International mediators in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are due to arrive in the Armenian capital Friday after having reportedly discussed the current state of the negotiating process with Azerbaijan’s leadership in Baku.
Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Tigran Balayan confirmed to RFE/RL on Thursday that the US, Russian and French cochairmen of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group will be in Yerevan November 14 and will hold a meeting with Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian the same day.
According to the President’s spokesman Samvel Farmanian, the co-chairs will also meet President Serzh Sarkisian while in Armenia.
Meanwhile, it has been reported that while in Baku Matthew Bryza, Yuri Merzlyakov and Bernard Fassier met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev to discuss “the current state and prospects of the negotiations over the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”
The troika’s visit to the region comes less than two weeks after the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, together with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, signed a declaration in Moscow pledging to continue and step up the prolonged search for a peaceful political solution to the long-running dispute.
Amid fresh international hopes for a breakthrough in Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks Sarkisian left Moscow for Paris where he met with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and then visited Brussels for high-level meetings with European Union and NATO leaders.
The Moscow declaration, in particular, refers to the principles drafted by the Minsk Group and presented to the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan at the OSCE summit in Madrid in November 2007 as a likely basis for continued talks on a peace accord.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a former predominantly Armenian-populated autonomous region of Soviet Azerbaijan, has been controlled by local ethnic-Armenian forces since the area broke free of Baku’s control following a bloody war that lasted for nearly three years and left thousands on both sides killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. A Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement in 1994 put an end to the hostilities, but sporadic clashes along the line of contact have continued to date.
Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to a three-way meeting to settle long-standing disputes in the Caucasus, Turkey’s foreign minister said on Wednesday.
Turkey and Armenia have no formal diplomatic relations. Armenia and Azerbaijan are at odds over disputed territory.
Several oil and natural gas pipelines flow through the Caucasus to Western Europe.
The three foreign ministers had met on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September.
“There is consensus to repeat the trilateral meeting … but the schedule for that should be determined carefully so that concrete results can be taken,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said.
Babacan said he planned to visit Azerbaijan. Armenia’s foreign minister would visit Turkey as part of “busy diplomatic traffic”.
“We hope to see positive developments in a plausible timeframe and to solve these decades-old problems,” Babacan said.
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 in a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking ally, which was fighting Armenian-backed separatists over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population broke away from Azerbaijan in a war as the Soviet Union fell apart.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have never signed a peace treaty, and Azerbaijan has not ruled out using force to restore control over the territory.
Relations between Turkey and Armenia are strained by accusations Ottoman Turks committed genocide when they killed ethnic Armenians in World War One.
Russia has been pushing for Armenia and Azerbaijan to negotiate over Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey’s Babacan praised Moscow’s role.
“We expect Russia to make important contributions for the normalization of Azeri-Armenian relations,” he said.
President Abdullah Gul became the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia in September for a soccer match between Turkey and Armenia, and Babacan said the two could meet again soon.
“There is no need to wait for another football game for a meeting between (Armenian President Serzh) Sarkisian and Gul. I expect that such a meeting could take place within months.”
Armenia believes the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is a key issue in the continuing search for a settlement in the long-running Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute and regards the Armenian-controlled territories surrounding the enclave as a guarantee of its population’s security, the country’s leader said in an interview with a leading European newspaper.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quoted President Serzh Sarkisian in its Monday issue as saying that Azerbaijan’s recognition of the self-determination of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population can be followed by solutions to other issues.
“The control over territories is not an end in itself for us, but is aimed at Karabakh’s security. Today we need to negotiate over principles of settlement, which can be followed by the basic peace accord. We still have a long way to go,” Sarkisian said, according to the text of his interview disseminated by the presidential press office Tuesday.
Earlier this month Sarkisian met with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliev in Moscow and following tête-à-tête talks signed a joined declaration along with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledging to step up efforts for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
The signing of the nonbinding document came amid growing international hopes for a breakthrough in internationally mediated Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.
Sarkisian commented that the Moscow declaration was important for the Armenian side due to its exclusion of a military way of resolving the dispute.
“Of course, it is just a declaration, and we would be very glad to reach an agreement. Anyway, I do not mean to underestimate the importance of that document,” Sarkisian told the German paper. “I am also glad that Azerbaijan signed a document that assumes all principles of international law as a basis for a solution to the conflict and not only the principle of territorial integrity.”
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian-populated autonomous region in Soviet Azerbaijan, broke free of Baku’s control after the demise of the USSR, prompting a bloody war that claimed thousands of lives on both sides.
After nearly three years of fighting, Karabakh Armenians managed to establish control over the most part of the region and expand into surrounding areas to form a security zone.
Since 1994, when hostilities ended after a Russia-brokered ceasefire, negotiations between the former warring sides over the future of the region have been conducted through the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) jointly chaired by the United States, France and Russia.
The parties to the conflict have so far been unable to reconcile the two seemingly conflicting principles of international law, i.e. territorial integrity of states and the right of nations to self-determination. The stalemate that until recently had been observed in the peace process led to increased war rhetoric and petrodollar-backed military buildup in Azerbaijan as well as questions over the efficiency of the format of negotiations.
“I also positively evaluate the fact that despite critical assessments of the effectiveness of the Minsk Group’s activities made of late, the document [signed in Moscow] underscores the importance of the Group’s format and the role of the United States, Russia and France as mediators,” Sarkisian said.
The Armenian leader also effectively excluded a status of Karabakh implying its dependence on Baku as he said that history proves Armenians cannot develop in a safe environment under Azerbaijani rule.
“We have never thought that Karabakh can remain within Azerbaijan with any status,” he said.
Between Russia and the Middle East, the Caucasus is one of the world’s most diverse regions – and as recent fighting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia showed, still boiling with ethnic tensions. Norman Stone reviews a history which makes sense of this complexity
The surrender of the Circassian leader Sheikh Shamil to the tsarist forces in 1859
The Ghost of Freedom: a History of the Caucasus
Charles King
OUP, 219pp, £17.99
A Georgian professor came to my (Turkish) university a few years ago and said: “People who live in mountains are stupid.” You probably hear such things often enough in the Caucasus, but it is not the sort of remark that you expect professors to pass. However, there is maybe something in it, a point made by the crazy loyalism of the Jacobite Highlanders of the Forty-Five, or for that matter of the Navarrese Carlists: brave and romantic, certainly, with their own codes of honour, but not very bright.
A French sociologist, André Siegfried, developed this theme a century ago, because he had noticed that voting patterns depended on altitude; in the valleys, people got on with normal lives, but, the further up you went, the less this was true. The diet was very poor, the economy was sheep-stealing or smuggling, resentment simmered against the valley settlers, and religion of a wild sort reigned. The Caucasus also fits Siegfried’s pattern, with the difference that, the further uphill you went, the more weird languages you hit on. In Charles King’s words, “the north-east harbours the Nakh languages . . . as well as a mixed bag of disparate languages that includes Avar, Dargin and Lezgin”.
He has missed out the Tats, who are mountain Jews, and he has mercifully missed out a great deal else, because the whole region is a kaleidoscope, and the ancient history is very complicated, with an Iberia and an Albania in shadowy existence; the Ossetians, of whom the world recently heard so much, are apparently what is left of the Alans, one of the barbarian tribes that swept through the later Roman Empire (and ended up in North Africa).
Charles King’s great virtue is that he is a very proficient simplifier and misser-out; he writes well, and can read the languages that matter (for some reason, quite a number of the important sources are in German; Germans were especially interested in the Caucasus, and in 1918 even had plans to shift U-boats overland to the Caspian). All the important themes are here, with some interesting additions.
King concentrates on the modern history of the Caucasus, roughly from 1700, when Russia began to take over the overlordship from Persia and the Ottoman Empire. In 1801, she annexed much of Georgia. This was relatively easy, since it is a very divided country (and the language – so difficult that even Robert Conquest, writing his biography of Stalin, found it impossible – itself sub-divides). It was also Christian, the nobility on the whole glad to come to terms with the tsar, and it could easily be reached from the sea, whereas other parts of the Caucasus, given the very mountainous and forested terrain, were much more difficult. The various Muslim natives of the northern Caucasus were then generally known as “Circassians” (the present-day Chechens are related) and they put up an extraordinary resistance to Russian penetration.
Cossacks came in, as the 19th century went ahead, and a line of forts was established; but a ferocious tribal-religious resistance grew up, under a legendary figure, Sheikh Shamil. Combining mystical-religious inspiration with an extraordinary astuteness as to guerrilla tactics, Shamil kept the Russians pinned down for a whole generation. (King’s bibliography is very solid and useful, but he might have mentioned a classic book about this, Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch, who went on to write The Wilder Shores of Love about the erotic Orient.)
In the event, the Russians “solved” the problem of the Circassians by mass-deportation. About 1,250,000 of them were forced out, and King is very good at describing their fate, as a third of the deportees died of disease or starvation or massacre, and the rest scattered over the Near and Middle East. Settling in eastern Anatolia, they encountered the Armenians, and bitter conflict resulted. A generation later much the same fate occurred to the Armenians of eastern Turkey. King quite rightly makes the parallel.
Shamil was at long last captured, but the Russians treated him well, and part of his family faded into the tsarist aristocracy. This is incidentally a dimension of matters that King could have explored: the relations of Russia and Islam. He has a good chapter about the image of the Caucasus in Russian literature (Lermontov and Tolstoy especially) but both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky were fascinated by Islam, and the Russians, whether tsarist or communist (and even nowadays) were quite adept at dealing with Muslims. The Tatars have turned into rather a plus: Nureyev and Baryshnikov, whose names mean “light” and “peace” in Turkish, being a case in point.
