( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Officials in Washington are doubling down on their efforts to create a new energy corridor that runs through the Caucasus, a major transit route for trade and energy that connects Europe and Asia.

Focusing on Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries at odds over land and history, officials in Washington hope to link the two countries with energy pipelines, despite Azerbaijan’s recent incursion into Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the territory in September.

“A transit corridor built with the involvement and consent of Armenia can be a tremendous boon to states across the region and to global markets,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.

U.S. Objectives

For decades, U.S. officials have pursued geopolitical objectives in the Caucasus. Viewing the region as a strategically important area that connects Europe and Asia, they have sought to integrate the region with Europe while pulling it away from Iran and Russia, both of which maintain close ties to the region.

“The Caucasus is tremendously important as a crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” Senator James Risch (R-ID) said in a statement last year. “Trade agreements, energy deals, infrastructure, and investment all have the potential to better integrate the region within the transatlantic community.”

At the heart of U.S. planning is Azerbaijan. Given the country’s extensive energy resources, especially its oil and natural gas, U.S. officials have seen Azerbaijan as the key to creating a U.S.-led Caucasus that will help Europe transition away from its dependence on Russian energy.

“We have been hard at work, along with our European colleagues, over the course of the last decade, trying to help Europe slowly wean itself off of dependence on Russian gas and oil,” Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) explained at a hearing in September. “Part of that strategy has been to deliver more Azerbaijani gas and oil to Europe.”

Another reason for the U.S. focus on Azerbaijan is its location. With Russia to the north, the Caspian Sea to the east, and Iran to the south, U.S. officials have seen the country as “the epicenter of Eurasia energy policy,” as U.S. diplomats once described it. The United States has worked to position Azerbaijan as the starting point for an east-west energy corridor that benefits the West and deters a north-south corridor that would work to the advantage of Iran and Russia.

For the United States and its European allies, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline demonstrates the possibilities. Since 2006, the BTC pipeline has carried oil from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean Sea, where it has been shipped to global energy markets. The pipeline is controlled by a consortium of energy companies headed by BP, the British oil giant.

“We need that to keep functioning,” State Department official Yuri Kim told Congress in September.

From the U.S. perspective, another major geopolitical achievement has been the Southern Gas Corridor. The corridor, which combines three separate pipelines, runs from Azerbaijan all the way to Europe. Since its initial deliveries of natural gas to Europe in 2020, the corridor has been critically important to keeping Europe supplied with energy during the war in Ukraine.

“That Southern Gas Corridor is extremely important for ensuring that there is energy diversity for Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, potentially Albania, and definitely Italy, and possibly into the Western Balkans,” Kim said. “We cannot underestimate how important that is.”

A New Route?

As pipelines carry oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the West, U.S. officials have sought to reinforce the east-west corridor by creating additional pipelines that run through Armenia. Not only would a pipeline through Armenia add another route to the corridor, but it would pull Armenia away from Russia, which maintains a military presence in the country and provides Armenia with most of its energy.

For decades, one of the major challenges to U.S. plans has been the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. As long as Armenia and Azerbaijan have remained at odds over the region, U.S. officials have seen few options for integrating Armenia into a broader east-west energy corridor.

“If not for the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009, “the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline could have been routed through Armenia, reducing the distance and construction cost, and providing Armenia both an alternative source of gas as well as much-needed transit fees.”

In recent years, regional dynamics have rapidly shifted, however. As Azerbaijan grew flush with cash from its operations as an energy hub for the West, it began spending more money on weapons. With Israel and Turkey selling Azerbaijan increasingly sophisticated weapons, Azerbaijan built a large arsenal and acquired the upper hand over Armenia.

“Where other Western nations are reluctant to sell ground combat systems to the Azerbaijanis for fear of encouraging Azerbaijan to resort to war to regain [Nagorno-Karabakh] and the occupied territories, Israel is free to make substantial arms sales and benefits greatly from deals with its well-heeled client,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009.

Photo by Sarin Aventisian on Unsplash

Emboldened by its growing power and influence, Azerbaijan made its move. As fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September 2020, Azerbaijan’s military forces took advantage of their advanced weaponry from Israel and Turkey to capture the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh.

Before Azerbaijan’s military forces could seize control of Nagorno-Karabakh, however, Russia intervened, brokering a ceasefire and deploying about 2,000 peacekeepers to the region. Although various observers portrayed the outcome as a victory for Russia, the deal did not last long.

This past September, Azerbaijan moved to take the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh, armed by additional supplies of Israeli weapons. Following Azerbaijan’s incursion, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the territory for Armenia, where they remain today.

Now that Azerbaijan has taken control of Nagorno-Karabakh, U.S. officials are renewing their efforts to persuade Armenia and Azerbaijan to forge a peace deal that could be the basis for a new energy corridor.

“There is business to be done in this region,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.

At the Start Department, officials have been reviewing U.S.-funded plans for building the new energy corridor. As O’Brien noted, “the feasibility studies on this transit corridor [have] actually been done, funded by [the Agency for International Development (AID)], so we’re in the middle of seeing what kind of economic future there may be.”

Obstacles

Several obstacles stand in the way of U.S. plans. One possibility is that an increasingly emboldened Azerbaijan will invade Armenia and take the territory it wants for new pipelines. If Azerbaijan continues to acquire weapons from Turkey and Israel, it could take Armenian land by force, something that U.S. officials believe could happen.

“I think, from what I hear, the Armenians are concerned and feel threatened by that corridor and what it might imply for another grabbing of land by Azerbaijan,” Representative James Costa (D-CA) said at the hearing in November.

A related possibility is that Azerbaijan could work more closely with Russia. As Russia maintains military forces in Azerbaijan, it could facilitate a move by Azerbaijan to take Armenian land for a north-south energy corridor that benefits Russia.

Although Russia maintains a security pact with Armenia, relations have soured over Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh, making it possible that Russia will side with Azerbaijan.

Another challenge is the Azerbaijani government. For years, critics have charged Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev with leading a corrupt and repressive regime that has hoarded the country’s wealth while leaving the population to suffer.

In internal reports, U.S. diplomats have been highly critical of Aliyev. Not only have they compared him to mobsters, but they have suggested that the country “is run in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages.”

As critics have called on Washington to reconsider the U.S. relationship with Azerbaijan, some members of Congress have begun questioning U.S. strategy, particularly as it concerns the U.S. partnership with Aliyev.

The United States may have made “the wrong bet by moving more Azerbaijani resources into Europe,” Senator Murphy said in September. “This strategy of being dependent on a system and series of dictatorships… may not necessarily bear the strategic game that we think it does.”

Other members of Congress have questioned the State Department’s claims that a new energy corridor can bring peace to the region.

