Karabakh – One More Argument Against Iran

In our previous review, we talked about the Iran problem, or more precisely, whether the United States, Israel and their allies would attack Iran. Will Iran share the fates of Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia and others, where direct attacks, coups and immediate dissolutions of power created hotbeds of instability where no centralized power could exist? Washington and Brussels learned a long time ago how to act without regard for their fellow states and the standards of international diplomacy. The United States and NATO have never needed the U.N.’s approval to act, and they are ready to attack anyone who fails to please them. In this climate, the only guarantee of national security is a powerful military or, better yet, a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The United States has not decided to directly attack Iran. Ultimately, every American president’s primary concern is how to extend his time in power, which is a goal that is contingent upon the public’s support. Today, the fact of the matter is that the public is not too keen on indiscriminate American intervention in all conflicts and regional wars, in which Americans usually bear the most notable losses.

A glance at the recent past brings to mind Vietnam, where the United States suffered a humiliating defeat. Now at the forefront of the anti-war movement are yesterday’s heroes, the veterans of the Afghan war. And then there was Iraq, where the Americans unsuccessfully looked for chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. It all ended with the execution of Saddam Hussein and the complete collapse of what had once been a prosperous country. The invasion of Afghanistan was explained as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent desire to punish al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden. He was eliminated without a trial or investigation, but coalition troops are still stationed in Afghanistan. And let us not forget Yugoslavia, which was simply bombed and dismembered without any land invasion.

The events in South Ossetia in Aug. 2008 were also not without the participation of the United States and its allies. The American administration can go on for years about how they were against the military advances of Mikheil Saakashvili’s regime. But even Americans doubt this version of the story, as it has been proven that the United States not only trained Georgian soldiers, but also supplied Georgia with arms and money for military operations.

Barack Obama is running for re-election, and if the United States were to suddenly attack Iran, the presidency would be out of reach for even his considerably sized ears. To attack Iran would require good reason, and the public needs to be convinced that the war is completely essential. Concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons program are moot because the painful memory of Iraq still looms, and so Washington strategists have begun to look for new justifications for forays into Iran. It seems that one of the main justifications for further action in Iran lies with America’s fanning of the veritable ring of fire surrounding the Middle Eastern country. And by and large, this strategy has been largely successful. A not-quite-civil war continues to rage in Afghanistan, Iran has erupted into deadly interfaith violence, and the civil war in Syria has also garnered the attention of the Americans, who want to “pacify” the situation as they did in Iraq. Meanwhile, Turkey is increasingly being drawn into this conflict, and the Kurds, packed into Iraq, Iran and Turkey, constantly provoke a military response.

However, there seems to be little to work with for the orchestrators of these new large-scale military adventures. They need new hotspots and might have found one in the ever-more frequent reports of violence in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. Clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis here have been increasing in frequency, and it seems that something is always happening on the Karabakh border. The death toll is rising, and many experts are not ruling out the possibility that the situation could soon erupt into war.

Tensions between Baku and Yerevan have quickly reached unprecedented heights in recent months. Terrorist attacks have been thwarted not only on the Karabakh border, but also on the borders of other Azerbaijani and Armenian areas. Washington, Paris and Ankara reacted in tandem, calling on both sides to put an end to the escalating violence. Until then, Russia had remained silent on the matter.

Armenia and Azerbaijan outright blamed one another for the exacerbation of the conflict. The members of the Minsk group, who had served as mediators in the negotiations between the two countries, have also come under fire for passively allowing the situation to fester. The Azerbaijani leadership recently issued a statement unprecedented in its aggression, saying that “10 days is enough for our army to liberate the occupied territories and reach the national borders of Iran and Armenia. We will only stop when we decide that we want to end the bloodshed and suffering.”