In fact, as the 19th century went ahead, the Caucasus was opened up, and many of the Muslims became loyal subjects of the tsar. Tiflis, the Georgian capital (why must we use these wretched “Tbilisis” and “Vilniuses” for places so well marked on the historic map?), was the seat of a viceroyalty that stretched from Kars in eastern Anatolia to the Caspian, and the railways, or the military roads, snaked ahead. Oil was struck on the Caspian side, and Baku, the capital of today’s Azerbaijan, grew up as a boom town, much of the architecture rather distinguished in late- Victorian style. One of the great mansions has been spectacularly restored as a historical museum.
To this day, the solid architecture of Kars, now in eastern Turkey, is impressive, and though the town went through a very bad period, when the Cold War was going on, it is doing much better now, as the oil pipeline to Baku pumps away, and the old railway links are restored. Even now, despite the gruesome climate, the inhabitants of Kars are notably sharper and better-educated than those of Trabzon or Erzurum, which remained under Ottoman rule. According to Orhan Pamuk’s novel on the town, Snow, its theatre was very good, but if you needed Islamic female costumes you had to send off to Erzurum, which was (and is: the calls to prayer are frequent and deafening) very provincial-pious. In its way, Kars shows in miniature that pre-1914 period which is the great might-have-been of Russian history: 1914 aborted a period of growing prosperity even, if you like, a bourgeois revolution. The revolution of 1917 finished all of that.
There was a pathetic episode, as the three nations of Transcaucasia – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – established a shadowy independence, even though the peoples of each were (and to some extent still are) intermingled. Baku and Tiflis had large Armenian populations, and Yerevan, the territory of today’s Armenia, was roughly half Muslim, whether Azeri or Kurdish. “Ethnic cleansing” then went ahead, the Armenians especially becoming megalomaniac, and even, as a first act on independence at Christmas 1918, invading Georgia. To this day, much of the Armenian diaspora seems never to have forgiven the west for failing to support their cause: hence these strange and persistent demands for the tragedy to be recognised as genocide. Perhaps it was, but as King shows, Armenians were not the only victims – not by any means – and it is rather to the credit of the Circassians’ (and others’) descendants that they are not demanding similar recognition of genocide from Congress or the Assemblée Nationale or Cardiff City Council or the Edinburgh City Fathers etc.
Sovietisation of the Caucasus then happened, and it was the communists’ turn to find out just how difficult the national question was going to be: eventually, it destroyed them. Communism had a very strong appeal to begin with when it came to the national question: who, looking at the Caucasus (as with Yugoslavia) would not be desperate for anything that would stop the rise of vicious tinpot nationalism? Many stout communists, beginning with Stalin himself, came from the Caucasus, and Stalin in the end had recourse to deportation (of the Chechens and many, many other peoples) as the only solution. That created the counter-hatreds that have made post-Soviet life so difficult. The Armenians repeated their fantasy of 1918 and invaded a neighbour – Azerbaijan – in pursuit of a fantasy. They victoriously set their standards afluttering over Karabakh, with much swelling of diaspora bosoms. The effort, and the isolation it brought them, caused nothing but economic trouble to what was already a poor, land-locked little place, and the original population, three million, is now, from emigration, below two: independence, in other words, having done more damage than ever the Turks did. The Georgians had an 18th-century ruler who described himself as “The Most High King, by the Will of Our Lord King of Kings of the Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians and Armenians and Master of All the East and the West”: more megalomania with a contemporary ring, in other words. Charles King has written a very instructive and interesting book about it all.
Norman Stone’s most recent book is “World War One: a Short History”, now available as a Penguin paperback (£7.99)
International mediators plan to visit Baku and Yerevan next week to try to build on progress which they believe was made by the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents at their weekend meeting in Russia, Washington’s chief Nagorno-Karabakh negotiator said late Thursday.
In an interview with RFE/RL, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza also insisted that the outgoing U.S. administration still hopes to broker a framework peace accord on Karabakh before handing over the reigns of power to President-elect Barack Obama on January 20.
“It’s absolutely possible,” he said, commenting on chances for the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani agreement in the coming weeks. “I’m not predicting that it will happen. I’m just saying it is possible and I want to do everything I can to make it a reality.”
Bryza spoke to RFE/RL by phone from Vienna where he met earlier on Thursday with the two other co-chairs of the OSCE’s Minsk Group representing France and Russia. The mediators discussed their further steps four days after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hosted talks outside Moscow with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts. In a joint statement, they said those talks gave them “reason for cautious optimism.”
