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With a quick reading of the current round of fighting, it seems clear that the events are different this time from the previous ones, not only in terms of the high level of violence, but also in Turkey’s direct involvement in supporting and arming Azerbaijan, including the recruitment of mercenaries from Syria’s “mujahideen”, and the dispatch of nothing less. About a thousand of them to participate in the murder of the local population, as well as dozens of Turkish officials who provide advisory services to the Baku regime.
The spark for the conflict that broke out in early September was in mid-July, during a border clash in which seven members of the Azerbaijani forces were killed, including a high-ranking officer. At that time, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev promised that “the political and military leadership of Armenia will bear full responsibility for the provocation.” Later that month, Turkey joined Azerbaijan in a two-week military exercise with heavy weapons, which was described as an annual exercise. But the message was clear: Azerbaijan is preparing for a real battle and Turkey supports it. This is what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later announced, without evasion, saying: “We are in Turkey, by all means and with all our heart, on the side of the brother and sister of Azerbaijan, and we will continue to stand by his side, God willing, until Nagorno Karabakh is liberated. ” .
Nagorno Karabakh is a mountainous region located between the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Historically speaking, the majority of its population was Armenian, but it has deep geographical, cultural and economic ties to the lowlands of Azerbaijan. And when the conflict broke out there in the late 1980s, nationalism and hate propaganda, religious and ethnic, were the deadliest weapon used by the disintegrating bureaucratic gangs in the republics of the Soviet Union, including the two parties to the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, and also in Yugoslavia, to forge their path to power and wealth. the public. The old historical myth of hatred proved to be an easy explanatory framework when war broke out in the early 1990s in the region between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but a deep reading of the conflict reveals that evidence of the endless roots of hostility in the region is scarce.
Before, the entire region belonged to Persia, and for many centuries it remained a place of peaceful coexistence between the Armenian, Azeri and Kurdish communities, even in the first half of the 19th century, when Russian imperialism swallowed it up during the war of 1826 -1828. Since then, the peoples of the Caucasus have become a letter. A commitment in the struggle of Russia and the Ottoman Empire for political, economic and cultural domination, even if ethnic and religious groups continued to mix in the proletarian environment of the cities.
Although during the 19th century the region remained multiethnic, the effect of the spread of European nationalist discourse meant that its mixed population tended to build increasingly separatist and hostile tendencies. Modernization created new tensions and inequalities, which often assumed ethnic representations. In 1905, Baku became the scene of large-scale clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Since 1914, the Turkish war and the genocide of the Armenians have sparked cycles of violence and displacement throughout the region. Following the collapse of the Tsarist government and the October 1917 revolution, Georgians, Armenians, and Azeris attempted to allocate specific national geographic spaces for themselves. Karabakh was one of the many places where this led to violence. In particular, the decision taken by the Soviet bureaucracy, in 1921, to integrate the region with Soviet Azerbaijan instead of Armenia, was decisive in establishing a permanent conflict between the two parties.
Russia fears that the war on its southern border will ignite old conflicts within it.
Under Soviet rule, for seven decades, Armenians and Azerbaijanis have maintained largely peaceful, if not always harmonious relations. Each republic was home to significant minorities of other nationalities, but the Soviet enshrinement of national identities in the southern Caucasus made the Karabakh region increasingly anomalous, as Armenians and Karabakhs continued to seek, albeit intermittently, the unification with Armenia. And later, in the atmosphere of “perestrokia” in 1988, large-scale demonstrations were held in Karabakh and Armenia, calling for the unification of the two peoples into one country, and the administration of the Soviet region submitted an official request to make it to Moscow. Although the Gorbachev regime rejected the request at the time, the matter sparked anger and insecurity in Azerbaijan, which was quickly followed by gratuitous violence. The attacks against Armenians in Sumgait killed 26 Armenians and six Azerbaijanis, while the Moscow authorities proved incapable of doing much, as the crisis escalated, intersectarian violence spread and incidents of mutual expulsion, and the fate of Karabakh became a focus of national movements in Armenia and Azerbaijan. When the two republics gained independence in 1991, the conflict turned into a full-blown war in which Armenia achieved, in 1994, military supremacy not only over Nagorno Karabakh, but also over the surrounding regions of the Azerbaijani lands, from which the local Azerbaijani population was displaced, though not The ceasefire leads to a durable solution. As the conflict entered this year, its fourth decade, the region has not been in a true state of calm since the ceasefire; Local communities experienced insecurity, intermittent violence and constant panic, and recruits lost their lives in frequent and increasingly deadly clashes, with neither side having a monopoly on violence or victims.
