Minsk Group, which had been attempting to broker an end to the dispute, but this has been thrown into doubt by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.