The Armenian media declared that such statements undeniably prove their neighbor’s aggressive plans. “Azerbaijan can try to distort the facts as they please, but their motives are transparent. Attacks have been thwarted on Armenian soil. Baku can also issue warlike statements as it pleases; they do not scare us. We are always ready to defend ourselves, but we only want a quiet, peaceful life,” said David Babayan, the spokesperson for Nagorno-Karabakh’s president. “After a series of Azerbaijani provocations, we have the right to expect that the U.S. Department of State will amend their strategy with regard to settling the conflict here. Azerbaijan regularly violates the ceasefire and kills Armenian soldiers but still manages to keep their temporary spot on the U.N. Security Council. It’s absurd. The United States must reassess the situation and change their position on the matter. And truth be told, this will probably end up being the case.”

According to the Nagorno-Karabakh Ministry of Defense's Press Secretary Senor Astaryan, the ceasefire has been violated 5,000 times. In June alone, the Azerbaijani side undertook six covert reconnaissance missions and consequently lost more than 20 soldiers. Since January, Azerbaijan has reported 52 conflict-related fatalities. The Armenians have also born losses, and though they have counted smaller numbers of dead, Armenia lost eight soldiers in the most recent battle. Western experts have grown uneasy about the events in South Caucasus. They believe that both sides will continue to retaliate with every single death. The vicious cycle will lead to large-scale military actions, and neither side will be able to simply win the war quickly or launch a full-scale retreat. Moreover, a number of analysts predict that the conflict will become a war before the next round of negotiations can even begin.

The Armenian side does not discount the possibility of intervention by the intergovernmental Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), mainly because of the direct nature of the provocations against Armenia, which counts itself as a member of the organization along with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. However, many remain skeptical about an intervention by the CSTO. “Bringing third-party troops into a conflict zone isn’t so simple. That kind of action requires the consent of all sides of the conflict and the participants in the negotiations. The appropriate agreements have to be signed, a ton of nuances have to be picked over, and so on and so forth.”*

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan recently spoke about the difficult situation. He believes that if any military provocations are sanctioned by the Azerbaijani government, then the government must take full responsibility for the current events. Otherwise, Azerbaijan’s armed forces are no longer under the control of the central government, and then Armenia must be prepared to talk to the field commanders and not the high command of the Azerbaijani military. “I have always said that provocation in the line of contact is extremely dangerous. I have also said that they will face strong retaliation. The incidents of the past days testify to this,” he said. “Armenia does not want the situation to escalate, but we will not stop until we get answers and justice for our citizens, our borders and the Nagorno-Karabakh region.”

It is impossible to talk about the criticisms of the mediators of the negotiations without mentioning the role of the U.S. Department of State in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Fresh from her recent visits to Baku and Yerevan, Hillary Clinton expressed concern about the situation, albeit with extremely measured caution. A source close to the Azerbaijani government suggested that the U.S. State Department, along with the co-chairs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, has ruled out the possibility of a military solution to the conflict, though they still are not taking any steps to remedy the current situation. If the U.S. Department of State is both genuinely concerned about tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan and interested in the stabilization of Turkish-Armenian relations, then Clinton should take a firm, principled position on the question of a diplomatic settlement, paying special attention to the implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolution to increase pressure on the occupying country, in this case Armenia.”* There should also be a key addition to the resolution that notes the inconsistencies between the U.N.’s positions on South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 and that of the current situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Meetings in Paris between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Moscow and the countries’ respective heads of foreign affairs failed to yield anything new. They run in circles, defending their own country’s innocence and placing all the blame on the other country. A different format was necessary.

With the ultimate goal of the diffusion of tensions between the two countries in mind, Armenia and Azerbaijan met with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Chairman Eamon Gilmore. He spoke a lot about peace, horror and the inadmissibility of bloodshed, among other indisputably correct things. However, everyone in Baku and Yerevan has heard this lecture far more than a handful of times in the past year, and as mediator, Mr. Gilmore had to listen to the cases of the two countries. Baku came down especially hard, as Azerbaijan has long claimed that the Minsk Group maintains the status quo (and enables the tightening of the current military situation) in Armenia’s favor. Azerbaijan has begun to insist on changing not only the format of the negotiations but also the affiliations of the negotiators.

