BAKU

by LADA YEVGRASHINA

The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, wound up an unusual, high-profile two-day visit to Azerbaijan on Wednesday, dangling the prospect of normalised relations with the long-time foe of both countries – Armenia. That is if certain outstanding issues are resolved.

Speculation has grown as to when the two historic adversaries will finally establish relations. But Erdoğan’s statement came during a speech before Azerbaijan’s parliament. Moreover, it was so direct, evidently, as to leave many in Baku reluctant to respond.

There was no official comment from the Azerbaijan government, and the suggestion was not overtly mentioned in the country’s media, which the government overwhelmingly controls.

“To the extent that the problems between Armenia and Azerbaijan can be resolved, Turkey can take certain measures for normalising relations with Yerevan,” the veteran Turkish President told the Milli Mejlis.

Azerbaijan routed Armenia late last year by retaking districts occupied by Yerevan with military support from Ankara. Erdoğan is a frequent visitor to Baku, and Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, visits Turkey often.

But this two-day visit was more than the usual protocol visit. It was announced with relatively little advance notice.

It seemed designed to push Yerevan to cooperate in delimiting the border between the countries. For Baku, this is a top priority. It has threatened new hostilities unless Armenia actively participates in delimitation talks immediately.

And, another sticking point recently emerged – restoring a road and rail corridor between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan – located between Iran, Turkey and Armenia. The area was cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan since hostilities with Armenia went into high gear in 1991.

Erdoğan and Aliyev also signed an enhanced defence pact with Azerbaijan, further cementing their relationship, which is already extremely close.

So close that a pan-Turk slogan first used in the early 1990s during a post-Soviet honeymoon period – “Bir millət, iki dövlət” in Azerbaijani or “One nation, two countries” – has popped up again on billboards or street illustrations.

MOSCOW NOW SEEMS OVERSHADOWED

The ostentatious visit by Erdoğan began in the revered city of Shusha, retaken by Azerbaijan after three decades of occupation. It is the country’s official “cultural capital.” Many writers, philosophers, and scholars hail from Shusha.

Shusha was more than 90 percent ethnic Azeri before the war, which started 30 years ago.

But the town is now a shell of its former self. Most homes belonging to Azerbaijanis were deliberately dismantled or systematically wrecked during the long occupation. Turkey plans to open a consulate in Shusha.

“Those who want to derive benefit from the new reality in the region should abandon hatred and incitement and promote peace and cooperation,” Erdogan said during his visit to the town.

“We will contribute to the normalisation of relations with Armenia. We believe that this process will continue … if Azerbaijan and Armenia will move … to a comprehensive and visionary peace agreement.”

And even though Moscow mediated the November armistice and has about 2,000 peacekeepers on the ground, Azerbaijan clearly feels emboldened by its decisive victory. Evidently, it senses a lessening need to kowtow to the Kremlin.

Neither Erdoğan nor Aliyev made any known open statement regarding the Kremlin during the two-day meeting.

Yet, it was clear during the six-week onslaught by Baku last year that Moscow was no longer unilaterally calling the shots. And it demonstrated how NATO member Ankara’s 25-year effort to help Azerbaijan build its army from the ground up effectively was successful.

So while Russia may have negotiated the formal armistice, it was finally forced to reckon with Turkey’s influence in Azerbaijan.

TURKEY’S MORE VISIBLE ROLE

To anyone who follows Azerbaijan, Turkey’s economic and military role in the country is old news.

Azerbaijan has generally had cordial relations with Moscow, but they have often been complicated since the Soviet breakup. Baku is not part of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), nor does it aspire to join NATO. Instead, it pursues what it calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy. Though the strictly secular majority Shia Muslim country has had often fraught relations with Iran in the past, it has tried its best to put them aside. It attempts to balance relations with Europe, the United States, and Russia.

Thus when Russia signed the 2020 armistice, it was forced to deal with Turkey. The two countries set up a joint Russian-Turkish monitoring centre in the looted city of Agdam, a poster child for the systematic, deliberate destruction of Azerbaijani towns during the long occupation.

More than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were ethnically cleansed from seven Azerbaijani districts and the former Azerbaijani Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous district. But only a smaller portion of it remains under separatist – effectively Yerevan’s – control after the 2020 offensive.

MP and political analyst Rasim Musabekov said it was ncreasingly clear that Baku was becoming more open in its embrace of Ankara.