“I don’t see the peace process as going nearly as well as some of the description I’ve just heard,” Representative Costa said at the hearing in November. “It was ethnic cleansing that happened with the removal of these Armenians from their historic homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Regardless, officials at the State Department remain confident in their plans. Pushing forward with efforts to forge a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they remain hopeful that they can create a new energy corridor that runs through Armenia, even if means that the ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh will never be able to return to their homes.

“As we go from the medium to the longer term, there’s going to have to be some effort made to help integrate these folks into Armenian life,” AID official Alexander Sokolowski told Congress in November. “Many of them dream of going back to Nagorno-Karabakh, but for right now, they’re oriented towards making a life in Armenia.”

Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.

Foreign Policy in Focus

( Tomdispatch.com) – This month’s catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza — specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other’s war crimes — has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world.

That day in the fall of 2005 I was in Yerevan, Armenia, where I was teaching a post-graduate journalism course at the state university. In class that morning, my six students, all of them young women (as was not unusual in that time and place), began discussing the terrible treatment of young recruits in the Armenian army, where the vicious hazing that had been notorious in the Soviet armed forces was still common practice. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but when it did, one student after another chipped in with chilling tales about male relatives and friends who had been savagely treated by other soldiers and their superiors.

Just a few hours later, in an afternoon class with the same six students, someone mentioned Khojaly, the town where, according to the Azeris, Armenian soldiers massacred some 600 Azeri civilians during the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 1992. My students insisted the story must be false because, as one of them said, “Our boys couldn’t do something like that.”

Only that morning, I reminded them, they had recalled numerous first-hand accounts of horrible things Armenian soldiers did to their own young recruits. Maybe the Khojaly massacre happened, I said, and maybe it didn’t, as Armenia has long insisted, but given the cruelties you spoke about this morning, how can you say Armenians couldn’t do that? For a long silent moment, they looked at me with stunned expressions. Finally, one of them said, “We can’t think that.”

When I heard her words, I realized they were probably the all-too-literal truth. Those young women simply couldn’t think things that didn’t fit the accepted national story about that war, a feeling far more powerful than facts or logic. In the world they lived in, the threat from the enemy was the potential extinction of the Armenian people — a continuation of the attempted genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Taking the Azeri side on anything, including the “facts” on Khojaly or any Armenian atrocity, would be collaborating with the murder of their own people, and that just wasn’t possible.

Echoes from Gaza

If I were in the Middle East today, I’m quite sure I would see the same dynamic playing out on both sides of the current Israeli-Hamas war. Just as my Armenian students couldn’t think that their country’s soldiers were guilty of a serious atrocity, many Israelis and Palestinians are undoubtedly incapable — not just unwilling, but incapable — of recognizing that their side in that conflict might be violating the laws of war and committing crimes against humanity. (The parallel with Israelis is particularly close, since just like Armenians, they have a collective memory of genocide, of facing an enemy that wanted not just to defeat them on some battlefield but to wipe their whole people off the face of the earth.) It also seems a safe assumption that those feelings will not be changed by additional evidence about specific incidents or the broader conduct of the opposing forces.

The conflicting reactions to the October 17th explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City are an apt example. Palestinians immediately blamed Israeli bombing or missile fire, which they said killed nearly 500 people on the hospital grounds. Israelis argued that the blast was from an off-course Palestinian rocket, while challenging their adversary’s casualty count. (Two days after the explosion, a Jerusalem newspaper reported that estimates from “foreign independent intelligence sources” were far lower — no more than 50 deaths, maybe as few as 10.)

There is no way to know at this writing what additional facts may come to light or if there will ever be a conclusive finding on which side caused the explosion. But even if there is, it’s a safe bet that Palestinians will keep blaming Israel and Israelis will go on accusing Palestinians. Moreover, people on both sides will believe what they’re saying because, like my students in Armenia, they simply can’t think anything else.

Buy the Book

The parallels aren’t exact, of course. The Israeli-Hamas conflict is very different from Armenia’s with Azerbaijan — not just geographically but in terms of its history, its circumstances, and most notably its potential to ignite a much wider war with devastating consequences globally.

Another crucial difference is that the world in 2023 is not the world that existed in 2005 when I taught that class in Armenia. Facts carry significantly less weight in public discourse now than they did then. Truth-tellers in the news media, academic institutions, and the scientific world are less trusted and less believed, which gives untruths and those who spread them far more influence.

In the age of social media, people whose emotions (and identity) immunize them against unwelcome facts can easily find support and apparent confirmation for their false beliefs in ways that were only beginning to take shape in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, falsehoods spread much farther and faster to what would have been unimaginable numbers of people 15 or 20 years ago.

One stunning example of that change: when I was teaching in Armenia in 2005, Facebook had been in operation for only a year or so and had close to 5 million users. Today, something like two and a half billion people use that platform. In other words, 18 years ago Facebook was reaching approximately one out of every 1,300 people in the world. Now, it reaches almost one out of every three. Other social media networks have seen similar growth. In the United States alone, the percentage of adults who use social media is estimated to have increased from 5% to 79% between 2005 and 2019.

A New Weapon in the War on Facts

If the explosive growth of social media has meant a larger threat to truth, a more recent trend may pose a new and even bigger danger. Artificial intelligence clearly has the capability to create and distribute fake information that will make it ever harder — perhaps nearly impossible — to distinguish facts from falsehoods. So far, ideas about how to control it don’t exactly seem promising, while rapidly advancing technology is producing ever more effective tools of deception. In a recent column on the Axios news website, two of its cofounders delivered a chilling warning about one of those tools, which, they note, is being wielded by “anti-American actors” in crisis spots globally:

“A new weapon is being deployed in all these conflicts: a massive spread of doctored or wholly fake videos to manipulate what people see and think in real time. The architects of these new technologies, in background conversations with us, after demonstrating new capabilities soon to be released, say even the sharpest eyes looking for fake videos will have an impossible time detecting what’s real.”

Such misinformation is not only harmful when people believe things that are untrue, but possibly even more damaging in making it harder to believe things that are true. When lies fill the air around us, everything becomes suspect. Information becomes guilty-until-proven-innocent and, when people like those Armenian students are already motivated to deny reality, the effect will only be hugely magnified.

There’s a strong case to be made that, as misinformation and artificial intelligence gain ground, the greatest risk of all is that truth will simply lose credibility and facts will matter ever less. Ultimately, that trend won’t just subvert knowledge and understanding on specific subjects but undermine the belief that facts exist at all, that there is an objective reality outside our own consciousness.

That was the thesis of a chilling 2017 online essay by Mary Poovey, an emeritus humanities professor at New York University and author of A History of the Modern Fact. In her essay, she described a “post-fact world” where conventional knowledge sources are no longer trusted, formerly unquestioned assumptions are no longer shared, and traditional checks-and-balances processes no longer go unchallenged as validators of information. In that world, she concluded, “Ordinary citizens and parties with their own vested interests have begun to question the very possibility of facts.”