Gilmore also had a hard time in Yerevan. And while Armenia maintains a better relationship with the Minsk group, there was still a host of unpleasant questions. One especially unpleasant question for Gilmore asked about his announcement in Baku that he had no plans to visit the “unrecognized” republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Another commentator pointed out to Gilmore that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe tends to have a bias in interpreting current events in the Caucasus. There was the accusation that the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict was not being taken seriously because of the ever-present Iranian threat. And finally, there was the question about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s silence on the burgeoning Azerbaijani-Israeli military collaboration, exemplified by Baku’s recent purchase of $2 billion worth of arms from Israel and the sale to Israel of Azerbaijani air bases from the Soviet-era.

However, the military exchanges between Israel and Azerbaijan do not seem to be casting a shadow on Armenian-Israeli relations. In order to align the positions of the two countries, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recently made a drastic change in his former policy of not recognizing the Armenian genocide. Even the Knesset has become concerned with the discussion and recognition of the tragedy; it was decided on the floor of the parliament that it was time to “amend the historical injustice.” And when as many as seven parliamentary factions spoke for the recognition of the Armenian genocide, it made an enormous impression on the director of ecumenical and foreign relations for the Armenian patriarchate of Jerusalem, Archbishop Aris Shirvanian. “The very act of discussion showed that the Israeli government has given the green light and does not oppose the recognition of the genocide,” the archbishop said.

However, this is a rather optimistic outlook. It is more likely that Israel took this unexpected position in spite of Turkey, where controversy has long been brewing. Ankara is very sluggish to respond to these developments, and the Turkish government is convinced that Israel will never officially recognize the Armenian genocide. The Turks also maintain that they are capable of building relationships with Armenia on their own and without the help of third-party mediators. “We’re moving forward in this area, even if no one is talking about it,” a source in Ankara said.

It is clear that while Turkey will never undermine Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, they will be slow to take a firm and public position. After the events of Aug. 2008, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insisted that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev “forget about the recurrence of a Nagorno-Karabakh war.” However, it would be unrealistic to say that relations between Ankara and Baku have been a walk in the park. Several experts compare their relationship to that between Moscow and Minsk, or even to that between Moscow and Kiev. Turkey does not like the increasingly close relations between Azerbaijan and Israel (especially regarding the exchange of military goods between the two countries). There are other disagreements as well.

Meanwhile, Moscow can’t help but be worried by the events in the Caucasus. Azerbaijan’s large-scale purchase of Israeli weapons coincided with a warning from the Russian Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance about a possible ban on the Russian import of fruits and vegetables from Azerbaijan. (Such action was previously taken against Georgian and Moldovan visas and agricultural products, as well as Tajik dried fruit.) Perhaps it was a coincidence, but it must be noted that Armenia is one of Russia’s strategic partners, and Iran has become an important counterweight to the West by default. It is not without reason that Russia blocks every U.N. Security Council resolution that deal with this country. Military personnel on the base in the Armenian city of Gyumri have intensified their rifle training, and pilots have considerably increased their practice flight hours. You cannot possibly call this an accident.

If war does indeed break out in Karabakh, it will signify that the fate of Iran is predetermined, and the country will face a most serious military force when the time comes. The noose around this country, in which the people, by the way, speak a language in our shared linguistic family, is tightening.

Recently, a delegation headed by Vice-Speaker of the Republic of South Ossetia Mira Tskhovrebova visited Stepanakert, the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. They were received at the highest level and considered their allies and partners. The delegation took part in a number of events, one of which touched upon the 20th anniversary of the capture of the Karabakh town of Shusha, an event that became a major turning point in the Armenian-Azerbaijani war. On this occasion, the military parade made a great impression on all. Many consider the Karabakh army to be the most efficient and combat-ready country in South Caucasus, and no matter how much Azerbaijan arms itself at the expense of its petrodollars and the involvement of Turkish and Israeli military specialists, they will never see an easy victory here. However, we must all hope that reason will prevail and that the worst will never happen.

*Translator’s Note: The following quotes are not attributed in the original article.