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New York Times
Jan 31 2015
Clashes Intensify Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Over Disputed Land
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORNJAN. 31, 2015
AGDAM, Azerbaijan -- Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another
armed conflict in the former Soviet Union -- between Armenia and
Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh -- has escalated with
deadly ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each
side and pushing the countries perilously close to open war.
The month of January was heavily stained by blood, with repeated gun
battles and volleys of artillery and rocket fire. Two Armenian
soldiers were killed and several wounded in a fierce gunfight on Jan.
23 along the conflict's northern front. That set off a weekend of
violence including grenade and mortar attacks that killed at least
three Azerbaijani soldiers.
The most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by
international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the
Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.
"The rise in violence that began last year must stop," the mediators,
from France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement,
adding, "We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a
peaceful resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take
all measures to reduce tensions."
Instead, the violence has continued.
On Thursday, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said it had shot down a
drone not far from Agdam, an Azerbaijani city that was once home to
more than 40,000 people but has been a ghost town for more than 20
years since its occupation by Armenian forces.
Tensions are expected to grow even further this year as Armenia
prepares to commemorate in April the 100th anniversary of the genocide
against Armenians in Turkey.
While the fighting here often seems to be an isolated dispute over a
mountainous patch of land that no one else wants -- roughly midway
between the Armenian capital, Yerevan, and the Azerbaijani capital,
Baku -- the conflict poses an ever-present danger by threatening to
draw in bigger powers, including Russia, Turkey and Iran.
It also provides a chilling warning of what could be in store for
Ukraine, where many fear Russia is intent on turning the eastern
regions of Donetsk and Luhansk into a similar permanent war zone.
The recent flare in fighting has been fueled by a quiet arms race, in
which both countries -- but especially oil-rich Azerbaijan -- have built
up arsenals of ever more powerful weapons.
Russia is the main supplier to each side, even as it claims a
leadership role in international peace negotiations, known as the
Minsk Group process, which it chairs with the United States and
France.
In recent weeks, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has upped the
ante, demanding that the Minsk Group leaders take steps to force
Armenia to withdraw from Azerbaijani lands -- nearly one-fifth of
Azerbaijan's internationally-recognized territory -- that it has
occupied since a truce was signed in 1994.
"Measures must be taken," Mr. Aliyev said in a speech to government
ministers in January. "The truth is that the continued occupation of
our lands is not just the work of Armenia. Armenia is a powerless and
poor country. It is in a helpless state. Of course, if it didn't have
major patrons in various capitals, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would
have been resolved fairly long ago."
Continue reading the main story
In his speech, Mr. Aliyev warned darkly that Azerbaijan, which has an
economy seven times larger than Armenia's, planned this year to spend
more than double Armenia's entire annual budget of $2.7 billion on
strengthening its military.
President Serzh Sargsyan has responded with his own threats. "The
hotheads should expect surprises," Mr. Sargsyan said at a recent
military ceremony.
The dangerous consequences of the arms buildup were on full display in
November as Azerbaijan shot down an Mi-24 attack helicopter as it flew
just north of Agdam along the cease-fire line, killing three Armenian
soldiers on board.
The wreckage fell in the region near Agdam that has served as a buffer
zone since the 1994 truce, and for days the three bodies lay in the
open as Armenian forces seeking to recover their fallen comrades were
repelled by gunfire.
"This is as bad as it has got since the cease-fire," said Thomas de
Waal, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, whose book "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan
Through Peace and War" is widely regarded as the most authoritative
account of the Karabakh conflict.
"Fifteen years ago it was still bad but it was just a bunch of
trenches with a bunch of soldiers leaning over them with some guns,"
Mr. de Waal said. "Now, you have this massive heavy weaponry on either
side, sometimes only 100 yards from each other, with these drones and
so forth."
He added, "The stakes get higher every year, and the chances of
miscalculation get higher as well."
With tensions mounting, visits to each side of the front line, and
interviews with senior government and military officials, as well as
conversations with dozens of residents, refugees, war veterans,
soldiers, local officials, academics, civic activists and even
schoolchildren, found the two sides bracing for war, and neither
expecting nor prepared for peace.
"We have a saying," said Col. Abdulla Qurbani, a senior official in
the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry, while on a tour of the Azerbaijan
side of the line of contact. "When water mixes with earth, this is
mud. When blood mixes with earth, this is motherland."
Across the line in Shushi, a city whose Azerbaijani residents were
forced to flee during the war, an Armenian woman, Anaida Gabrielyan,
said: "Our land is soaked in blood. Every millimeter is soaked in
grief."
Since fighting began in the late 1980s, it has killed tens of
thousands of people and displaced more than a million, many of whom
have been living as refugees for more than 20 years.
The increased firepower is not the only reason the conflict has grown
more dangerous and more intractable.
The fight is rooted in religious hatreds -- real and imagined -- between
Christian Armenia and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan.
And a new generation of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, including the
soldiers now serving on the front line, cannot remember when their
parents and grandparents lived peacefully as neighbors -- before
Armenians were purged from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis were forced
from the areas now occupied by Armenia.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, where the majority Armenian population
declared an independent republic after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, are hamstrung by their unrecognized status, which prohibits
most international trade.