Reflecting on such thoughts in an interview earlier this year, Poovey noted that, without facts, we have no standard for what to believe, no trusted authority to teach us what’s real and what isn’t, and no way to correct false beliefs. And from that comes a bleak but inescapable conclusion: if facts don’t exist, knowledge doesn’t either.

How Misinformation and Disinformation Are Exploding Globally

The slide into low-fact or fact-free discourse is ominous for numerous reasons and across many areas of public life. In this country, false statements and willful denials of reality in the ongoing debate about fraud in the 2020 presidential election — a completely imaginary issue — have done grave and lasting damage to a fundamental foundation of democracy. (On the very day I drafted this essay, the House of Representatives chose as a new speaker a prominent election denier.) Thousands of Americans, perhaps tens of thousands, died as a direct result of misinformation about Covid-19. Intentional and unintentional falsehoods have seriously obstructed urgently needed policies and practices that could better prepare us for coming catastrophes associated with climate change. And, as always, misinformation and disinformation have exploded, along with rockets and bombs, in wars around the world.

To be sure, throughout human history, wars have generated lies and false beliefs. In the present era, however, those falsehoods seem to spread so much faster and more widely, arguably causing more pain than in the past. That has been visible in the current crisis in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine, as documented in a list of nearly 100 separate false claims compiled in the early stages of that conflict by the newspaper USA Today.

Almost 80 of those items were fake or falsely captioned videos and photographic images, mostly seen on platforms that had barely existed a decade or two ago. In an ironic twist, one photo, purporting to show an explosion in Ukraine, had, in fact, been taken in Gaza in 2021. Another, that newspaper’s fact-checkers reported, wasn’t an image from any real war but from a video game. Strikingly, though on reflection perhaps not surprisingly, a video clip from the very same game was posted on Facebook recently with a caption claiming it showed Israeli anti-aircraft fire shooting a Hamas fighter plane out of the sky.

That clip was far from the only such deception appearing during the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In one of many examples, after the Al-Ahli Arab hospital explosion, a false posting, presumably by a pro-Israeli source, showed a screen-shot of a tweet supposedly from an Al Jazeera journalist reporting that he had seen “with my own eyes” a Hamas missile causing the blast and that Al Jazeera‘s coverage of the event was untrue. Fact-checkers for the French news agency AFP determined that the tweet was fake, and no Al Jazeera reporter had ever sent such a message.

Rewriting Ancient Times — And Yesterday

One effect of the misinformation epidemic is that rewriting the past has become an easier and more common practice than it used to be. An example — looking at a piece of ancient history but completely relevant to today’s headlines — is recounted in a recent blog post by David Shipler, former New York Times correspondent and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Arab and Jew. When he was based in Jerusalem from 1979 to 1984, Shipler wrote on his blog, “I never heard a Palestinian utter a doubt that Jewish temples had stood on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews call the Temple Mount” (the site of the Temple of Solomon, according to Jewish scriptures). But on a visit in the early 1990s, a Palestinian high school student in Ramallah told him categorically that no Jewish temple had ever existed there and that the claim was “a fabrication by Israelis to lay title to Jerusalem.”

“I don’t know how many Christian and Muslim Palestinians have embraced that temple denial,” Shipler went on, “but on subsequent reporting trips I heard it more and more widely until it seemed virtually ubiquitous.” On that and many other realities from ancient times to the present, the two sides have come to teach and believe completely different stories. Shipler calls it “an arms race of memory.” And while he was referring to Arabs and Jews, his term could just as aptly have been applied to countless other contests between facts and falsehoods in our time.

For obvious reasons, the memory arms race is particularly prevalent in remembering wars, which leave passionate and painful emotions that last for generations. Throughout history, those emotions have shaped false visions of reality that tend to endure long after the fighting ends. A maxim said to have been coined more than a century ago (and usually attributed to California Senator Hiram Johnson during World War I) put it this way: “Truth is the first casualty of war.”

That was certainly a valid observation in the past, but I’m not sure it’s accurate in the same way today. Truth wasn’t the first casualty in the present Middle East conflict. It had already been a casualty before that war even began. Today, truth is simply a casualty of our world.

Copyright 2023 Arnold R. Isaacs

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Thirty-five years ago, more than 100,000 Armenian protesters took to the streets to convince Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nagorno-Karabakh – an ethnically Armenian enclave stuck geographically in the neighboring republic of Soviet Azerbaijan – ought to be joined to Armenia.

In recent days, more than 100,000 people have taken to the streets again. But this time it is Karabakh Armenians fleeing their homes to find refuge in Armenia. They have been decisively defeated by the Azerbaijanis in a short and brutal military operation in the enclave. Their dream of independence appears over; what is left is the fallout.

As a longtime analyst of the history and politics of the South Caucasus, I see the chain of recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh as depressingly predictable. But that is not to say they weren’t avoidable. Rather, greater flexibility from both sides – and less demonization of the other – could have prevented the catastrophic collapse of Artsakh, as Armenians called their autonomous republic, and with it the effective ethnic cleansing of people from lands they had lived in for millennia.

A legacy of Lenin

What began as a struggle to fulfill the promise of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin, that all nations would enjoy the right to self-determination within the USSR, turned into a war between two independent, sovereign states that saw more than 30,000 people killed in six years of fighting.

The 1988 demonstrations were met by violent pogroms by Azerbaijanis against Armenian minorities in Sumgait and Baku. Gorbachev, wary that a shift in territory would foster similar demands throughout the Soviet Union and potentially enrage the USSR’s millions of Muslim citizens, promised economic aid to and protection of the Armenians, but he refused to change the borders.

The dispute became a matter of international law, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of recognized states, in 1991 – with Azerbaijan declaring independence from the Soviet Union and rejecting Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomy vote. The legal principle of territorial integrity took precedence over the ethical principle of national self-determination.

This meant that under international law, state boundaries could not be changed without the mutual agreement of both sides – a position that favored Azerbaijan. All countries in the world recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, even, eventually, Armenia.

An unsolved diplomatic problem

But that didn’t mean the status of Nagorno-Karabakh was ever settled. And for all their efforts, outside powers – Russia, France and the United States most importantly – failed to find a lasting diplomatic solution.

The First Karabakh War, which grew out of the pogroms of 1988 and 1990, ended in 1994 with an armistice brokered by Russia and the Armenians victorious.

Moscow was Armenia’s principal protector in a hostile neighborhood with two unfriendly states, Azerbaijan and Turkey, on its borders. In turn, Armenia was usually Russia’s most loyal and dependable – and dependent – ally. Yet, post-Soviet Russia had its own national interests that did not always favor Armenia. At times, to the dismay of the Armenians, Moscow leaned toward Azerbaijian, occasionally selling them weapons.

