BAKU

by LADA YEVGRASHINA

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived in Azerbaijan on Tuesday and signed a “military union” pact with its ally in a visit announced on relatively short notice.

Some expected a standard protocol drop-in to Ankara’s close friend. And there were discussions about joint energy issues involving Azerbaijani natural gas and oil flowing to and via Turkey.

But the focus was political.

The Turkish leader went straight to Shusha, a hugely symbolic, strategic city occupied by Armenian forces for almost 30 years and recaptured only in November by Azerbaijan.

A shell of its former self, Shusha is regarded as the heart of Azerbaijani arts and letters, producing writers and philosophers until the 90-plus percent ethnic Azeri city was overrun in the early 1990s, ethnically cleansed, and Azeri houses looted and dismantled as in other occupied cities.

The high-visibility meeting in a mostly still deserted, half-desecrated city, complete with ceremony, flag-waving, and symbolism, was audacious. It was evidently meant to emphasise that Ankara stands with Baku.

REINFORCED MILITARY PACT

Erdoğan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a military pact further cementing the already very close relationship between Azerbaijan and Turkey.

“In the event of a threat or aggression from a third state or against independence, sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, inviolability of internationally recognised borders, the parties hold joint consultations and take steps in accordance with the goals and principles of the U.N. Charter,” the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a statement citing the document.

“It is also envisaged to provide the necessary assistance to each other in accordance with the U.N. Charter and to organise coordinated activities of the power and command structures of the Armed Forces,” it said.

It is not clear who the “third state” might be. Armenia was so badly battered during the 2020 offensive that despite persistent border disputes and issues regarding landmines, it is in no position to pose a real threat to Azerbaijan.

RUSSIA IN AN AWKWARD POSITION

On the other hand, Russia is both the official “peacekeeper” in the conflict and an official – if controversial in Yerevan – ally to Armenia. Moreover, its ties with Turkey are highly complex, as Turkey is a NATO country.

And while Russia was the official mediator of the November 2020 armistice, Turkey also became part of a joint Russian-Turkish monitoring centre in the looted, formerly occupied ghost-city of Agdam, giving it equal footing and likely enraging some in the Kremlin.

Erdoğan made no mention of Russia in a speech in Shusha. And instead of calling for the November armistice to be made into a permanent peace deal, he hinted that it could also pave the way for normalisation of relations between Turkey and Armenia.

The countries have never had diplomatic ties and are still locked in a debate over the events of 1915 in which estimates of up to 1.5 million – historians and politicians differ on the number – Armenians were killed.

Ankara says what many countries have labelled “genocide” resulted from civil war as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the dying days of World War I, fighting an also dying Tsarist Russia in the process. Many Armenians had sided with Tsarist forces.

ERDOĞAN VOWS PEACE WITH ARMENIA

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

“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.”

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry denounced the visit.

“As a clear provocation against peace and security in the region, we strongly condemn the joint visit of the presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan on 15 June”, it said.

“These provocative actions clearly demonstrate the falsity of the statements of official Ankara and Baku on normalization of relations with Armenia and the Armenian people. Once again emphasize, the elimination of the consequences of the recent Turkish-Azeri aggression against Artsakh should be carried out in the framework of a comprehensive settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict under the auspices of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group,” said the ministry.

CRITICAL TIME FOR VISIT

Erdoğan’s visit, moreover to symbolic Shusha, came at a crucial time. Azerbaijan overran areas occupied by Armenian forces since the early 1990s with a six-week 2020 blitzkrieg. Yerevan was driven out of some occupied areas and forced to leave others by a November armistice negotiated by Moscow.

Turkey was key in building the Azerbaijani military for a quarter-century. It gave training, logistical and material support to Baku, ending three decades of humiliation.

A smaller section of the former Azerbaijan Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous District is still in the hands of Armenian separatists but depends mostly on a single road to Armenia via Azerbaijan. There is no hard proof of how many are left there, though some unofficial estimates say 40,000 or so in a country of more than 10 million.

But seven months on, the two countries have yet to demarcate their border and there have been many incidents along with it as a result. Azerbaijan’s Aliyev appears to have lost patience.

“If Armenia wants peace, they must start with our negotiations on delimitation. If they don’t, they will be sorry about it,” Aliyev said on Saturday.

But if Baku were to drive out the remaining Armenians, it could also present Ankara with a dilemma, as it – Azerbaijan’s military sponsor – again could be accused of “persecuting” Armenians.

LANDMINE ISSUE LURKS, MAKES LIFE IMPOSSIBLE IN FORMER OCCUPIED AREAS

The formerly occupied territories are mostly unpopulated wastelands, stripped of anything of value down to bricks, wiring, roofing, and pipes. And full of landmines the Armenians left.

This makes any attempt to resettle the more than 600,000 Azeris ethnically cleansed from the districts practically impossible.

At least 25 Azerbaijanis have been killed and more than 100 injured in landmine incidents since late last year.

After months of arguments, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who is now officially in an acting capacity ahead of a snap parliamentary poll on Sunday, handed over maps of landmines planted in the Agdam region, a former long-time front-line area.

Just in that one district, the Armenian maps listed 97,000 anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. A staggering figure, given that the Agdam region’s pre-war population was approximately 60,000 souls.

Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry expressed thanks to a U.S. special envoy, the EU, and Sweden, which currently holds the rotating chair of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Curiously, Russia – the ceasefire broker and “peacekeeper” which has 1,980 troops on the ground – was not mentioned in the initial ministry press release.

But according to Azerbaijan government sources, the maps were given to Baku in an interesting way which raises questions about the Russian role in the region.

They said Pashinyan, a 45-year-old writer and journalist, gave the maps to the American envoy, Acting Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip T. Reeker, with the understanding that the landmine maps would be handed to Baku. Not via Moscow, the “official” peacekeeper and technical Armenian ally.

And not the OSCE, which led an unsuccessful, nearly three-decade mediation effort that many derided as ineffective.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited the region last month amid the swelling border and landmine issues, and President Vladimir Putin kept in touch with both capitals.

Armenia is formally part of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), which was set up as a weak counterweight to NATO. It also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. But Armenia has long been seen as a reluctant “ally”.

Although Azerbaijan is not a member of the CSTO or NATO and pursues what it calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, it has had cordial relations with Russia and deep economic ties.

Thus, Moscow’s role as a “peacekeeper” has long been a thorny issue.

NO CHANCE OF ARMENIAN REVENGE, BUT POTENTIAL FOR HOSTILITIES REMAIN

In what Azerbaijan’s government calls the “Patriotic War,” at least 6,000 troops on both sides died, but some believe the death toll to be much higher. At least 200 civilians were also killed.

Any resumption of hostilities would likely involve the few areas of internationally recognised Azerbaijan still under de facto ethnic Armenian control or border areas.

Armenia’s Pashinyan has already had to fend off ferocious attacks from nationalist detractors for agreeing to the armistice in the first place. He has defended this by saying it saved what remained of the former mostly Armenian-populated Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh from a worse fate, and there was no alternative.

In providing landmine maps via a U.S. envoy, Pashinyan may have been snubbing Moscow. It is widely perceived as backing a group of more alacritous nationalists, including ex-President Robert Kocharyan, who has emerged from obscurity and is well-financed by unknown groups.

Pashinyan of late has even been met within regional towns with epithets of “traitor” or worse – “Turk”.

ARMISTICE LEFT MURKY BORDER AND OTHER ISSUES

But delimiting the border is central. And thorny. Talks have ground to a halt. Incidents have raised tensions. Armenia claims Azerbaijani units took an area, including a strategic reservoir, 3 km deep into what it says is its territory. Azerbaijan cites documentation and their relevance to international law as claiming the area as its own.

“If Armenia wants peace, it also ignores our proposal, which major international parties support, to start negotiations on the delimitation of the state border with Armenia. We do not understand this,” Aliyev said.

Baku says the strip of land and water is actually its territory and both sides cite Soviet maps between the two USSR republics drawn up by military cartographers years ago.

Armenia also says it has no intention of opening a rail and road link via Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhchivan and the rest of Azerbaijan via a 40-km section of its territory. This, Baku says, is a direct violation of previous agreements.

Azerbaijan has detained Armenians for “violating its border” or being “saboteurs”. Armenia says they are prisoners of war. Baku counters by saying they are not POWs as they were apprehended after the November 10, 2020 armistice and fall under criminal statutes.

DELIMITING BORDER KEY TO FINAL AGREEMENT

“If Armenia wants peace, we also need a peace agreement. If Armenia wants war, then it will receive this same result,” Aliyev said over the weekend.

This might include the road crossing Azerbaijani territory -the Lachin Corridor – linking Armenia to the last major town in the former Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh district, Stepanakert [Armenian place name] Xenkendi [Azerbaijani place name].

An offensive might cause the remaining ethnic Armenians in the former Nagorno-Karabakh to flee, reducing the region to the main centre, Stepanakert/Xenkendi and a few outlying areas.

Some Azerbaijani politicians said the regional centre was deliberately left alone during the end phase of the 30-year war despite some periodic shelling. Left alone because it was considered not particularly strategic, and if remaining ethnic Armenians were to flee, it might invite allegations of “ethnic cleansing” – just as the Armenians had done when forcing the 600,000 plus ethnic Azerbaijanis out – an act which produced four unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions for them to withdraw – but which were ignored.

After all, Azerbaijan has back what it wanted most.  Armenian forces stripped seven districts of its country of anything of value, areas where Armenians had not lived before the three-decade war.

But Azerbaijan’s Aliyev says a full, official agreement delimiting the border is needed without delay. He has recently called on the President of the European Commission to help expedite the process.