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PARIS, KOMPAS.com – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met on a single platform in a rare gathering at the Security Conference in Munich, Germany, in February. Both were asked to provide an overview of the history of Nagorno-Karabakh.
It did not end well, as cited in AFP on Friday (09/10/2020).
“To talk about how to resolve the conflict, we first have to go back and look at the historical problem,” Aliyev said, arguing that it was “a historical truth” that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan.
“I would ask President Aliyev not to go too far into history,” Pashinyan replied, insisting that the territory was only a part of Azerbaijan due to decisions made in the early years of the Soviet Union.
Large differences in historical views prevented the search for a solution to the most difficult conflict left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Two weeks after today’s fierce fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh since the war of the 1990s, it erupted when the region declared unilateral independence.
Analysts say the weight of history is preventing Armenia and Azerbaijan from reaching a long-term agreement, and the fighting only stopped with a short-lived ceasefire.
For Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh is an integral part of the state of Azerbaijan and is recognized by the United Nations. It has centuries-old records of Muslim settlement by Persian and Seljuk Turks.
However, Armenians argue that Nagorno-Karabakh, which became part of the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, only ended up in Soviet Azerbaijan as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) on a whim.
During their discussion in Munich, Pashinyan said that the decision to include the Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan in the early 1920s was due to the “personal initiative” of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet commissioner for nationality.
Aliyev immediately denied this statement.
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Strong root
Armenians make up the majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Soviet republic of Armenia has repeatedly lobbied for control of the NKAO, in a move that Moscow opposes.
However, when the Soviet Union began to crumble, a separatist republic was declared and war broke out.
The Armenians were victorious with a truce that was finally agreed.
With hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis fleeing Karabakh and the 7 surrounding territories in Azerbaijan that were occupied by Armenian troops, the population of Karabakh today is almost entirely Armenian.
Even so, Nagorno-Karabakh has never received recognition of its independence by any other country, including Armenia itself.
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“The positions of Armenia and Azerbaijan are so entrenched that the international community has little practical influence over them,” said Nicu Popescu, director of the Greater Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
He said the most likely scenario was not the end of a cycle of conflict or outright military victory, but more wars in the future to “divide” the territory.
Both sides have doubled their positions since the Munich meeting.
“We have to go back there (Karabakh),” Aliyev said at the weekend, describing it as “our land.”
During a visit to Karabakh in August, Pashinyan had even called for unification with Armenia, stating that “Artsakh (Karabakh) is Armenia, and that’s it.”
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Angry rhetoric
Both sides also broadcast selective historical opinions, focusing on the atrocities committed by others and ignoring their own atrocities.
Armenians remember the pogrom in Sumgait in Azerbaijan when a mob swept through in February 1988, leaving at least 26 Armenians dead.
However, in Khojaly in 1992, Armenians opened fire on civilians fleeing a massacre that, according to Azerbaijan, killed hundreds.
Since the ceasefire ended the last upheaval in the fighting in 2016, “the peace process has practically stalled with increasingly angry rhetoric,” analysts at the International Crisis Group said.
Also read: The Azerbaijan-Armenian war is getting fiercer, the capital city of Nagorno-Karabakh is destroyed
The role of Turkey, Azerbaijan’s main ally, raises another problem because Armenians resent the modern Turkish state for its refusal to recognize the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
Analysts point out that where there are fewer interpretations of the story, all hope is not lost.
For example, Armenians and Azerbaijanis coexisted peacefully for most of the Soviet era and even today outside the Caucasus region, especially in Russia.
“The text of the 1724 Persian-era friendship agreement signed between the Armenian rulers of Karabakh and the Azerbaijani kings of Ganje against the Ottoman Turks may have to be reprinted,” said Tom de Waal, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, after of the confrontation of the presidents in Munich.
