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Armenia-Azeri War Risks Grow as Clashes Intensify

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  • Armenia-Azeri War Risks Grow as Clashes Intensify

    Bloomberg
    Aug 3 2014

    Armenia-Azeri War Risks Grow as Clashes Intensify

    By Henry Meyer, Sara Khojoyan and Zulfugar Agayev Aug 3, 2014


    The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan plan to meet this week in a bid
    to defuse escalating tensions between the two countries after at least
    15 soldiers were killed in the worst clashes in two decades.

    The fighting in the past week in the disputed region of
    Nagorno-Karabakh has been the deadliest since the two former Soviet
    states signed a cease-fire in 1994. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan
    will hold talks with his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the Russian
    city of Sochi on Aug. 8-9, Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan
    said on the government's website.

    "We hope that serious arrangements will be reached during the
    meeting," Abrahamyan said. "We are not afraid of war, I just think it
    is not clever to solve problems with wars in the 21st century."

    The skirmishes between the South Caucasus countries, which border
    Turkey and Iran, flared amid the worst geopolitical standoff since the
    Cold War between Russia and the U.S. over the conflict in Ukraine. A
    renewed war between Azerbaijan, an ally of the U.S. and Turkey, and
    Russian-backed Armenia has the potential to put NATO directly at odds
    with the government in Moscow, according to Timothy Ash, a
    London-based economist for emerging markets at Standard Bank Group
    Plc.

    "Militarily, Armenia is still thought to have superiority, given
    Russian backing, but with its rising oil wealth, Azerbaijan has been
    re-arming rapidly," Ash said yesterday by e-mail.

    Facing off are 20,000 Armenian and Azeri troops, dug into World War
    I-style trenches sometimes only 100 meters (330 feet) apart, according
    to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

    Energy Route

    The escalating death toll since July 31 has inflamed tensions between
    landlocked Armenia and its eastern neighbor Azerbaijan, the former
    Soviet Union's third-largest oil producer and the only route for
    Caspian energy to Western markets that bypasses Russia.

    Armenia took over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave about the
    size of Rhode Island, and seven adjacent districts from Azerbaijan in
    a war after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. More than 30,000
    people were killed and over a million displaced before Russia brokered
    a cease-fire in 1994.

    Once an Armenian-majority autonomous region within the Azerbaijan
    Soviet Socialist Republic, Nagorno-Karabakh remains internationally
    recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Four United Nations Security Council
    resolutions were passed demanding an Armenian withdrawal from the
    area. About 700,000 Azeris were forced to leave the districts in what
    Azerbaijan describes as ethnic cleansing. The two nations' presidents
    met in November in Vienna for the first time in two years.

    NATO, Russia

    Azerbaijan has forged closer ties with Israel and NATO-member Turkey
    and increased defense spending 27-fold to $3.7 billion a year in the
    past decade, outlays that exceed Armenia's annual budget. Armenia
    hosts a Russian military base in its second-biggest town of Gyumri,
    near the Turkish border, and Russian troops guard Armenia's borders
    with Iran and Turkey.

    Azerbaijan, which signed a $45 billion contract in December with a BP
    Plc-led group to pipe natural gas to Europe, has repeatedly threatened
    to use force to regain control of the territory should peace efforts
    fail. Aliyev said in January he had "no doubts" that Azerbaijan will
    "restore its territorial integrity."

    'Provocative' Steps

    Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry accused Armenia of "provocative" actions
    and said it "bears full responsibility for the evolving dangerous
    situation," according to a statement on the ministry's website.

    The U.S., France and Russia, which are leading efforts to resolve the
    Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to take
    immediate action to defuse tensions and respect the cease-fire, as
    well as resume negotiations.

    Companies led by London-based BP have invested more than $40 billion
    in Azerbaijan's oil and gas fields. Azerbaijan can pump as much as 1.2
    million barrels a day of oil to Turkey through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
    pipeline, which allows supplies to bypass Russia.

    Eight Azeri and two Armenian troops were confirmed killed in clashes
    on July 31. Azerbaijan said it lost an additional four troops and an
    Armenian soldier was confirmed dead in fighting on Aug. 1-2. Another
    Azeri serviceman was killed Aug. 3, according to Nagorno-Karabakh's
    armed forces.

    Crimea Context

    Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in March and
    the continuing pro-Russian separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine is
    inflaming the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Thomas de Waal, senior
    associate at Carnegie in Washington, said in a research paper posted
    on the research group's website in June.

    "In this context, people are wondering not about whether Karabakh
    creates a precedent for Crimea but whether it works the other way
    round," de Waal said. "The truth may be that Crimea has placed
    Karabakh in a new vicious circle of destructive politics."

    With Russian President Vladimir Putin "cynical" about the chances of
    pursuing peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the chances of a
    diplomatic breakthrough are low, according to the Carnegie analyst.

    As Azerbaijan bolsters its army with weapons such as drones,
    multiple-rocket launchers and attack aircraft, "we can be certain that
    a new conflict, however small, would be vastly more destructive than
    that of the 1990s," he said.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-03/armenia-azeri-war-risks-grow-as-clashes-intensify.html


    From: Baghdasarian
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