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AZERBAIJAN-ARMENIA TENSIONS: REGIONAL RISKS, POLICY CHALLENGES
By Michael Cecire
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12046/azerbaijan-armenia-tensions-regional-risks-policy-challenges
12 Jun 2012
With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a tour of the South
Caucasus last week, hopes that Washington's top diplomat could use the
visit as an opportunity to push for regional peacemaking and democracy
support were quickly overcome by events on the ground, underscoring
the region's volatility. Though Clinton's meetings in Georgia were
mostly low key, the brittle cease-fire between arch-nemeses Azerbaijan
and Armenia was sorely tested by a series of clashes, fueling fears
that another Caucasus war was in the offing.
Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been rocky since the
two former Soviet republics fought a war in the early 1990s over the
disputed territory of Nargorno-Karabakh, a region largely settled
by ethnic Armenians that is internationally recognized as part of
Azerbaijan. When large-scale fighting ended in 1994, Armenian forces
-- with assistance from geopolitical patron Russia -- had driven
out Azerbaijani troops as well as ethnic Azeri communities from
the province. Since then, Armenia has supported the unrecognized,
separatist quasi-statelet of Nagorno-Karabakh, and international
efforts to peaceably resolve the conflict have fallen short, leading
to frequent descriptions of the dispute as a "frozen conflict."
The conflict has been anything but frozen on the ground, however,
and the dispute remains at constant risk of spiraling out of control.
Though clashes are not uncommon along the line of contact, as the
unofficial border between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan is known,
last week's fighting had all the appearances of a series of escalations
cascading out of control. Notably, skirmishes not only took place along
the line of contact, but also at the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan
proper, a development that raised fears of the conflict heating up.
"The implication is that, on one side or both, there was a degree of
regional-level coordination by military commanders and a willingness to
test the defenses of the other side across a wide swathe of territory,"
wrote regional analyst Alex Jackson. "This expansion of the battlefield
marks a serious escalation."
For Washington, the situation, difficult enough on its face, also
presents a deeply challenging conundrum to U.S. policy in the region.
Though the U.S. continues to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part
of Azerbaijan, Armenia's relatively large and politically active
diaspora in the United States has cultivated significant goodwill in
the U.S. Congress and can count on considerable support. Washington
also engages Nagorno-Karabakh through a series of diplomatic and
exchange programs, including a modest but symbolically significant
aid allotment. And until 2001, Section 907 of the Freedom Support
Act banned direct aid to Azerbaijan. The law is still on the books,
but it has been waived annually since 2001.
Despite the growing influence of the Armenian-American lobby in
Washington, it is understood that Armenia itself remains a crucial
component of Russia's regional alliance system. Russia was a key ally
during the war against Azerbaijan, and it continues to maintain a
significant troop presence on Armenian soil. It also owns approximately
80 percent of the country's energy system and is the country's most
important economic partner through trade and remittances.
Though Russia has shrewdly increased its engagement toward Azerbaijan
in recent years, including through energy contracts and arms sales,
the Baku-Moscow relationship remains fragile and more pragmatic
than friendly. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has a powerful friendship with
regional power and NATO member Turkey, which broke relations and
closed its borders with Armenia in 1993 out of solidarity with its
Turkic cousins. (Turkey and Armenia have never established diplomatic
relations.) In 2010, Turkey and Azerbaijan signed a mutual defense
treaty, obligating Turkey to intervene should Azerbaijan be attacked.
Further complicating matters for Washington, Armenia maintains strong
economic and political ties with Iran, while relations between Iran
and fellow Shiite-majority Azerbaijan are increasingly tense.
Meanwhile, Baku's relations with Israel are robust and growing.
Azerbaijan's poor human rights and democracy record compared to
Armenia's -- which, though poor on its own merits, is consistently
scored better on international assessments -- adds the final wrinkle
for U.S. policymakers.
