How tensions simmered for 26 years
Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict started with tough talk, grudge
TERTER, Azerbaijan — For years, the leaders of Armenia had spoken carefully and ambiguously about the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, to avoid inflaming passions in Azerbaijan.
But that changed this spring, when the populist prime minister declared the area Armenian.
To Azerbaijanis, who lost a bitter, unresolved war with Armenia over the region in the 1990s, the remark by the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, landed with explosive force. Even more infuriating, it was delivered in Shusha, a city that Azerbaijanis regard as their cultural capital but that lies in territory lost during the war.
“The final nail in the coffin of the negotiation process was when he said that NagornoKarabakh was Armenian,” said Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign policy adviser to the Azerbaijani president.
The two countries returned to all-out war a month ago, with Azerbaijan determined to retake the roughly 13% of its land that Armenia seized 26 years ago, displacing 800,000 Azerbaijanis in the process. The fighting threatens to draw in Turkey, on the Azerbaijani side, and Russia, which backs Armenia.
Casualties in the conflict have already mounted into the thousands, but as his troops make advances, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, is showing no signs of slowing down, and the country is gripped with war fever.
A cease-fire mediated in Washington last weekend was broken within an hour of going into effect as both sides traded artillery fire Monday.
Aliyev is demanding that Armenian forces withdraw to internationally recognized borders in keeping with U.N. Security Council resolutions and basic principles agreed to in previous negotiations. These were the terms agreed upon 10 years ago but never implemented, and analysts say that Armenia became less ambiguous this year about claiming territory seized during the war.
Independent analysts largely see Azerbaijan as the main driver of the war, saying it prepared a major offensive, but add that Pashinyan pushed the envelope
with his populist talk.
“It’s logical that Azerbaijan wanted to start this, not the Armenians, whomerely want the status quo,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe and author of “Black Garden,” a book on Nagorno-Karabakh. “But the Armenians also played their part with provocative moves.”
The Armenian government has accused Azerbaijan of mounting a planned offensive and of instigating the clashes that led to all-out war, and says it is acting in self-defense.
Russia has been a crucial presence backing Armenia. It supported Armenia in the original conflict, maintains two military bases in the country and has provided support and equip
ment.
Since the moribund truce in 2009, leaders of both countries proceeded carefully, believing it was politically safer to stick with the status quo than risk the territorial compromises that a peace deal would demand, de Waal said.
All the while, Aliyev, who inherited the presidency from his father in 2003, was using his country’s oil and gas wealth to build up the military, purchasing advanced weapons and sending officers for NATO-standard training in Turkey.
The rearming effort seemed to bear fruit in 2016, when in four days of fighting Azerbaijani forces seized control of a village just over the cease-fire line. But Russia intervened to stop the advance, said Farid Shafiyev, a former diplomat and director of the government-funded Center for Analysis of International Relations in Baku.
The popular disappointment at that time was palpable, he said. He noticed the same public reaction when Russia negotiated a cease-fire Oct. 10, just two weeks into the latest fighting.
“People were very depressed,” he said.
The immediate spark for the current conflict came in July, in a deadly clash near the border town of Tovuz, where Azerbaijan’s vital oil and gas pipelines run on their way to Georgia and Turkey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey regarded the clash at Tovuz as a strategic threat to Azerbaijan and dispatched jets and troops for two weeks of joint military exercises with the Azerbaijani military.
Turkish analysts saw Erdogan’s move as a way to gain leverage in his dealings with Russia. But protecting his Turkic ally, which recently replaced Russia as Turkey’s main source of natural gas, was also important.
“It is a cliché that Turkey was instigating it,” Shafiyev, of the Center for Analysis of International Relations, said of Azerbaijan’s venture into war.
But he confirmed, as both Erdogan and Aliyev have since, that Turkey has promised active support if Azerbaijan were to run into difficulties.
In August, the Azerbaijani authorities said the army had detained Armenian troops making another cross-border foray.
“We understood something was coming,” Hajiyev said.
After years of trading sporadic artillery fire, both sides were poised and ready for more by September.
Villagers living on the Azerbaijani side of the cease-fire line near the town of Terter were forewarned by the Azerbaijani military Sept. 26. Some who had cars left in the night. Those who stayed described a barrage of Armenian rockets the following morning.
“We hear shelling all the time, but this was completely different,” said Gulbeniz Badalova, 59, wholives in Terter, just 500 yards from the cease-fire line. “They started to fire continuously, and we all got scared.”
Azerbaijani troops have already retaken parts of four southern districts along the border with Iran and have come within striking distance of the Lachin corridor, a mountain pass that is a critical supply route from Armenia.
But there is little doubt that it has been tough going for Azerbaijani forces.
Baku has not released numbers of military casualties, but Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia said last week that each side had already lost more than 2,000 soldiers in less than a month of fighting. Missile strikes have also killed at least 65 civilians from Azerbaijan and 37 from Armenia, according to official figures from both sides.
Public support for the offensive remains solidly behind Aliyev and the army, but the president could face a difficult job managing expectations.
Many Azerbaijani families displaced by the shelling in Terter are originally refugees from Karabakh, and said they would not be satisfied if Aliyev halted after taking only a few districts.
“It’s not enough,” Zarifa Suleymanova, 43, said, before listing all the regions Azerbaijan needed back. “We have very brave sons. It will not take long.”