Memories of the atrocities – the Sumgait massacres for Armenians, the 1992 massacres of hundreds of civilians in Khojaly for Azerbaijanis – continue to add emotional resonance to the conflict, reinforcing stereotypes of an immutable enemy. But the matter now goes far beyond the stage of the local conflict; The region as a whole, due to its geographical position as a node between Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, and its availability of abundant supplies of oil and gas, has since 1991 become a hot spot of competition among the imperialists, especially the United States and its allies, including Israel. In particular, Erdogan played a special role in fueling the military conflict this time. After a long period of economic growth in his country, with the support of the Turkish religious bourgeoisie, he managed, with the support of the Turkish religious bourgeoisie, to undermine the unshakable influence of the Turkish army in the life of society, before it entered to the country on unsuccessful military adventures across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, sparking the Turkish economy over a period of time. Crisis and recession, the Turkish lira has depreciated more than three times over the past five years against the US dollar, causing a significant decline in living standards. As the situation changed in this way, Erdogan began looking for a way to reconcile with the military elite. Since the latter grew out of the anti-Islamic culture of Kemal Ataturk, Turanian nationalism remains the only point of convergence between the two parties, and here arises the Islamist propaganda slogan “One people in several countries.” Erdogan needs a small victorious war, after failing in Syria and Libya, and in Nagorno Karabakh, he will win an easy victory, while the wooden coffins will go to the mothers of Azerbaijani soldiers, Armenians and mercenaries.
The statements of the White House, so far, on the escalation of the conflict are not clear, since the violence in Nagorno Karabakh coincided with a phase of chaos in the electoral environment and the outbreak of the Corona virus among the workers of the White House, including the president himself. At this time, urgent calls were made from within France for the government to back Armenia, amid the Israeli commitment to support Baku, while Iran, as well as Russia, refrained from taking tense positions and insisted on calling for negotiations and a ceasefire. Anti-Armenian sentiments appear to be increasing in Iran, where about 300,000 Armenians reside (while a minority of Azerbaijani origin – 20 million – makes up a fifth of the country’s population, and the vast majority of them live in the north of Iran, near the direct border with Azerbaijan), and not especially since the Turkish-Azerbaijani narrative on the conflict places it in the context of defending Islam from the attack of Christian Armenia. This narrative can only affect Russia’s neighborhood, as peoples traditionally considered Muslim make up a large proportion of the population, in regions such as the Volga and the North Caucasus, while there is also a strong Armenian diaspora in the country. There is no doubt that the roar of cannons in Armenian and Azerbaijani cities can only resonate in Moscow in one form or another.
Of course, Russia, more than others, has the political and military capacity to resolve the situation in the Caucasus. However, to keep Armenia in its sphere of political and economic influence, the hot-button conflict is beneficial for the Kremlin in the short term; Russia seems increasingly to be the sole defender of the Armenian people and a policeman of the intractable European crises. Perhaps the Russian delay in intervening, during the last weeks, to the point of coldness, is a kind of revenge against the color revolution that is there in 2018, as there is no doubt that Vladimir Putin wants to show the neighboring countries of Russia, who respond in love to the American revolutions, who cannot count on their real time for their protection. However, the nightmare feared by the Kremlin is that war on Russia’s southern borders, especially with the presence of Islamic mercenaries, would ignite ancient ethnic and religious conflicts within it. Therefore, Putin will soon discover that the fireball that Erdogan ignited must be extinguished before its sparks spread throughout the region.
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