The republic is largely viewed as a puppet extension of Armenia, with
its residents traveling abroad on Armenian passports and many Armenian
officials, including President Sargsyan, having been born in
Nagorno-Karabakh and having previously held government posts there.
In casual conversations, it was not uncommon for Azerbaijanis to deny
that the Armenian genocide occurred, or for Armenians to insist that
Azerbaijanis were not a real nation and had no legitimate ties to
lands they had lived on for centuries.
"This is our land, our homeland, and we will always protect it," said
Gayane Gevorgyan, an Armenian and the mother of two young children who
now lives in Shushi, a city that before the war had a majority
Azerbaijani population. "We will do it for our children. We have no
place else to go."
Although the long history of Azerbaijani residents in Shushi is well
documented, and the city contains two famous mosques, Ms. Gevorgyan
said that Azerbaijanis expelled during the war had no right to return.
"We were part of greater Armenia even before Christ," she said in an
interview at the State Historical Museum, where she works as a guide.
"Shushi is not their homeland, so they don't have any right to come
back."
In Azerbaijan, there is a city government-in-exile with a
single-minded focus on reclaiming the city, called Shusha in
Azerbaijani. "Our only goal is to come back," said Bayram A. Safarov,
the head of the administration in exile. "I know every stone there."
The hardened views in the public mind make it even more difficult to
broker an accord, despite Presidents Aliyev and Sargsyan's having met
three times last year.
"The reality is after 20 years of inflammatory rhetoric, both
presidents will admit to you that the people of the two countries are
just not ready," said one Western official who has met both men, and
who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations on sensitive
diplomatic issues.
In Azerbaijan, tens of thousands of refugees live in substandard
housing. In some cases, families have lived for years in individual
college dormitory rooms, sharing a bathroom on the hall.
Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are hamstrung by their
unrecognized status, which prohibits most international trade.
The region's capital, called Stepanakert in Armenian and Xankendi in
Azerbaijani, has no functioning airport. And officials there do not
have a formal role in the peace process.
Irina Khachaturyan, who sells trinkets from a stall in the central
market in Stepanakert, is Armenian but said she dreamed of returning
to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital where she lived before the war.
"It was my motherland; I was born there, lived there, studied there,"
Ms. Khachaturyan said.
Although she lives among fellow Armenians, she said Stepanakert never
became home.
"I never found my place," she said. "These 25 years, I have been
living like on needles."
Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/world/asia/clashes-intensify-between-armenia-and-azerbaijan-over-disputed-land.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Jan 31 2015
Clashes Intensify Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Over Disputed Land
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORNJAN. 31, 2015
AGDAM, Azerbaijan -- Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another
armed conflict in the former Soviet Union -- between Armenia and
Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh -- has escalated with
deadly ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each
side and pushing the countries perilously close to open war.
The month of January was heavily stained by blood, with repeated gun
battles and volleys of artillery and rocket fire. Two Armenian
soldiers were killed and several wounded in a fierce gunfight on Jan.
23 along the conflict's northern front. That set off a weekend of
violence including grenade and mortar attacks that killed at least
three Azerbaijani soldiers.
The most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by
international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the
Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.
"The rise in violence that began last year must stop," the mediators,
from France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement,
adding, "We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a
peaceful resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take
all measures to reduce tensions."
Instead, the violence has continued.
On Thursday, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said it had shot down a
drone not far from Agdam, an Azerbaijani city that was once home to
more than 40,000 people but has been a ghost town for more than 20
years since its occupation by Armenian forces.
Tensions are expected to grow even further this year as Armenia
prepares to commemorate in April the 100th anniversary of the genocide
against Armenians in Turkey.
While the fighting here often seems to be an isolated dispute over a
mountainous patch of land that no one else wants -- roughly midway
between the Armenian capital, Yerevan, and the Azerbaijani capital,
Baku -- the conflict poses an ever-present danger by threatening to
draw in bigger powers, including Russia, Turkey and Iran.
It also provides a chilling warning of what could be in store for
Ukraine, where many fear Russia is intent on turning the eastern
regions of Donetsk and Luhansk into a similar permanent war zone.
The recent flare in fighting has been fueled by a quiet arms race, in
which both countries -- but especially oil-rich Azerbaijan -- have built
up arsenals of ever more powerful weapons.
Russia is the main supplier to each side, even as it claims a
leadership role in international peace negotiations, known as the
Minsk Group process, which it chairs with the United States and
France.
In recent weeks, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has upped the
ante, demanding that the Minsk Group leaders take steps to force
Armenia to withdraw from Azerbaijani lands -- nearly one-fifth of
Azerbaijan's internationally-recognized territory -- that it has
occupied since a truce was signed in 1994.
"Measures must be taken," Mr. Aliyev said in a speech to government
ministers in January. "The truth is that the continued occupation of
our lands is not just the work of Armenia. Armenia is a powerless and
poor country. It is in a helpless state. Of course, if it didn't have
major patrons in various capitals, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would
have been resolved fairly long ago."
