Nagorno-Karabakh: A Forgotten War
Late in December 2015, the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan sat down together for the first time in more than a year to discuss the long frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. According to the Associated Press, the meeting on December 19 came just nine days after the Azeri president accused the Armenians of escalation. Nagorno-Karabakh, or Artsakh to Armenians, is a contested territory between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The area, traditionally an ethnic Armenian region, was turned into an autonomous republic within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan following Soviet intervention in the Caucuses post-Russian Civil War. The region became contested, as did many other autonomous republics, during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1988 an Armenian secessionist insurgency began, seeking a union with Armenia. Fully open conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out when the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh was declared in 1991. The Azeris, despite having greater access to larger Soviet arsenals, lost the Nagorno-Karabakh and other swathes of Azerbaijani territory to combined Armenian-Karabakhi forces. Russia mediated a ceasefire in 1994 and maintained the post-war status quo.
The end of the war left the Armenian militarily successful but isolated. Azerbaijan found strong support from Turkey. The Turkish government has created an effective economic blockade of landlocked Armenia, with the country’s only remaining open land border consisting of a short stretch of mountainous territory shared with Georgia. Turkey has also bypassed Armenia with infrastructure projects such as the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline.
As of yet, all previous attempts to bring an end to the conflict have failed. A 2010 report of the situation by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group declared that “the status quo is unacceptable” and that only a negotiated peace settlement would provide a better future for the region. Despite this, the number of ceasefire violations has increased. In January the Defence ministries of both Azerbaijan and Armenia claimed around 120 violations in a single day. The U.S. ambassador and co-chair of the OSCE group, James Warlick, stated to the Daily Sabah that, “the ongoing violence was unacceptable.”
The current crisis in Middle East leaves major powers in a bind. An unfreezing of the conflict could lead to a struggle between the regional powers of Turkey and Iran, who are already at odds over the Syrian conflict. Such a confrontation would worsen present tensions between Russia and the United States. Russia, an ally of both Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as leader of the Eurasian Economic Union, would be at a disadvantage if an active war took place on its southern border. Likewise, the United States, which is home to significant Armenian-American population, would face opposition at home and from Turkey if conflict were to break out.