| ||||
|
| A view of Agdam town, controlled by Azerbaijani armed forces, in the region of Karabakh, Azerbaijan, in Nov. 2020. (Aziz Karimov/Reuters) |
| For years, a community lived a tenuous, yet proud existence in their ancestral homeland. Its people toiled, worshiped and raised families on territory recognized by the international community as belonging to a government and country to which they had no loyalty. They found themselves locked in periodic battles with that country. And then, the hammer fell: A spiraling conflict led to a blockade, growing hunger and, finally, the wholesale evacuation of the population away from their homes. An ethnic cleansing happened and the world did nothing to stop it. This isn’t the story of the Gaza Strip — at least, not yet. It’s what befell Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave within Azerbaijan whose majority ethnic Armenian population was forced to flee en masse in September 2023 in the face of an Azerbaijani offensive. But as exiles motored their way to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, there was little chance that any foreign power would help enable their return. Within weeks, Hamas’s strike on southern Israel convulsed global politics and plunged the Middle East into months of ruinous war. The dispossession and expulsion of Nagorno-Karabakh’s roughly 150,000 population of ethnic Armenians — who had lived with de facto autonomy for decades in their unrecognized republic of Artsakh — soon became a footnote in an era of deepening conflicts and instability. On Friday, that footnote may work its way back into the headlines, with President Donald Trump slated to host Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, in a bid to broker peace between the feuding neighbors. The proceedings, like many of Trump’s other showy performances of peacemaking, may prove to be more symbolic than substantive. The centerpiece of discussions is economic rather than political — the potential creation of a transit corridor helping to bridge the bulk of Azerbaijan’s territory with an Azerbaijani exclave on Armenia’s southwestern border. According to Reuters, Armenia plans to award the United States special development rights for the project, dubbed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. For those sympathetic to the plight of Karabakh’s displaced, there is the looming certainty that Trump will do little to reverse their loss. “Erasing Nagorno Karabakh is not peace,” Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement Thursday, while outlining Armenian grievances with Azerbaijan. “Normalizing ethnic cleansing is not peace. Abandoning Christian holy sites is not peace. Forsaking hostages is not peace. Accepting Azerbaijani occupation of Armenia is not peace. Peace reached at gunpoint is not peace.” | ||||||
| |
| An ethnic Armenian soldier stands guard next to Nagorno-Karabakh's flag in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2021. (Sergei Grits/AP) |
| In the current moment, peace reached by gunpoint is increasingly the “peace” that is pursued. Abandoning ceasefire talks with Hamas that analysts believe he has long undermined, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that his government intends to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip. The plan imperils more than a million exhausted, displaced Palestinians in Gaza and has provoked the opposition of, among others, the chief of staff of Israel’s military, who believes his forces have already “met and exceeded the operation’s objectives” in war-ravaged Gaza. Netanyahu said he doesn’t want Israel to occupy Gaza indefinitely, nor to govern the territory. But many of his political allies on the Israeli far right hope a total conquest of the territory is a prelude to the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s population and its resettlement by Jews. As it is, Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been so widespread and thorough that it will take many years to rebuild and, in the interim, its residents may feel compelled to seek sanctuary elsewhere, as Trump himself hopes. A fate not dissimilar to those forced to abandon Nagorno-Karabakh may await them.
In 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh’s population endured a ten month blockade after Azerbaijan closed the one road that linked the territory to Armenia and the outside world. The resulting shortages in food, medicines and other critical supplies triggered an exodus that only accelerated after Azerbaijan launched a military offensive to capture the territory and restore, in its view, Azerbaijan’s full sovereignty over its land. “What is true, is that both countries view food as a strategic tool in achieving their objectives,” Stephan Pechdimaldji, an Armenian American commentator, told me, referring to Israel and Azerbaijan. “Much of the world stayed silent when Azerbaijan was starving Armenians in broad daylight. The same is true today in Gaza.” Azerbaijani officials balk at these claims, and insist that Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population were welcome to remain in their native towns under Azerbaijan’s control. The enmity between Azerbaijan and Armenia is one of the many awkward legacies of the collapse of the Soviet Union: in its aftermath, the two newly-independent countries fought repeatedly over Nagorno-Karabakh, which sits entirely within Azerbaijan’s borders. The Armenians were the apparent victors of the first iteration of the war which ended in 1994. They solidified Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomy and gained control of surrounding territories. But in the second war, which took place in 2020, Azerbaijan wrested back control of some territory, thanks to a superior military funded in part by the country’s vast petrowealth. Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians grew more isolated and embittered, unable to respond to waves of Azerbaijani drones supplied by Baku’s allies in Turkey and Israel (another echo of the Gazan experience). The war in Ukraine meant the clout of Russia, the peacemaker in the Caucasus, had dimmed, while Azerbaijan sensed an opening to make its move. By the time it launched the final conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, there was only muted European condemnation of the offensive. In his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to protect Armenia’s “persecuted Christians,” and blasted the Biden administration for doing “NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced.” Their displacement now seems an irrevocable fait accompli. “This peace deal is just the latest example of how Azerbaijan continues to leverage its natural resources and geography as a geopolitical trade-off where human rights and the rule of law take a back seat to realpolitik and oil,” Pechdimaldji said. | ||||||||||||