Continue reading the main story
In his speech, Mr. Aliyev warned darkly that Azerbaijan, which has an
economy seven times larger than Armenia's, planned this year to spend
more than double Armenia's entire annual budget of $2.7 billion on
strengthening its military.
President Serzh Sargsyan has responded with his own threats. "The
hotheads should expect surprises," Mr. Sargsyan said at a recent
military ceremony.
The dangerous consequences of the arms buildup were on full display in
November as Azerbaijan shot down an Mi-24 attack helicopter as it flew
just north of Agdam along the cease-fire line, killing three Armenian
soldiers on board.
The wreckage fell in the region near Agdam that has served as a buffer
zone since the 1994 truce, and for days the three bodies lay in the
open as Armenian forces seeking to recover their fallen comrades were
repelled by gunfire.
"This is as bad as it has got since the cease-fire," said Thomas de
Waal, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, whose book "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan
Through Peace and War" is widely regarded as the most authoritative
account of the Karabakh conflict.
"Fifteen years ago it was still bad but it was just a bunch of
trenches with a bunch of soldiers leaning over them with some guns,"
Mr. de Waal said. "Now, you have this massive heavy weaponry on either
side, sometimes only 100 yards from each other, with these drones and
so forth."
He added, "The stakes get higher every year, and the chances of
miscalculation get higher as well."
With tensions mounting, visits to each side of the front line, and
interviews with senior government and military officials, as well as
conversations with dozens of residents, refugees, war veterans,
soldiers, local officials, academics, civic activists and even
schoolchildren, found the two sides bracing for war, and neither
expecting nor prepared for peace.
"We have a saying," said Col. Abdulla Qurbani, a senior official in
the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry, while on a tour of the Azerbaijan
side of the line of contact. "When water mixes with earth, this is
mud. When blood mixes with earth, this is motherland."
Across the line in Shushi, a city whose Azerbaijani residents were
forced to flee during the war, an Armenian woman, Anaida Gabrielyan,
said: "Our land is soaked in blood. Every millimeter is soaked in
grief."
Since fighting began in the late 1980s, it has killed tens of
thousands of people and displaced more than a million, many of whom
have been living as refugees for more than 20 years.
The increased firepower is not the only reason the conflict has grown
more dangerous and more intractable.
The fight is rooted in religious hatreds -- real and imagined -- between
Christian Armenia and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan.
And a new generation of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, including the
soldiers now serving on the front line, cannot remember when their
parents and grandparents lived peacefully as neighbors -- before
Armenians were purged from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis were forced
from the areas now occupied by Armenia.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, where the majority Armenian population
declared an independent republic after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, are hamstrung by their unrecognized status, which prohibits
most international trade.
The republic is largely viewed as a puppet extension of Armenia, with
its residents traveling abroad on Armenian passports and many Armenian
officials, including President Sargsyan, having been born in
Nagorno-Karabakh and having previously held government posts there.
In casual conversations, it was not uncommon for Azerbaijanis to deny
that the Armenian genocide occurred, or for Armenians to insist that
Azerbaijanis were not a real nation and had no legitimate ties to
lands they had lived on for centuries.
"This is our land, our homeland, and we will always protect it," said
Gayane Gevorgyan, an Armenian and the mother of two young children who
now lives in Shushi, a city that before the war had a majority
Azerbaijani population. "We will do it for our children. We have no
place else to go."
Although the long history of Azerbaijani residents in Shushi is well
documented, and the city contains two famous mosques, Ms. Gevorgyan
said that Azerbaijanis expelled during the war had no right to return.
"We were part of greater Armenia even before Christ," she said in an
interview at the State Historical Museum, where she works as a guide.
"Shushi is not their homeland, so they don't have any right to come
back."
In Azerbaijan, there is a city government-in-exile with a
single-minded focus on reclaiming the city, called Shusha in
Azerbaijani. "Our only goal is to come back," said Bayram A. Safarov,
the head of the administration in exile. "I know every stone there."
The hardened views in the public mind make it even more difficult to
broker an accord, despite Presidents Aliyev and Sargsyan's having met
three times last year.
"The reality is after 20 years of inflammatory rhetoric, both
presidents will admit to you that the people of the two countries are
just not ready," said one Western official who has met both men, and
who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations on sensitive
diplomatic issues.
In Azerbaijan, tens of thousands of refugees live in substandard
housing. In some cases, families have lived for years in individual
college dormitory rooms, sharing a bathroom on the hall.
Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are hamstrung by their
unrecognized status, which prohibits most international trade.
The region's capital, called Stepanakert in Armenian and Xankendi in
Azerbaijani, has no functioning airport. And officials there do not
have a formal role in the peace process.
Irina Khachaturyan, who sells trinkets from a stall in the central
market in Stepanakert, is Armenian but said she dreamed of returning
to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital where she lived before the war.
"It was my motherland; I was born there, lived there, studied there,"
Ms. Khachaturyan said.
Although she lives among fellow Armenians, she said Stepanakert never
became home.
"I never found my place," she said. "These 25 years, I have been
living like on needles."
Alexandra Odynova contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/world/asia/clashes-intensify-between-armenia-and-azerbaijan-over-disputed-land.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress