Lessons From an Unending Conflict
2023-11-01 00:38:03
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This morning in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, the government of Azerbaijan said it had mounted a counter-terrorist operation, but the ethnic Armenians who live here saw it as an unprovoked and opportunistic attack.
In late September, one of the world's most intractable conflicts ended, causing tens of thousands of Armenians to flee their homes.
On the streets of Stepanakert, panic took over as mortars pounded its surroundings. Overwhelmingly, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, now a defeated people, have decided it's safer to flee their homeland than live under Azerbaijani rule.
Today, my colleague Andrew Higgins on how that conflict started, why it lasted for more than 30 years, and what its end can tell us about the nature of seemingly insolvable disputes.
It's Wednesday, November 1st.
So, Andy, I want to start by breaking the third wall here, to say you and I actually recorded a version of this episode, and I was looking back at my calendar just now to see when we actually did that. It was October 6th, and the team had the episode ready to go for that Monday, but then that weekend, Hamas militants crossed into Israel, and our attention shifted to another part of the world, and we did not actually run the episode.
Yeah, exactly, and put what we were talking about in a slightly less important place.
However, I think what we were talking about is very instructive and important when it comes to conflict and the nature of conflict, how it begins, and, most importantly, how it can end, right? So, we're now returning to this topic because, you know, other than the struggle between Israel and the Palestinian territories, this conflict, the one we've recorded the episode about, the one between Azerbaijan and Armenia, was considered the most intractable conflict in the world. That is, up until about a month ago, when suddenly, almost out of the blue, it ended, quickly and quite brutally. So, let's talk about this conflict, Andy, how it became so intractable, how it ended, and what that tells us about the nature of conflict. Where does that story start?
Well, the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, like that between Israel and the Palestinians, is won over territory. And, like Israel-Palestine, diplomats have been talking around and around this issue, how to solve it, and they got absolutely nowhere. Multiple meetings, multiple summits, all failed. And then last month, it was, in quotation marks, solved through a military assault, which obviously has maybe not implications, but echoes for Israel-Palestine. I mean, can the Israel-Palestine dispute over territory be solved by force?
Okay. So, let's walk through the first part of that conflict between these two countries, Azerbaijan and Armenia. And start, Andy, back at the time when the Soviet Union was still alive. Take me through, in very simple terms, the basics of it.
Yeah. It all starts in the waning years of the Soviet Union, the late 1980s. Remember, the Soviet Union was the largest land empire on earth, and it comprised 15 separate republics, each with its own people, but they were all Soviets. And two of these were Armenians and Azerbaijanis, who lived side by side, not always harmoniously, but Soviet power kept long historic grievances under wraps, kept them from basically attacking each other. Armenia was, by some counts, the oldest Christian civilization, surrounded on all sides by Muslim countries, to the west by Turkey, and to the east by Azerbaijan, and south by Iran.
And when the Soviet Union starts to fall apart under Mikhail Gorbachev, all these mountains and valleys of difference suddenly start coming to the surface.
And Mikhail Gorbachev, at this point, trying to hold this vast country together, goes down there and pleads for them, both the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, to remember they are Soviet citizens, first and foremost, and that they should put their differences aside, and basically avoid open conflict.
And does that work? No, it fails completely. These tensions are bubbling up steadily.
And in 1990, they erupt in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where there is a large population of ethnic Armenians. And suddenly, the Azerbaijani Muslim population turn on their Christian neighbors, and, in many cases, friends. And there's a horrific pogrom in Baku, in the early years of 1990, when Armenians are basically hunted through the streets, and in some cases, killed by their neighbors.
And this sets the stage for even more violence. There was a small enclave of ethnic Armenians that remained within the newly formed republic, which became a state, a separate state of Azerbaijan. And this place was called Nagorno-Karabakh. This enclave was very, very important to the Armenians. It contained many of their oldest churches, and was seen as sort of the cradle of Armenian civilization.
And in one particularly bad incident, in Khojaly, a town in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenians, in retaliation for what's happened in Baku and elsewhere, turn on the Azerbaijanis. And this leads to a massacre which leaves hundreds dead. And this is probably the worst single massacre of civilians during the whole conflict. And by 1993, and here we're two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, what had begun as a local dispute between two different peoples, has become a full-scale war between two states, the newly declared states of Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Okay, so this war between these two new countries has its front line in a place called Nagorno-Karabakh. And that place has lots of Armenians and includes many of their most cherished religious sites. But it sits within the territory of Azerbaijan. What did that war look like in its first phase,
Andy? At this stage, the two new countries are very unbalanced in terms of strength. Azerbaijan is a shambles, political chaos, constant turmoil in Baku, the capital, and Armenia is more organized and has a far more disciplined, effective army. And moves very quickly to basically destroy the Azerbaijan military. And they take not only Nagorno-Karabakh, this area of territory which is inhabited by ethnic Armenians, but a large chunk of territory between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper.
So, by 1994, when this war ends with a ceasefire, Armenia has not only Nagorno-Karabakh, but a large, wide swathe of Azerbaijani territory. And what was the feeling among the Armenians at that point, Andy? At this point, the Armenians are exultant. They are euphoric at their victories over what an enemy they despise as weak and disorganized. Many people, I suppose, would compare it to the feeling Israelis had after the 1967 war when they conquered Jerusalem.
There was this idea that the Armenians were the sort of Spartans of the region, that they were all conquering, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. And what about the Azeris, Andy? Well, the mood in Azerbaijan, which I visited this time, was one of absolute despondency. The government was falling apart and in 1993 it fell, bringing in a new leader, the former KGB chief of the region, who slowly, brutally, began to put the house in order. And by no means did the Azeris give up on what they had lost.
In fact, this became a festering wound. And for all leaders of Azerbaijan, since the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, the only issue that would prove that they were successful was whether or not they got back Nagorno-Karabakh. So it created this terrible, terrible, deep wound that coursed through.
Azerbaijan for decades. So terrible wound for the Azeris. It's like a little piece of glass in their heel as they walk along. What about the outside world? How do people see this?
Well, the outside world looked at this and realized that this wound had to be healed.
And why did the world care about the wound? Well, the Americans cared after the collapse.
of the Soviet Union, because they needed and wanted to show that the end of communism, the end of dictatorship, the end of basically a police state, did not mean just a wasteland of endless conflicts. That there was some hope to be had from the end of Communist Party rule. So they were very determined to basically have a success, or at least not a total bloody failure, in this part of the world. And for the Russians, it was important because they considered this their turf. And they saw themselves as the ultimate guardians of peace.
And they wanted to show that they could bring about some sort of peace. And at the same time, both the Americans and the Russians at this time, unlike today, were working very closely together. And in many ways, they were both on the same page. Diplomats who were involved at that time look back very fondly at those days when they said they, you know, had very good relations with their Russian and American colleagues. And they were sort of working together to try and solve this problem.
Not that they got anywhere, though.
So everybody had a stake in wanting this festering wound to be healed. What did they do?
Well, everyone also had a plan.
They drew up roadmaps, came up with five-point plans, eight-point plans, got the leaders and diplomats of Azerbaijan and Armenia to sit down at various talks, roundtable talks, square table talks, and they all got nowhere.
The most famous push in all diplomatic efforts came in 2001 with George W. Bush, who had just come into the White House, and he was looking for what he thought might be a simple, easy diplomatic triumph.
Little did he know.
No, he bit off a lot more than he could chew. And he and Colin Powell, Secretary of State at the time, organized this meeting in Key West, Florida. After months of preparation, they thought they might be able to solve the problem and finally cut this Gordian Knot that had tormented so many of their predecessors. They got the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia to go to Key West. And yet again, the effort failed and left such a bitter taste in George Bush's mouth that he supposedly told aides, please never mention Nagorno-Karabakh to me ever again.
So diplomacy was really no match for these underlying tensions, the right to the land, the language, the religion, and the conflict basically bumped along, but in a frozen form. But it was still seething underneath the surface, right? So when did that start to change?
The conflict itself has not changed, but the world around it has completely changed. after the Key West debacle. Azerbaijan, which in the early part of this dispute was a shambolic mess, is now an organized, basically police state, with lots and lots of money coming in, thanks to oil and gas, which it's developed largely with the help of Western companies. And it's using a lot of this money to buy weapons. And this military, which before was just laughed at by the Armenians, is now becoming a serious fighting force.
And at the same time, Armenia is sort of stuck. Its politics is sort of frozen and stagnant, and it's not a rich country. It's a small country. It has nothing like oil or gas to sustain a major military buildup. So it's falling behind Azerbaijan militarily.
So, basically, they're trading places, right? Azerbaijan is rising economically, and Armenia is largely stuck in place. How does that power shift change the weather in the war? What does?
it do to this frozen conflict? Well, alongside this dramatic economic trading of places, is a very serious hardening of regime in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which is run at this point by the son of the previous leader, who came to power with little experience, few of the connections of his father, and was basically fairly insecure. But he reaches out to ethnic nationalism as the way to consolidate his position. And he starts stoking fairly vicious hatred of Armenians generally, and of Armenians living in.
Nagorno-Karabakh in particular. Like he's insecure. He needs a tool to prove to the people of Azerbaijan that he knows what he's doing, and he's important, and he's powerful, that they should listen to him. So he grabs the ethnic nationalist lever.
Yes, exactly. Ethnic nationalism in this part of the world and many other places is basically the first refuge of a political scoundrel. And the president, the new president, started to use increasingly violent rhetoric, either himself or through his proxies and the media outlets he controlled, whose message was basically the only good Armenian is a dead Armenian. And this culminated in 2004,, when an Azerbaijani officer who'd been sent to a NATO training exercise in Hungary, which was also being attended by Armenian military officers. And one night, this Azerbaijani officer went out and bought an axe.
This is in the capital of Budapest. And he went back to the dormitory, broke into the Armenian soldier's room, and hacked him to death with this axe. God. But rather than spending life in prison, he's eventually extradited back to Azerbaijan, where the authorities promised Hungary that he will serve his sentence. But instead, as soon as he arrives back in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, he's hailed as a conquering hero.
And the president of Azerbaijan promotes him to a higher officer rank, gives him a new apartment. And this guy, a convicted murderer, becomes a national hero in Azerbaijan, because he is killed an Armenian.
So the president is clearly sending a message to his people, but also to Armenians here, right, that they will be dealt with, with extreme violence. He's congratulating that. So where does that sentiment, that ethnic nationalist tool he's wielding, lead?
This sentiment leads to a new war, ultimately.
Over these years, Azerbaijan has been buying huge amounts of weapons from Israel, from Turkey, and other countries. And at the end of this process, Azerbaijan has a formidable fighting force that Armenia simply cannot match. And in 2020, after the failure of yet another round of peace talks and negotiations, Azerbaijan unleashes this military machine onto Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan says its troops have begun entering the areas surrounding the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. And in the space of 44 days, they make mincemeat of Armenia's far inferior military and take back much of the territory they lost in 1994..
But they don't take Nagorno-Karabakh, because.
Vladimir Putin of Russia intervenes.
Overseas. tonight, Armenia and Azerbaijan brokered a peaceful deal that ended weeks of fighting and bloodshed.
And in an effort to assure both sides that this ceasefire will actually hold, he commits to send a Russian peacekeeping force of about 2,000 soldiers to police the arrangement. But the ceasefire leaves Nagorno-Karabakh a sort of isolated island, surrounded on all sides, once again by Azerbaijan, and very, very vulnerable. And the Armenians are terrified. And they realize it's only a matter of time before Azerbaijanis take back the last bit of what they see as their rightful territory.
We'll be right back.
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So Nagorno-Karabakh is surrounded, and the Armenians think it's only a matter of time before this little spot of land is overrun. What's the beginning of the end of this conflict?
The first very serious clouds on the horizon came in December last year, when suddenly so-called youth activists from Azerbaijan start appearing on the only road connecting Armenia to the ethnic enclave.
Youth activists? Like people carrying signs?
Yeah, they were self-declared patriots who wanted to recover what they considered their sacred land. And this was clearly orchestrated by the governments in Azerbaijan. And in April this year, the Azerbaijani military sets up a checkpoint on the road. The only way that Armenia can supply food, medicine and weapons to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Right. This is a very important road because it's effectively the umbilical cord from Armenia to this enclave.
Exactly. So. Nagorno-Karabakh is totally isolated, and the population is getting hungrier and weaker, and effectively just waiting for the final blow to fall. And at the end of September, the Azerbaijani military launches yet another attack. And within 24 hours, they have crushed the Armenian defences on this territory.
The Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh collapses. They have a president, they have a flag, they have a parliament, and it just dissolves. This conflict that's been going on for more than 30 years is over in a night.
And in the wake of that, the population, ethnic, Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh begins to trickle out. And it begins slowly at first, but within the following days, this very thin trickle turns into a flood.
Tens of thousands of people leaving each day.
The horizon is just trucks, tractors, cars, people on foot, flooding down this single road from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia proper.
So, by the end of the lightning military campaign by Azerbaijan in September, 100,000 people have left, which is almost the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh. So it was an exodus.
My colleague, Ivan Nechaparenko, and a local journalist, Nairi Abrahamian, went to the border to document this flight of Armenians. One of the most poignant stories they came across was a guy who'd been recording the struggle for this enclave for 30 years on his video camera. And in a few minutes, he decided he had to burn all his recordings from the first war onwards, like 100 cassettes. And he said, with tears in his eyes, he set fire to this whole collection. And his history and this territory's history for the last 30 plus years went up in smoke.
Why had he burned them?
He was worried that if he had footage of soldiers fighting, which he did, he would be accused of being a spy, of being an Armenian agent, and that he would be prosecuted. He said it. 15 minutes took him to pack up everything. And that was the last thing he did before leaving his house.
God.
It's like he's erasing his identity, his essence somehow.
Yeah. And that's what's happening in Nagorno-Karabakh. now. The Armenian identity of Nagorno-Karabakh is being erased, mostly through the flight of its people, fleeing what they fear will be a round of revenge killings by the Azerbaijanis. There's very little evidence that that actually happened.
But in people's heads, there was this overpowering fear of the fate that awaited them if they stuck around. So, whether intentional or not, it was an ethnic cleansing, more through fear than actual violence.