Only Iran, treated as a pariah by much of the international community, provided some additional support, sporadically, to Armenia.

The United States, though sympathetic to Armenia’s plight and often pressured by its American-Armenian lobby, was far away and concerned with more pressing problems in the Middle East, Europe and the Far East.

What might have been

The disaster that has befallen Nagorno-Karabakh was not inevitable. Alternatives and contingencies always exist in history and, if heeded by statespeople, can result in different outcomes. Analysts including myself, advisers and even the first president of independent Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, proposed compromise solutions that might have led to an imperfect but violence-free solution to the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Yet the triumphant Armenian victors of the 1990s had few immediate incentives to compromise. Instead, after the First Karabakh War, they expanded their holdings beyond the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving an estimated one million Azerbaijanis out of their homes and making them hostile to Armenians.

The greatest error of the Armenian leaders, I believe, was to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a “Greater Armenia” on territory emptied of the people who had lived there. After all, wasn’t this how other settler colonial states, such as the United States, Australia, Turkey, Israel and so many others had been founded? Ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with forced assimilation, have historically been effective tools in the arsenal of nation-makers.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani nationalism smoldered and intensified around the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. Many decision-makers in Azerbaijan viewed Armenians as arrogant, expansionist, existential enemies of their country. Each side considered the contested enclave a piece of their ancient homeland, an indivisible good, and compromise proved impossible.

Armenian leaders also failed to fully comprehend the advantages that Azerbaijan held. Azerbaijan is a state three times the size of Armenia with a population larger by more than 7 million people. It also has vast sources of oil and gas that it has used to increase its wealth, build up a 21st-century military and finesse into greater ties with regional allies and European countries thirsty for oil and gas.

Armenia had a diaspora that intermittently aided the republic; but it did not have the material resources or the allies close at hand that its larger neighbor enjoyed. Turks and Azerbaijanis referred to their relationship as “one nation, two states.” Sophisticated weapons flowed to Azerbaijan from Turkey – as they did from an Israel encouraged by a shared hostility with Iran, Armenia’s ally – tipping the scales of the conflict.

Democracy versus autocracy

Armenians carried out a popular democratic revolution in 2018 and brought a former journalist, Nikol Pashinyan, to power. A novice in governance, Pashinyan made serious errors. For example, he boldly, publicly declared that “Artsakh” was part of Armenia, which infuriated Azerbaijan. While Pashinyan tried to assure Russia that his movement was not a “color revolution” – like those in Georgia and Ukraine – Vladimir Putin, no fan of popular democratic manifestations, grew hostile to Pashinyan’s attempts to turn to the West.

While Azerbaijan had grown economically – with the capital city of Baku glittering with new construction – politically, it stagnated under the rule of Ilham Aliyev, son of former Communist Party boss Heydar Aliyev.

The autocratic Ilham Aliyev needed a victory over Armenia and Ngorno-Karabakh to quiet rumbling discontent with the corruption of the family-run state. Without warning, he launched a brutal war against Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2020 – and won it in just 44 days thanks to drones and weapons supplied by his allies.

The goal of the victors then was equally hubristic as that of the Armenians a generation earlier. Azerbaijan’s troops surrounded Nagorno-Karabakh and in December 2022 cut off all access to what was left of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, starving its people for 10 months. On Sept. 19, 2023, Baku unleashed a brutal blitzkrieg on the rump republic, killing hundreds and forcing a mass exodus.

This ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh – first through hunger, then by force of arms – completed the Azerbaijani victory. The defeated government of Artsakh declared it would officially dissolve the republic by the end of 2023.

Learning from defeat and victory

War sobers a people. They are forced to face hard facts.

At the same time, victory can lead to prideful triumphalism that in its own way can distort what lies ahead.

Aliyev appears to have tightened his grip on power, and Azerbaijanis today speak of other goals: a land corridor through southern Armenia to link Azerbaijan proper with its exclave Nakhichevan, separated from the rest of the country by southern Armenia. Voices have also been raised in Baku calling for a “Greater Azerbaijan” that would incorporate what they call “Western Azerbaijan” – that is, the current Republic of Armenia.

Armenians might hope that Azerbaijan – and the international community – take seriously the principle of territorial integrity and protect Armenia from incursions by the Azerbaijani army or any more forceful move across its borders.

They might also hope that the U.S. and NATO, which proclaim that they are protecting democracy against autocracy in Ukraine, will adopt a similar approach to the conflict between democratic Armenia and autocratic Azerbaijan.

But with Russia occupied with its devastating war in Ukraine and stepping back from its support of Armenia, a power vacuum has been formed in the Southern Caucasus that Turkey may be eager to fill, to Azerbaijan’s advantage.

A chance for democratic renewal?

The immediate tasks facing Armenia are enormous, beginning with the housing and feeding of 100,000 refugees.

But this might also be a moment of opportunity. Freed of the burden of defending Nagorno-Karabakh, which they did valiantly for more than three decades, Armenians are no longer as captive to the moves and whims of Russia and Azerbaijan.

They can use this time to consolidate and further develop their democracy, and by their example become what they had been in the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union: a harbinger of democratic renewal, an example of not just what might have been but of what conceivably will be in the near future.

Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On February 10, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said that preparatory works for the Islamic Republic’s permanent membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is going to be done in two weeks. Upon his visit to Moscow he also said that he brought a “very important message” from Iran’s Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The Leader emphasized on long-term coordination and strategic agreements with Russia. His message was of course broader, covering other issues, including economic and political ones, how to achieve agreements, future communications and policies between Iran and Russia”, said Qalibaf.

It is worth noting, however, that Qalibaf canceled his scheduled meeting with Putin after he refused to accept the health protocols to be followed during the meetings with the Russian leader. So Khamenei’s message has been delivered not to Putin directly, but to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev. According to reports, Russian authorities had demanded from Ghalibaf to first self-isolate for 15 days upon arrival to the Russian capital in order to meet with Putin, which is something that the Iranian official strongly opposed.

Still, it is unlikely that Putin’s overly cautious hygiene demands will have an impact on relations between Moscow and Tehran. Iran and Russia-led EAEU have already signed a free trade agreement in October 2018, which resulted in increased Islamic Republic’s exports to the EAEU member states significantly. The Eurasian Union was created on the basis of the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in 2014. Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined the EAEU in 2015, and that is when the enlargement process stalled. Besides Iran, about 40 nations have also expressed a desire to develop trade and economic cooperation with the EAEU. However, one of the main problems for this Russia-dominated entity is the very slow progress towards its stated goals.

