Defending revolution

Angela Harutyunyan Armenia, one of the few nations to overthrow a corrupt ruling elite and embark on the process of democratization in the past decade, now risks losing the gains of its "Velvet Revolution" to an AzerbaijaniTurkish territorial assault.

Armenia's revolution of 2018 was neither globally acknowledged nor championed by Western democracies, which normally favor democratic regime change in post-Soviet countries. But small states struggling for sovereignty and democratic regime change should take note of the struggle of Armenia today, as the autocratic leader of Azerbaijan speaks openly about his desire for Armenia's return to its old corrupt regime.

On September 27, as Armenia was pressing ahead with the reconstruction of its social and political institutions in the midst of a global pandemic, Azerbaijan launched an offensive unprecedented since the 1990s aimed at seizing the ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh.

In the last 25 years, hostilities of varied intensity have periodically broken out between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the specter of a large-scale war haunting both countries. In April 2016, the two Caucasus republics faced each other during a four-day war that resulted in dozens of casualties on both sides. And in July of this year, Azerbaijan directly threatened the borders of the sovereign Armenian state.

This time, it quickly became clear that this was not one of the business-as-usual clashes to which the two sides have been accustomed since the 1994 ceasefire.

The arsenal deployed by Azerbaijan was unprecedented: unmanned drones, ballistic missiles such as multiple launch and selfpropelled rocket systems, as well as USmade F-16 fighter planes from the Turkish Air Force, according to reliable reports. Some of these weapons such as the Israeli LORA ballistic missile are being "tested" for the first time ever.

That the war was reaching unprecedented dimensions has been confirmed, as Syrian mercenaries have been transported to Azerbaijan and sent to the Azerbaijani front lines. A number of countries with the resources to verify this - Russia, France and the US - acknowledged that fact.

The Armenian side also claimed it had evidence that the Azerbaijani Air Forces jet fighters involved in the military operations had been placed directly under the command of officers from Turkey.

Armenia reacted swiftly and decisively to the violation of the ceasefire by declaring martial law in the country and instituted general mobilization.

Yet Armenia's strategic partner, Russia, which has military bases in the west and south of the country, has not acted in Armenia's defense. Western countries, including those involved in the international mediation process, released general and ineffective statements that called upon the sides to halt the military operations.

As Azerbaijan undertook the intense shelling of civilian settlements and

Nagorno-Karabakh's capital Stepanakert, Armenians saw that the very right to survival of Karabakh Armenians was at stake.

For a nation that survived the first genocide of the 20th century at the hands of Turkey, the direct involvement of the latter in the conflict had frightening reverberations. Armenians yet again directed their attention to their precarious place on the map between two Turkic nations, especially given the identification of Turkey and Azerbaijan on ethnic grounds.

What awaits them, should they be defeatis ethnic cleansing. The authoritarian

ed, regime of Azerbaijan has fed its people militaristic, hate-filled rhetoric as a means of quieting possible domestic strife while amassing extreme wealth through petrodollars.

The conflict has wider, regional and international implications; its geopolitical dimensions are becoming increasingly manifest within the context of Turkey's most recent aggressive meddling in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean seas, the Middle East in general, as well as in Libya.

Nevertheless, the questions still emerge: Why now? Why launch a large-scale war in the midst of a global pandemic? Why has Russia issued only vague statements as Turkey threatens an area traditionally within its zone of direct influence?

The answer should be sought in the recent political and social processes in Armenia in the wake of the successful 2018 revolution.

That revolution brought a democratically elected leader, Nikol Pashinyan, and his party to power with unprecedented popular support. As one of the few, if not the only, revolutions in the last decade that reached its goal of regime change, and did so peacefully, the Velvet Revolution got rid of the oligarchic elite that had been holding the country hostage through rigged elections and mafia-style politics of governance.

The Velvet Revolution was neither a "color revolution" supported by the West or "Soros," the scarecrow that the authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet sphere have constructed as the epitome of espionage, immorality and so on, nor a coup sponsored by some third country. This is largely the reason Western democracies did not embrace it, let alone champion it.

Angela Harutyunyan