The potential for loss of life and damage in a renewed hot war between
Azerbaijan and Armenia is significant, but the real danger is the
threat of regional escalation. With so many moving parts, any conflict
risks turning into a conflagration with Turkey and Azerbaijan on one
side and Armenia and Russia on the other. Add the wild cards of Iran --
which sees Azerbaijan's existence as a challenge to its sovereignty
over its own large ethnic-Azeri population -- and Israel to the mix
and the prospect of multiple conflicts overlapping and fusing into
a larger regional conflict becomes frighteningly plausible. The
U.S. would be hard-pressed to stay neutral in such a scenario.
Despite the obvious threat such a war poses to Eurasian security,
little has been done to rein in the bellicose rhetoric and border
sparring on both sides. With a population still smarting from the
"shame" of defeat in the 1990s, Azerbaijan's leaders are under
domestic pressure to resolve the conflict to its advantage, which
explains Baku's hydrocarbon-fueled military buildup.
With so much at stake, the West must move proactively to prevent what
increasingly seems like an inevitable conflict. Current avenues for
conflict prevention and negotiations, in particular the OSCE's Minsk
Group, co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France, need to
be empowered to ensure that de-escalation measures such as the 2007
Madrid Principles are fulfilled. With Russia taking a defensive posture
to recent fighting and progress implementing the Madrid Principles
stalled, Azerbaijan may feel it has no choice but to resort to
extreme measures to push the principals to re-engage diplomatically
on the issue. The U.S. should use its influence in Baku and Ankara,
in coordination with Russia, to pull the situation back from the brink.
In 2008, another little-known frozen conflict in the South Caucasus
went hot, resulting in the Russia-Georgia War over South Ossetia
and Abkhazia. Unless tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh can be cooled down
quickly, the world risks another such war, but one with far greater
potential for escalation and great-power intervention.
Michael Hikari Cecire is an independent analyst and Wikistrat
contributing analyst focusing on the South Caucasus and Black Sea
region. He blogs at Evolutsia.Net.
Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev in Baku, Azerbaijan, June 6, 2012 (U.S. State
Department photo).
By Michael Cecire
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12046/azerbaijan-armenia-tensions-regional-risks-policy-challenges
12 Jun 2012
With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a tour of the South
Caucasus last week, hopes that Washington's top diplomat could use the
visit as an opportunity to push for regional peacemaking and democracy
support were quickly overcome by events on the ground, underscoring
the region's volatility. Though Clinton's meetings in Georgia were
mostly low key, the brittle cease-fire between arch-nemeses Azerbaijan
and Armenia was sorely tested by a series of clashes, fueling fears
that another Caucasus war was in the offing.
Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been rocky since the
two former Soviet republics fought a war in the early 1990s over the
disputed territory of Nargorno-Karabakh, a region largely settled
by ethnic Armenians that is internationally recognized as part of
Azerbaijan. When large-scale fighting ended in 1994, Armenian forces
-- with assistance from geopolitical patron Russia -- had driven
out Azerbaijani troops as well as ethnic Azeri communities from
the province. Since then, Armenia has supported the unrecognized,
separatist quasi-statelet of Nagorno-Karabakh, and international
efforts to peaceably resolve the conflict have fallen short, leading
to frequent descriptions of the dispute as a "frozen conflict."
The conflict has been anything but frozen on the ground, however,
and the dispute remains at constant risk of spiraling out of control.
Though clashes are not uncommon along the line of contact, as the
unofficial border between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan is known,
last week's fighting had all the appearances of a series of escalations
cascading out of control. Notably, skirmishes not only took place along
the line of contact, but also at the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan
proper, a development that raised fears of the conflict heating up.
"The implication is that, on one side or both, there was a degree of
regional-level coordination by military commanders and a willingness to
test the defenses of the other side across a wide swathe of territory,"
wrote regional analyst Alex Jackson. "This expansion of the battlefield
marks a serious escalation."
For Washington, the situation, difficult enough on its face, also
presents a deeply challenging conundrum to U.S. policy in the region.