Iran’s potential membership in the EAEU would allow Tehran to neutralize, at least to a certain extent, the cost of the US sanctions, and also to force the US administration to be more flexible, especially when it comes to negotiations on the nuclear program. From a purely economic perspective, Iran’s access to Eurasian Union would strengthen business ties not only between Tehran and Moscow, but also between the Islamic Republic and other Russian allies. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the total turnover between Iran and the EAEU increased by two percent in 2020 and exceeded $2 billion. Food products and agricultural raw materials accounted for about 80 percent, or $939 million of the volume of supplies from the EAEU countries to Iran, more than half of which – $609 million – fell on grain. In turn, similar goods also accounted for most of the supplies from Iran to the Union – 68 percent or $575 million.

Besides joining the EAEU, Tehran could also benefit once a railway connection between Iran and Russia is established. According to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, a rail link will go through Nakhchivan – Azerbaijan’s exclave wedged between Armenia, Iran and Turkey.

“There will also be a rail link between Iran and Armenia. There will be a rail link between Turkey and Russia. Thus, all countries in the region will only benefit from this project”, said Aliyev discussing the Nakhchivan corridor scheme.

According to Vardan Voskanyan, Head of the Department of Iranian Studies at Yerevan State University, both Russia and Iran are interested in promoting this project. He says that in the past, the absence of good land transportation between Russia and Armenia negatively affected bilateral trade relations between the two allied countries.

For Russia, this road could serve as an alternative pathway to the markets of the Middle East, and Armenia could finally get a land link to the market of the Eurasian Union. One thing is for sure – the Nakhchivan corridor will negatively affect Western-backed Georgia which has for years benefited as an important regional transit country.

Both Russia and Iran could come out of these infrastructural improvements with a much strengthened hand in geopolitics. Once completed, the Nakhchivan corridor will provide Turkey the opportunity to have a direct railway route to Baku, which will strengthen Ankara’s influence in energy-rich Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea region. Compared to the existing Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which connects Azerbaijan to Turkey through Georgia, the road within the new corridor will be about 340 kilometers (211 miles) shorter. Russia, on the other hand, will get a railway link with Turkey and Iran, which has great potential primarily in light of the announced strengthening of trade and economic ties between Moscow and Tehran. Moreover, the Russian Federation will have an additional land link to its ally Armenia through Azerbaijan – a country that will play the role of a transport hub.

If Iran can join the burgeoning Eurasian economy, it may drastically weaken Biden’s hand and reduce pressure on Iran to deal with Washington.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

New China TV: “Iran, Russia to hold joint naval exercise in Indian Ocean: military official”

According to the document, Armenian forces will have to withdraw from significant portion of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh – internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenians backed by Yerevan for the past 26 years – and almost 2000 Russian peacekeepers will be deployed to the region. Their main task will be to protect a five kilometer-wide Lachin corridor, which is the major link between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

“This is not a victory but there is not defeat until you consider yourself defeated”, said Pashinyan calling the deal “extremely painful” for Armenian people.

Indeed, many Armenians see the agreement as capitulation to their archenemy Azerbaijan. That is why angry crowd stormed the government and the parliament buildings in Yerevan hours after the deal was announced. There are rumors that Pashinyan fled to Russia, and that Armenia could face a coup, but given that the military said it would follow the orders from the country’s leadership, at this point such an option does not seem very probable.

After Russia refused to interfere in the conflict, Armenia-backed Artsakh forces suffered heavy defeats on a daily basis. According to Pashinyan, he was told to sign a truce with Azerbaijan by leaders of Armenian armed forces, who explained that their resources were depleted. It is, however, widely believed that the Kremlin put enormous pressure on Armenian leadership not only to surrender Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan, but also to guarantee the safety of transport links between southwest Azerbaijan, south Armenia and Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhichevan. According to the agreement signed by Putin, Pashinyan and Aliyev, the Nakhichevan corridor will be secured by the Russian Security Service which means that Armenia will de fact lose its sovereignty over this road that lies in the south of the country, along the Iranian border.

The Kremlin propagandists and Russian officials claim that Putin prevented an Armenian military defeat by forcing Pashinyan to sign an “extremely painful” agreement with Aliyev. Still, even if even if Yerevan lost Nagorno-Karabakh on the battlefield, it is unlikely that Azerbaijan would dare to attack Armenia in order to capture the Nakhchivan corridor, since such an action would force Russia – Yerevan’s ally in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – to actively defend Armenia. In other words, Russia pushed its ally to sign a humiliating deal with its archenemy that was openly backed by Turkey, and armed by Israel.

Ankara, which has played the most visible role in escalating the conflict by sending arms to Azerbaijan and recruiting former Syrian opposition forces to fight against the Armenians, has long envisioned itself as a major energy corridor between East and West. Now that its client Baku has won the war, Turkey’s influence in the region is expected to grow. As Azerbaijan’s leader pointed out, Turkey will also take part in the peace-keeping process, which suggests that Moscow and Ankara will de create their own “occupations zones” in the region – a model that the two countries already applied in Syria.

At the same time, according to Ukrainian political analyst Dmitriy Dzhangirov, Armenia, as a defeated nation, could face waves of destabilization.

“I believe Russia knew about the Azeri war plans in advance, but refused to share them with Pashinyan who is perceived in Moscow as a pro-Western and liberal figure. Now the Armenians will be even more dependent on Russia, since what has left of Nagorno-Karabakh will be in hands of the Russian peacekeepers”, said Dzhangirov.

Although the presence of Russian peacekeepers is seen as a guarantee that Azerbaijan will not be tempted to resume the war and capture the remaining portion of Artsakh, primarily the capital Stepanakert and the Lachin corridor, in reality Baku could create serious troubles for Russian troops on the ground. It is worth noting that just hours before the deal was reach, Azerbaijan’s Armed Forces downed Russian military helicopter over Armenia, close to Nakhchivan border.

“This is a planned provocation that resulted in the death of Russian pilots. There can be no other explanation”, said Russian military expert Alexei Leonkov. He emphasized that Azerbaijan is not a NATO member and that Russia can be tougher with Baku it than it was with Turkey after it downed the Russian Su-24 jet in Syria in 2015.

However, Russian media did not pay much attention to the incident in Armenia, and Azeris living in Russia came out to the streets of Saint Petersburg to celebrate their country’s military victory over Armenian forces, just hours after the Azeri Army Russian shot helicopter. Such an ambivalent Russian position can be interpreted as another Russia’s weakness and geopolitical humiliation. At the same time, it was a clear message to the Armenians that they cannot rely on Moscow.

“If your ally is the Russian Federation, you should be aware that everything that’s written in various agreements will be implemented only on paper, and Russian help will be very limited”, wrote a prominent Russian blogger whose pseudonym is Donetsky.

Even though many Armenians will be disgusted and will likely blame both Pashinyan and Putin for their defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh, the country is expected to remain in Russia’s geopolitical orbit, although Russian influence in Yerevan could start declining.

“Pashinyan will certainly have a very hard time”, said Alexander Iskandaryan, Director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan.

“Protests in Yerevan will be quite massive, and troops will start coming back from the warzone. In addition, there are already many refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia and they have nowhere to return. The situation in the country will be very turbulent”, said Iskandaryan.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia sign deal to end Nagorno-Karabakh war”

Fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia and the de-facto authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh dramatically escalated on September 27, 2020. Two humanitarian ceasefires brokered by members of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe have failed to halt the fighting. According to authorities from all parties, scores of civilians have been killed or injured in attacks in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan.

“The continued use of cluster munitions – particularly in populated areas – shows flagrant disregard for the safety of civilians,” said Stephen Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch and chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition. “Cluster munitions should never be used by anyone under any circumstances, much less in cities, due to the foreseeable and unacceptable harm to civilians.”

In the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Human Rights Watch is investigating whether all sides of the conflict adhere to international humanitarian law, which requires armed forces to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and between military objects and civilian objects, at all times. As such, indiscriminate attacks are prohibited, including attacks which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific legitimate military target. Human Rights Watch has made repeated requests to the Azerbaijani government for access to conduct on-site investigations, but access has not yet been granted.

Human Rights Watch examined remnants of the rockets, impacts, and remnants of submunitions that exploded, as well as dud submunitions that failed to function at several locations in Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh’s administrative center, which is called Khankendi in Azerbaijan. Human Rights Watch also examined photographs taken in the town of Hadrut of a rocket, impacts, and remnants of submunitions that exploded, and a dud submunition that failed to explode. Human Rights Watch also spoke to six people who witnessed the attacks. Azerbaijani officials have accused the Armenian side of using cluster munitions in this conflict, but Human Rights Watch has not independently verified those claims.

Residents of Stepanakert told Human Rights Watch that attacks using cluster munitions began on the morning of September 27 in a residential area no more than 200 meters from the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

A 69-year-old woman who was in her apartment on the fourth floor of a building next to where Human Rights Watch observed scores of the distinctive impacts of the M095 submunitions said the building began to shake around 7:15 a.m.: “The children started to scream and everyone was panicking when the bombs started coming down. We opened the windows and saw that the cars were burning. We saw that they had small pink things that were making them burn, so we ran down to the basement.”

She said that a number of submunitions did not explode and that people in the neighborhood covered them with sand from the children’s playground until emergency responders came the next day to secure and remove them. She said glass broken from the blasts injured a number of people in the neighborhood. Another resident told Human Rights Watch that dozens of vehicles were damaged.

On October 12, Human Rights Watch visited the site and, in addition to the distinctive impacts of the submunitions, Human Rights Watch observed several damaged and burned vehicles and numerous broken windows in nearby apartments and a shop located in the courtyard. However, the exact damage to the area done by the submunitions is unknown because another subsequent attack was carried out with a different munition in roughly the same location.

At least one more LAR-160 cluster munition rocket was fired roughly into the same area several hundred meters away. Human Rights Watch observed the remnants of a LAR-160 rocket, scores of the distinctive impacts of the M095 submunitions, the remnants of the pink-colored stabilization ribbons, and submunition fragments. Numerous buildings, private business, and markets had varying degrees of damage from the attack.

Human Rights Watch spoke to one worker for a nongovernmental group who observed a fire in a shop following an attack in this second neighborhood when he visited the site at approximately 11:20 p.m. on October 3. Human Rights Watch also reviewed a photograph taken by this witness that, according to the photograph’s metadata, was captured on October 3 at 11:20 p.m.

A video uploaded on the Telegram channel “Re:public of Artsakh” on October 4, captured another cluster munition rocket attack on Hakob Hakobyan Street in Stepanakert. Human Rights Watch spoke to two people who live on Hakob Hakobyan Street and witnessed the attack. One 55-year-old resident said that she was in her fourth-floor apartment during the attack. She said that some of the explosions occurred on the roof and ruptured the water pipes on the top of the building, causing water to run down from the upper floors. As a consequence, the water was shut off to the building.

The distinctive pattern of a M095 dual-purpose submunition impact on the ground along with its pink-colored ribbon in Stepanakert near Karabakh Telecom’s main building. © 2020 Human Rights Watch.

Rescue services were able to clear the submunitions from the top of the building after several days and access to water was restored but there has been no electricity in the building since the attack. An individual familiar with the electrical grid told Human Rights Watch that they were working to restore electricity in the area but could only provide electricity to basements and shelters for the time being.

Human Rights Watch was not able to identify any military equipment or bases in the three neighborhoods where the attacks took place. Even if there had been, given the indiscriminate effects of cluster munitions, their use in a residential civilian setting is not permitted under the laws of war.

Human Rights Watch also examined 35 photographs and one video shared directly with Human Rights Watch from the town of Hadrut of a LAR-160 rocket and its fuse, impacts, and remnants of M095 submunitions that exploded, and dud submunitions that failed to explode in and around a home. According to the metadata of the media, they were recorded on October 3. Human Rights Watch verified the location of the video and photographs as taken in the town of Hadrut. On October 4, a video was uploaded on YouTube by the Armenian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that showed the same house and remnants.

Cluster munitions have been banned because of their widespread indiscriminate effect and long-lasting danger to civilians. Cluster munitions typically explode in the air and send dozens, even hundreds, of small bomblets over an area the size of a football field. Cluster submunitions often fail to explode on initial impact, leaving duds that act like landmines.

The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions comprehensively prohibits cluster munitions and requires their clearance as well as assistance to victims. Armenia and Azerbaijan are not among the treaty’s 110 states parties. Both say that they cannot accede to the treaty until the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh is resolved. Both should take the necessary steps to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions without delay, Human Rights Watch said.

Regardless of specific treaty obligations, all parties to the conflict are bound by the Geneva Conventions and customary international law and must abide by the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, which requires armed forces to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and between military objects and civilian objects, at all times. It is also forbidden to carry out indiscriminate attacks or attacks that cause excessive civilian damage to the anticipated concrete military advantage.

“The repeated use of cluster munitions by Azerbaijan should cease immediately as their continued use serves to heighten the danger for civilians for years to come,” Goose said.

Additional information about cluster munitions attacks in Nagorno-Karabakh

Human Rights Watch identified the remnants of Israeli-produced LAR-160 series cluster munition rockets and unexploded M095 dual-purpose submunitions in Stepanakert and Hadrut. Each rocket carries 104 submunitions and each submunition is equipped with a self-destruct mechanism. Azerbaijan received these surface-to-surface rockets and launchers from Israel in 2008–2009. Neither Armenia, nor Nagorno-Karabakh de-facto authorities, are known to stockpile cluster munitions but they possess multi-barrel rocket launchers capable of delivering these weapons.