So what changed between 2020 and now? I mean, as you said, Putin intervened in 2020 to save Nagorno-Karabakh, for the Armenians to block it from Azeri invasion, effectively. What's different?
The big difference, of course, is that in 2020, when Putin invested a lot of time and effort into brokering a ceasefire, he was not engaged in Ukraine. Since February 24, last year, he has had other concerns. And it's not only distracted his attention, it's distracted the attention of the Russian military, which is providing the peacekeeping forces on the ground around Nagorno-Karabakh. So whereas when they were first sent in 2020, they took their duties relatively seriously, by the time this area attack came this year, these peacekeeping troops, the best of them had been moved on to Ukraine. They were left with a skeletal crew and a skeletal crew that had no interest in engaging in another fight on the ground of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh.
So they just stood aside. That is one of the most extraordinary elements of this whole saga, that the Russian military did nothing. when the Azerbaijanis set up their military roadblock. The Azerbaijanis inferred a giant national flag within a few feet of the Russian soldiers, who just watched on. They clearly had orders, don't intervene, just let them get on with it.
So I think Putin had sort of just checked out. He had far more important things to deal with than the survival, or basically extinction, of the ethnic Armenian state in Nagorno-Karabakh.
And what about the rest of the world? I mean, there was a time, as we were talking about, when all of the big powers were focused on this conflict, in particular, the Americans.
Yeah, this area was the focus of what became, in the journalistic cliche, the great game. But by the time this latest conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Americans were a much diminished force, at least in terms of their ambitions. I mean, the days of the 1990s, when Washington hoped that, you know, the former Soviet Union would become this big garden of blossoming democracy and economic prosperities, that was all gone.
And as soon as Nagorno-Karabakh fell, but only afterwards, the Biden administration rushed out two senior administration officials to Armenia, but largely just to hold their hands and offer some cold comforts at their loss. There was no promise of additional aid beyond some humanitarian shipments. There was certainly no move to sanction Azerbaijan for having used military force to resolve a dispute that the U.S. and the Europeans had always insisted must be resolved through diplomatic means. People have lost interest.
So, in the end, what finally finished this conflict wasn't some kind of masterful diplomatic push. It was really about the Armenians coming to terms with the fact that they couldn't win, right, that they had lost the Russian backing. The world kind of had moved on, didn't care about it anymore. So, you know, wars keep going when both sides know that they can win. And that wasn't the case here.
Yeah, the Armenian side recognized reluctantly, grudgingly, and with deep bitterness that they could not win militarily, that the Azerbaijani military was far superior. And throwing Armenian troops into this fight would have been pointless and would have just left Armenia even more exhausted, more diminished than it was with the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Right. And in the end, force was what ended it.
Yes, exactly. After decades of elaborate diplomatic formula, meetings in expensive hotels from the Key West to Geneva, to Moscow, and extraordinary diplomatic efforts to solve this thing, what ended? it was pure brute force. The Azerbaijanis were more powerful than the Armenians, and they won.
And what does this say about the role of diplomacy in these seemingly unsolvable conflicts?
Well, sadly, it shows diplomacy is very limited when two sides have.
irreconcilable demands. In this case, for a piece of territory, a piece of land claimed by two people whose positions are basically on budging, it's ours, no, it's ours. And this went on for 30 years. And now this conflict is over, has been declared over, has been forced to be over by military force. But clearly, the issue is not solved.
And the danger here, without a diplomatic solution, is that there will be another eruption on other points of dispute between these two countries. They also claim other bits of land, each side. And there are rumblings at the moment that Azerbaijan could be gearing up to strike into Armenia to seize another patch of territory.
So it's a puzzle, right? The diplomacy didn't work, but without the diplomacy, the conflict continues.
Well, exactly. That's the underlying disputes, tensions, hatreds, even, between these two countries have not gone away. And they could well erupt in the fairly near future into another armed confrontation, which will put diplomats back to the table, which will set people drawing up new plans. And, you know, you have to hope that maybe this time, they'll be a bit more successful.
Andy, thank you.
You're welcome.
We'll be right back.
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Israel hit a densely populated neighborhood in northern Gaza on Tuesday, and what it said was an operation to kill Hamas militants. The Israeli military said it's large scale airstrikes, killed a Hamas commander who had helped plan the October 7th attack on Israel. The strike leveled a large area in the Jebel Ayah neighborhood. A video from the scene, broadcast by the Reuters news agency, showed hundreds of people searching through the rubble of collapsed buildings. The Times reports that a doctor at a nearby hospital said the facility was receiving hundreds of injured and that dozens had been killed.
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Today's episode was produced by Sidney Harper and Lindsay Garrison, with help from Alex Stern and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Alina Lobzina, Ivan Nechaparenko, and Nairi Abrahamian.
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