Though the U.S. continues to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part
of Azerbaijan, Armenia's relatively large and politically active
diaspora in the United States has cultivated significant goodwill in
the U.S. Congress and can count on considerable support. Washington
also engages Nagorno-Karabakh through a series of diplomatic and
exchange programs, including a modest but symbolically significant
aid allotment. And until 2001, Section 907 of the Freedom Support
Act banned direct aid to Azerbaijan. The law is still on the books,
but it has been waived annually since 2001.
Despite the growing influence of the Armenian-American lobby in
Washington, it is understood that Armenia itself remains a crucial
component of Russia's regional alliance system. Russia was a key ally
during the war against Azerbaijan, and it continues to maintain a
significant troop presence on Armenian soil. It also owns approximately
80 percent of the country's energy system and is the country's most
important economic partner through trade and remittances.
Though Russia has shrewdly increased its engagement toward Azerbaijan
in recent years, including through energy contracts and arms sales,
the Baku-Moscow relationship remains fragile and more pragmatic
than friendly. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has a powerful friendship with
regional power and NATO member Turkey, which broke relations and
closed its borders with Armenia in 1993 out of solidarity with its
Turkic cousins. (Turkey and Armenia have never established diplomatic
relations.) In 2010, Turkey and Azerbaijan signed a mutual defense
treaty, obligating Turkey to intervene should Azerbaijan be attacked.
Further complicating matters for Washington, Armenia maintains strong
economic and political ties with Iran, while relations between Iran
and fellow Shiite-majority Azerbaijan are increasingly tense.
Meanwhile, Baku's relations with Israel are robust and growing.
Azerbaijan's poor human rights and democracy record compared to
Armenia's -- which, though poor on its own merits, is consistently
scored better on international assessments -- adds the final wrinkle
for U.S. policymakers.
The potential for loss of life and damage in a renewed hot war between
Azerbaijan and Armenia is significant, but the real danger is the
threat of regional escalation. With so many moving parts, any conflict
risks turning into a conflagration with Turkey and Azerbaijan on one
side and Armenia and Russia on the other. Add the wild cards of Iran --
which sees Azerbaijan's existence as a challenge to its sovereignty
over its own large ethnic-Azeri population -- and Israel to the mix
and the prospect of multiple conflicts overlapping and fusing into
a larger regional conflict becomes frighteningly plausible. The
U.S. would be hard-pressed to stay neutral in such a scenario.
Despite the obvious threat such a war poses to Eurasian security,
little has been done to rein in the bellicose rhetoric and border
sparring on both sides. With a population still smarting from the
"shame" of defeat in the 1990s, Azerbaijan's leaders are under
domestic pressure to resolve the conflict to its advantage, which
explains Baku's hydrocarbon-fueled military buildup.
With so much at stake, the West must move proactively to prevent what
increasingly seems like an inevitable conflict. Current avenues for
conflict prevention and negotiations, in particular the OSCE's Minsk
Group, co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France, need to
be empowered to ensure that de-escalation measures such as the 2007
Madrid Principles are fulfilled. With Russia taking a defensive posture
to recent fighting and progress implementing the Madrid Principles
stalled, Azerbaijan may feel it has no choice but to resort to
extreme measures to push the principals to re-engage diplomatically
on the issue. The U.S. should use its influence in Baku and Ankara,
in coordination with Russia, to pull the situation back from the brink.
In 2008, another little-known frozen conflict in the South Caucasus
went hot, resulting in the Russia-Georgia War over South Ossetia
and Abkhazia. Unless tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh can be cooled down
quickly, the world risks another such war, but one with far greater
potential for escalation and great-power intervention.
Michael Hikari Cecire is an independent analyst and Wikistrat
contributing analyst focusing on the South Caucasus and Black Sea
region. He blogs at Evolutsia.Net.
Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev in Baku, Azerbaijan, June 6, 2012 (U.S. State
Department photo).