Human Rights Watch identified the Israeli-produced M095 dual-purpose submunition in each location. When this submunition detonates on impact, it produces lethal pre-formed metal fragments and a jet of molten metal intended to destroy vehicles and materiel. Human Rights Watch observed hundreds of the distinctive impacts of M095 submunitions as well as remnants of the pink-colored nylon stabilization ribbons in three neighborhoods in Stepanakert.

On October 13, Human Rights Watch visited the site where the witness saw and photographed the burning shop at 11:20 p.m. on October 3 and observed the same scorched building visible in the photograph and at least three pink stabilization ribbons a few meters away from the building as well as numerous distinctive impacts consistent with M095 submunitions. Human Rights Watch found remnants of a LAR-160 rocket 10 meters from the building and observed impacts to the roof of the building that were consistent with kinetic damage. According to available satellite imagery, the attack took place between September 27 and October 8. On October 8, the imagery shows damage to the building that is consistent with fire.

In the attack on Hakob Hakobyan Street, the distinctive auditory signature of at least three separate rockets dispersing payloads of submunitions, and their subsequent detonations can be heard in the video of the attack, believed to have been filmed by a vehicle’s dashcam. On October 12, Human Rights Watch visited the site where the video was taken and counted over 100 individual impacts on the same street. Human Rights Watch also observed scores of submunition impacts on immediately adjacent streets and on rooftops of office and residential buildings on several adjacent streets within a 100-meter radius. In a separate visit on October 13, Human Rights Watch found the remnants of a LAR-160 series rocket less than 100 meters from the location the video of the attack was taken. Human Rights Watch observed damage to power lines, children’s playgrounds, vehicles, businesses, homes, the main post office, and the Karabakh Telecom building.

Via Human Rights Watch

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Reuters: “New clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh after Washington talks”

A number of artillery shells and rockets have recently landed in Iranian territory, including a residential area, only kilometers away from the battle zone, Iranian officials and media have reported.

Tehran is playing a delicate balancing act between its two neighbors, taking an official neutral stance while calling for an end to the hostilities and a dialogue between the countries despite strong domestic pressure for the Islamic republic to fully support Azerbaijan.

Iran shares a border with both Armenia and Azerbaijan. (file photo).

Tehran has assured Azerbaijan that it recognizes its territorial integrity — the ethnic-Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani land — and has also denied as “baseless rumors” reports claiming that it was assisting Armenia, which has traditionally shared strong ties with Tehran.

“We have very good relations with both nations,” Iranian President Hassan Rohani said on October 7, referring to Azerbaijan as a brother nation and Armenia as a neighbor. “The war should come to an end. We hope stability returns to the region.”

Growing Concern

An offer to mediate, expressions of concern, and visits by officials to the border region highlight Tehran’s growing concern over the fighting, which Rohani warned on October 7 could turn into a regional war.

A wider conflict could have unpredictable consequences for the Islamic republic, which has been working to keep its borders secure while engaging in proxy wars across the region.

“We won’t allow in all these years that we have been fighting — [assassinated commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps elite Quds force Qasem] Soleimani has been…fighting to eradicate terrorists there so that they don’t come near our borders,” Rohani said earlier this week.

“Some are trying to bring terrorists from Syria to locations near [Iran’s] borders,” Rohani said, an apparent reference to reports that Turkey had recruited Islamist fighters to go to Azerbaijan and help in the war.

“It is unacceptable,” said Rohani, refraining from naming any specific country.

French President Emmanuel Macron has specifically accused Ankara of sending “Syrian fighters from Jihadist groups” to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh amid concerns that Turkey, a close ally of Azerbaijan, and Russia, which has a military base in Armenia, could be pitted against each other.

The two countries have backed different warring sides in Syria — where Iran has been propping up the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — as well as in Libya.

Touraj Atabaki, professor emeritus and chairman of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University, said that, for Iran, the growing presence in the region of its chief enemy, Israel, is a major source of concern.

Israel is a major arms supplier to Azerbaijan, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Azerbaijan has acknowledged using Israeli-made attack drones — or “kamikaze drones” — during the recent fighting with Armenian forces.

“The presence of Israel, although implicitly is a cause of concern for Iran, we see [Israel’s] shadow in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, therefore the Islamic republic wants to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible,”Atabaki told RFE/RL.

“The Islamic republic fears the consequences of a war, which could turn into a proxy conflict and Tehran could be dragged into it,” he said.

Speaking to the daily Hamshahri, Seyed Ali Saghaian, a former Iranian ambassador to Armenia, said the main reason for the current conflict are “third-party elements, particularly the Zionist regime,” a term used by Iranian officials to refer to Israel.

“Regional and transregional third-party elements are seeking influence and have prevented the resolution of the crisis,” Saghaian said.

With a large Azeri minority of an estimated 20 million — as well as over 100,000 Armenians — living in the country, Tehran is also wary of ethnic and social tensions at a time of economic crisis caused by crippling U.S. sanctions and state mismanagement that have caused widespread public dissatisfaction.

Protests In Several Cities

Earlier this week protests were reported in several Iranian cities — including the capital, Tehran, and the northwestern city of Tabriz — in support of Azerbaijan.

The protests came as four representatives of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who is an ethnic Azeri — in four of the country’s provinces with a large ethnic Azeri populations released a joint statement in support of Baku.

Protests Erupt In Iran Backing Azerbaijan In Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

The statement by Khamenei’s representatives in the provinces of West and East Azerbaijan, Ardebil, and Zanjan said that “there is no doubt” that the breakaway region belongs to Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Khamenei, accused Armenia of “occupying” Nagorno-Karabakh while calling on Yerevan to withdraw its forces.

“We call on Armenia to return those occupied parts to the Republic of Azerbaijan,” Velayati said in an October 6 interview with the hard-line daily Kayhan.

“More than 1 million [Azerbaijanis] have been displaced after the occupation of those areas and must return home soon,” he added.

A day later, government spokesman Ali Rabei urged Armenia to pull its forces from Nagorno-Karabakh while reiterating Iran’s stance that the conflict does not have a military solution.

“We want peace and dialogue in the region, with an evacuation from occupied territories and respect for Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity,” he said.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

( Middle East Monitor) – While most attention is focused on the positions of Russia and Turkey in the ongoing conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Iran receives less attention. The former are the direct regional sponsors of the Armenian and Azeri parties to the crisis, but Iran is likely to be the most affected by the outcome. In addition to having long land borders with the two parties to the conflict, there is also a large Azeri minority in Iran; more, in fact, than actually live in Azerbaijan itself.

Since the beginning of the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Iran has taken a pro-Armenian stance, even though the majority of the Azeri population are Shia (but religion does not play an important role in their lives). While Iran has presented itself as a mediator in the current fighting, today it has political, economic and geopolitical reasons to prevent Azerbaijan from achieving a military victory.

An Azerbaijani victory would mean that around 130 kilometres would be added to Iran’s borders with its neighbour. Tehran fears that this will lead to a rise in separatism among its millions of Azeri citizens, especially since a group in Azerbaijan believes that Iran is occupying “southern Azerbaijan” in the Iranian provinces of East and West Azerbaijan. The same group calls for the establishment of Greater Azerbaijan, to include all Azerbaijanis on both sides of the border with Iran. Tehran now fears that an Azeri victory in the war with Armenia will necessarily strengthen Turkey’s influence in the Southern Caucasus — the Azeris are a Turkic people — and feed its general regional rise. This is a concern for Iran, which has its own influence in the region to consider.

Moreover, Iran is looking uneasily at the energy projects that Turkey is establishing with or through Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, with the aim of delivering oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to European markets. This would reduce Turkey’s dependence on gas and oil from Iran and Russia, and Tehran believes that this also reduces the importance of its own future projects and undermines its ambition to be a major energy source for Europe. The three existing energy pipelines from the Caspian to Turkey all avoid passing through Iranian and Russian territory. For Iran — and Russia too — it is important for Nagorno-Karabakh to remain in Armenian hands because it overlooks the valley through which Azerbaijan pumps 80 per cent of its oil and gas exports. The thinking is that this can be threatened if the need arises to put pressure on Turkey and Europe.

While the Azerbaijani-Turkish relationship is a source of confusion in Tehran, this also applies to Azerbaijan’s inclination to become a centre for NATO on the Caspian Sea, especially if it emerges as an ally that can be relied upon if it is victorious over Armenia. Iran relies on the French position in support of Armenia to curb Azerbaijan’s attempted rapprochement with the West, but this may not succeed in light of French-American disagreement on a number of issues, not least about Iran itself, as well as Lebanon, Libya and the rise of Turkey as a regional force.

No less important than all of this is Iran’s apprehension about the relationship between Israel and Azerbaijan, and the heavy Israeli security presence in Baku. Some in Iran accuse Azerbaijan of being the source of most of the attacks on vital Iranian installations, especially the Natanz nuclear facility last summer. With the UAE normalising its relations with Israel, Iran is threatened by the Israeli presence in Azerbaijan to the north and the Gulf in the south.

At this stage, Iran’s interests are limited to preventing the spread of violence across the border into its own territory, and possibly a wave of displaced persons. It is considering all of these factors as it monitors the development of the conflict on its northern borders.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed on 7 September 2020

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Nagorno-Karabakh: Armenia, Azerbaijan in Moscow for talks”

There are reports that Ankara transferred its proxies from Syria and Libya to fight the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh – a region of Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Yerevan since the conclusion of war in 1994. Turkey, however, denied such accusations. On the other hand, there are claims that Armenia is attempting to transfer hundreds of Kurdish fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan to Nagorno-Karabakh via Iran.

The Iranian state has long been firmly allied with Armenia, and is in danger of being drawn into the conflict, as unconfirmed video circulated appearing to show that Iran had shot down an Azerbaijani drone that entered its territory. Although some Iranian clerics reportedly urged their country to support fellow Shiia Azeris, Tehran ironically enough aligns with Christian Armenia. It is worth noting that, according to Iranian reports, during heavy clashes between the Azerbaijani Armed Forces and Armenia-sponsored Artsakh troops several rockets landed in Iranian villages near the line-of-contact between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Tehran had to deny that it allowed the passage of Russian weapons bound for Armenia after unverified video footages were posted on social media.

Russia is also Armenia’s ally, since Yerevan is a member of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), although that does not necessarily mean that Russia will directly get involved into the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Key Article 4 of the Treaty, “if one of the States Parties is subjected to aggression by any state or group of states, then this will be considered as aggression against all States Parties to this Treaty”. However, Azerbaijan attacked the Armenia backed self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, not Armenia itself, which is why for Moscow hostilities in the disputed region are seen as a showdown between Armenians and Azerbaijanis for control over Nagorno-Karabakh. In other words, Russia is attempting to maintain good relations with both, Yerevan and Baku. Although the two sides are de facto at war, as they both declared martial law and mobilization, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan turned up on the same Russian primetime TV show to explain their positions on the conflict.

The Kremlin is still trying to portray itself as a key mediator in this decades old conflict, as any changes on the ground would ruin not only Moscow’s reputation, but also its lucrative position. Over the years, Russia has been selling weapons to both, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and even though Yerevan is a member of Russia-dominated Eurasian Union, the trade turnover between Russia and Azerbaijan reached $3 billion in 2019, which is much higher than the trade balance Moscow has with Armenia. Also, Azerbaijan is an energy-rich country, and two pipelines that carry oil and gas from the former Soviet republic westward through the Caucasus both pass near the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

In case the conflict spills over the borders of the disputed territory, the very existence of the energy corridors could be under threat. Still, at least at this point, such an option does not seem very likely as that would have a strong impact on Turkey’s energy supplies. Natural gas and crude oil, rather than alleged Neo-Ottoman and Pan-Islamic ambitions, are the key reasons for Turkish explicit support to Azerbaijan, as Ankara aims to reduce its dependency on Russian energy. That is why, for Turkey, Baku is the most important partner in the Caucasus and Ankara remains one of the most important buyers of the Azeri energy.

Russia’s interests in the region are also based mostly on energy. The Kremlin aims to prevent the construction of the Trans-Caspian pipeline, as well as Southern Gas Corridor, as such projects would bypass the Russian Federation and undermine the country’s influence in the Caucasus. As long as there are hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia, flawless gas and oil supplies to Europe via Turkey will be under threat. Since Azerbaijan’s oil reserves are expected to last for 30 more years, in the long term foreign actors will likely manage to resolve the conflict in the region, one way or another. In spite of harsh rhetoric from the Turkish side, Ankara is expected to eventually agree to ease tensions, especially if the Azeri forces do not make any significant progress on the ground.

Finally, it is worth remembering that Turkey pushed its proxies in Libya to capture the energy-rich Sirte province, but after Russia, Egypt France and the United Arab Emirates warned Ankara not to cross the “red line”, none of the sides managed to break the stalemate in the conflict over the North African country. Given that the Nagorno-Karabakh war has been treated as a frozen conflict over the past 26 years, it is very unlikely that situation on the ground will radically change without wide deals between Russia and Turkey.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

RFE/RL: “Turkish-Russian Rivalry Influences Azerbaijan-Armenia Fighting”