The crumbs of information coming to us from this – unfortunately already – military conflict in the Caucasus are minimal this time, because the coronavir has made it almost impossible for people to move across borders, and air traffic has almost completely stopped, so even experienced journalists can’t get to the scene. Then you have to look at various intermediate signs, which those with a keen eye can peel from other filmed materials.
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First of all, the character of Nagorno-Karabakh (as it is called in Azerbaijan) or Arcach (Armenian): during the Soviet era, such “autonomous republics” and “autonomous regions” were formed with different statuses in all ethnically diverse parts of the USSR, as Mikhail Suslov’s chief ideologue invented the scheme: if, for example, half of Ossetia were to be counted in the USSR and the other half in the Georgian SSR, or if the Armenian-inhabited Arcah were named Nagorno-Karabakh and subjugated to Azerbaijan, the people in those territories would hate each other’s historical sense of abuse rather than benefit from Russification. (The occupiers did the same in Latvia, only less brutally – according to the same principle, the Latgalian Varakļāni was separated from Latgale and mapped in Vidzeme, or Krustpils and Jēkabpils were forcibly merged.)
In the Caucasus, the scheme set off a gigantic explosive that unfolded even before the collapse of the USSR, with mass racist attacks on Armenians beginning in Sumgait and other Azerbaijani cities since 1988. Ukrainian President Kravchuk, along with the leaders of Russia and Belarus, had not yet signed documents on the liquidation of the USSR, when Caucasians stabbed and shot each other until nearly half a million Armenians had to flee Azerbaijan. Oil-rich Azerbaijan, with a population of ten million, fought against the mountainous state of Armenia with a population of three million without oil. Armenia won the four-year war.
Distancing from the unresolved question of which side “could be right”, which “could not be right”, we can see: the current military clashes show that Azerbaijan is tacitly planning a revenge. It has an ally, Turkey, which, under the leadership of its power-hungry President Erdogan, longs to become a regional superpower, perhaps even more so, and where even better to show the ambitions of the superpower than to support foreign wars? You don’t have to shed your own blood if you can incite others to it!
Iran, Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s common neighbor, is silent, which generally benefits Azerbaijan. Turkey supplies unmanned aerial vehicles and other military equipment to Azerbaijan, and oil money allows the latter to buy everything it wants.
Armenia has always been geopolitically oriented towards the West, especially under the current President Pashinyan, but at the same time it is forced to cooperate with Russia, not because of its own desires, but because there is no deadlock – there is simply no other major country nearby. Turkey, which killed one and a half million Armenians in 1915 and still does not recognize genocide, although the term “genocide” was coined by Polish prosecutor Rafael Lemkin to refer to ethnic cleansing against Armenians. Ukraine, which is not far from the Caucasus, has a deep blood fraternity with Georgia, but not Armenia, and the Ukrainian diplomats have urgently started flying around the Ukrainians, hinting at the common enemy – the Kremlin.
So how do people react to this disaster (described very simply here)? The Azerbaijani army has posted on the web videos of the villages of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Arcah, where one side is calling for liberation and the other for seizure, as is unfortunately the case in almost all such cases.
The video shows empty, abandoned farms, shot homes and cars. Some buildings were destroyed, others had a broken roof. No population is seen anywhere. There are flies along the camera lens. If the “oppressed” inhabitants of the villages of Sukovuja and Dashkana had asked the Azerbaijani army to “release” them, they would have covered the brave “liberators” with flowers and shashliks, while here managed to grab. Pigs and chickens have been released to seek livelihoods in the future. The dog is tethered. Shots can still be heard in the distance…
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