“Turkey is preventing the possibility of harsh military pressure by Russia on Azerbaijan,” said. “First of all, by neutralising the desire of the Russian Federation to get into the conflict on the side of Armenia.”

“To a certain extent, Turkey neutralises Russia’s goal of affirming its post-imperial desires.”

ARMENIAN PM ALSO HINTS AT DISPLEASURE

The situation is made more awkward as Armenia is an ally of Russia.

Formally, that is.

But attitudes towards the Kremlin are mixed in Armenia.

Furthermore, Pashinyan, a 45-year-old journalist and writer, swept to power in 2018 in one of the “colour revolutions” Moscow often claims are plots cooked up by the West – it says the same about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia. It also alleges the U.S. has promoted anti-government demonstrations in Russia itself.

Thus, Pashinyan, from a different generation and mindset, is not exactly the type of leader that the Kremlin generally prefers to deal with.

He was elected in 2018 after he walked from one end of the country to the other, picking up supporters along the way. Massive street protests forced the “old guard” authorities – several of them “Karabakhis”, who many Armenians resent for having dominated political life in the country for far too long.

Pashinyan’s detractors blame him for the battlefield losses. However, Armenian forces – many of them hiding in World War II-style trenches – were zapped by high-tech weapons like Azerbaijani “suicide drones” that devastated their positions and made capitulation almost assured. Pashinyan was forced to accept the armistice late last year after the devastating six-week Azerbaijani campaign and has defended it as an alternative to a worse fate.

Still, protests by more militant types have forced Pashinyan to agree to a snap election taking place this Sunday.

A month ago, he had a huge lead.

But figures not long ago regarded as discredited – largely from the “old guard” Pashinyan displaced – have suddenly reappeared – and they seem newly flush with cash. Foremost among them is ex-President Robert Kocharyan, who hails from the former Nagorno-Karabakh region. Kocharyan once had Pashinyan thrown in prison for leading protests in 2008 over widely regarded as falsified elections, which elected an associate of Kocharyan.

Kocharyan just two months ago had a support rating of two percent, with other nationalist parties registering even less than that. But he and a grouping of them show him catching up with Pashinyan, though some analysts are sceptical of polling in Armenia.

Adding fuel to the fire, Pashinyan raised eyebrows last month by suggesting that despite the traditional enmity between Armenia and Turkey, the two counties were, now, after all, neighbours and would have to coexist. This soon led the acting PM to be greeted by taunts of “Turk” at his political rallies, the ultimate insult among some in Armenia.

Pashinyan’s campaign has all but openly alleged that Moscow is financing Kocharyan and his ultranationalist cohorts, seen as very pro-Kremlin.

In the most obvious snub to Moscow, Pashinyan recently handed over landmine maps of at least one of the regions formerly occupied by Armenian forces – those in the heavily fortified Agdam district. The maps showed the alleged location of 97,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. A staggering amount in a district that was originally home to just 60,000 before the war.

The political significance was that the acting PM did not channel the maps via its formal ally, Moscow, but instead gave them to a special visiting U.S. envoy, who then handed them to Baku.

Azerbaijan expressed a cautiously positive reaction regarding the landmine map handover. But it noted this was not nearly enough – there are many other districts for which it has not received maps. And others where – during the hasty, chaotic retreat of late last year – there may not be any maps.

REMAINING STICKING POINTS BETWEEN ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN

The main issue between Baku and Yerevan is still the delimitation of the border between the two countries. That has led to several tense incidents and apprehensions around frontier areas.

The fate of the so-called “Zangezur corridor”, which would reconnect Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan, is another huge obstacle.

Nakhchivan was connected to the rest of Azerbaijan by rail and road until tensions erupted into an all-out war in 1991.

In January, the two countries seemed to have agreed to re-open the route, which crosses 40 kilometres of Armenia.

But Yerevan, including Prime Minister Pashinyan, who is in an acting capacity until the vote, now says the connection would jeopardise its sovereignty and is not acceptable. Many, however, see this as pre-election bravado.

Erdoğan has emphasised the re-opening of the route, which would provide a more direct link between it and Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

“The convenience that the Zangezur corridor would bring is impossible to overestimate. Moreover, the rail link that would re-open would make it easier for Armenians to get to Moscow and other parts of the world, thus getting them out of isolation,” he told the Azerbaijan parliament.

A smaller section of the former Azerbaijan Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous District is still in the hands of Armenian separatists. Still, it depends mostly on a single road to Armenia via Azerbaijan.