“We will make a trip to the region, I hope some time next week, and consult with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to figure out how to translate the momentum, that we felt in Moscow and that our French colleagues felt in Paris when President Sarkisian visited [on Tuesday,] into a finalization of the basic principles [of a Karabakh settlement,]” Bryza said.
He said the co-chairs will then meet the foreign ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of a high-level OSCE meeting in Helsinki due early next month. “Depending on how much progress we will make, we will see whether we can get the presidents to meet again soon,” he added.
In a joint declaration with Medvedev, Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliev pledged to intensify the protracted search for peace but stopped short of announcing any concrete agreements. The lack of specifics in the declaration is construed by some observers as a sign that a breakthrough in the Karabakh peace process is not on the cards.
Bryza insisted, however, that the Moscow summit did bring Aliev and Sarkisian closer to agreement. “First of all, they developed a better sense of trust in each other and respect for each other’s needs, for what they need to do to sell the agreement back home,” he said. “Number two, in terms of substance, it sounds like they began a process of narrowing their differences on the remaining few issues that have to be resolved over the basic principles. So both in terms of mood and substance, they moved forward.”
Former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, the leader of Armenia’s main opposition alliance, went further on Tuesday, saying that Aliev and Sarkisian have “officially” accepted the basic principles of a Karabakh settlement which the mediators presented to the conflicting parties in Madrid in November 2007. Ter-Petrosian predicted that the two presidents will likely seal a peace deal in the United States as early as next month.
“Actually, it’s a great idea, a great aspiration,” commented Bryza. “I hope we could get to that. But we don’t have any concrete plans like that yet.
“It’s an ambitious goal that the former President Ter-Petrosian has set. I’d like to work toward it but it may be a little more ambitious than reality would allow right now.”
Bryza indicated that the parties have yet to fully agree on some of they provisions of the proposed framework agreement, notably a future referendum on Karabakh’s status. He said they are still trying to reconcile the internationally principles of territorial integrity and self-determination. “It’s not agreed on yet but it’s under discussion,” he said. “And I sense that the two sides, especially the presidents, are talking things through and thinking things through with regard to that issue and others.”
The Minsk Group’s existing peace proposals seem to entitle Karabakh’s predominantly Armenian population to determining the disputed territory’s status in a future referendum. However, Aliev has repeatedly stated, most recently on October 24, that Azerbaijan will never come to terms with the loss of Karabakh. The Armenian side, on the other hand, maintains that Azerbaijani recognition of the Karabakh Armenians’ “right to self-determination” is a must.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov singled out late last month the future of the so-called Lachin corridor, which provides for the shortest overland link between Karabakh and Armenia proper, as the main stumbling block in the negotiating process. He did not elaborate, though.
“Everybody knows that that issue has to be resolved,” Bryza said, referring to Lachin. “It’s an important one. We’re working on that and getting closer to that.”
The U.S. official further reiterated that Washington has no problem with Moscow seemingly taking the initiative in the Karabakh peace process of late and does not fear being sidelined by the Russians. He argued that he and the Minsk Group’s French co-chair, Bernard Fassier, were invited to the November 2 summit held at Meiendorf Castle outside Moscow.
“We don’t consider it so much a Russian initiative because we were invited from the beginning to come to Moscow,” he said. “If the Russian president decides he wants to apply his influence and his energy to moving the process forward, that’s positive.”
The U.S. and Russia are willing to continue to work together on Karabakh despite their “very sharp differences” over the recent conflict in Georgia, concluded Bryza.
The leaders of Turkey and Azerbaijan revived efforts Wednesday to resolve entangled conflicts in the volatile Caucasus region also involving Armenia.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul hailed Azeri-Armenian talks in Russia last week as “the beginning of a new era”, boosting hopes of securing peace and stability in the region.
“Turkey supports this process and hopes that it will continue,” Gul said after talks with Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliev. “We have begun to handle the problems in the Caucasus together and with courage.”
Hosted by Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev, Aliev and Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian met near Moscow Sunday and signed a joint declaration asserting their desire to find a political settlement to the Nagorny Karabakh conflict.
Aliev voiced hope the talks with Armenia would result in a settlement “through gradual ways” and thanked Turkey for its peace efforts in the Caucasus, which Ankara wants to crown with a regional cooperation pact, involving also Georgia and Russia.
Turkey is eager for progress on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict in the hope of advancing its own reconciliation bid with Armenia, its eastern neighbor with which it has refused to establish diplomatic ties. In a show of support for Azerbaijan, a close ally with which it shares ethnic roots, Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, dealing a heavy economic blow to the impoverished ex-Soviet nation.
Gul became the first Turkish head of state to visit Armenia when he traveled to Yerevan in September to watch a World Cup qualifying football match between the two countries on the invitation of Sarkisian. Turkish officials have said the reconciliation process with Armenia would be advanced mostly through “silent” diplomacy.
