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Armenios huyendo de Nagorno-Karabaj, el pasado septiembre.ANATOLY MALTSEV (EFE)

Hemos sido espectadores de un hecho insólito en la historia del siglo XXI, la disolución de un Estado democrático, la República de Nagorno-Karabaj (Artsaj). Esta será “integrada” forzosamente y por la vía de hecho en un Estado dictatorial, tras la limpieza étnica perpetrada contra toda la población civil. En palabras de Luis Moreno Ocampo, primer fiscal jefe de la Corte Penal Internacional (CPI), estamos frente a un nuevo Genocidio Armenio.

La esperada reacción contundente de la comunidad internacional no ha llegado. Ni la Unión Europea (UE) ni otras potencias han actuado para evitar esta catástrofe humanitaria, como se hizo en Kosovo o Ucrania.…  Seguir leyendo »

Azerbaijani troops parade in the formerly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, November 2023. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan / Reuters

In late September, one of the most shocking human upheavals since the century began took place in the former Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, a small, hilly patch of territory nestled within Azerbaijan. After three decades of tensions and conflict, it took just one day in September for Azerbaijan to seize the disputed enclave. Armenia stood largely on the sidelines, not strong enough to intervene, causing Nagorno-Karabakh’s population of some 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee en masse in one of the starkest examples of forced displacement in the twenty-first century. And yet international attention soon drifted away from the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan has faced no international consequences for its actions, a fact made all the more striking by the possibility of a new war in the region.…  Seguir leyendo »

«J’en rêve la nuit.» Un père azerbaïdjanais montre une photo de sa fille prise en 1986 au Haut-Karabakh à Khanhendi, appelée Stepanakert par les Arméniens. La famille a dû quitter la ville de son enfance en 1988, lors de la première guerre du Haut-Karabakh. Bakou, 7 octobre 2023. — © Aziz Karimov / keystone-sda.ch

Prague, République tchèque

Minuit passé, dans une ville que je considère comme ma seconde patrie. Je suis assise avec deux amis, également journalistes, nous sommes plongés dans une ardente discussion sur la guerre d’Israël contre Gaza. L’endroit grouille de monde avec des rythmes de jazz relax en fond sonore, mais il n’y a que nous, à notre table, essayant de donner un sens à ce qui se passe, à la réaction du monde, établissant des parallèles avec le passé récent et les guerres et conflits que nous avons couverts au cours de notre vie de journalistes dans la région – des conflits en abondance, vu d’où nous venons: l’Arménie, la Géorgie et l’Azerbaïdjan.…  Seguir leyendo »

Fuerzas militares otomanas llevan a hombres armenios de Kharput a un lugar de ejecución fuera de la ciudad. Kharput, Imperio Otomano, marzo de 1915-junio de 1915. American Red Cross / Wikimedia Commons

Para entender visualmente el conflicto entre Armenia y Azerbaiyán sin correr peligro no hay más que seguir la orilla iraní del río Aras en un mapa.

En el hermoso paisaje de montañas, valles, afluentes y bosques que hacen de frontera entre Irán y estos países del Cáucaso también se encuentran búnkeres, trincheras y destacamentos militares de ambos Estados. La razón de esta militarización de la zona se debe a que es uno de los posibles escenarios bélicos del enfrentamiento que existe entre Armenia y Azerbaiyán.

Concretamente, el río Aras hace de frontera sur de la provincia armenia de Syunik con Irán, pero además limita al este con Azerbaiyán y al oeste con la República Autónoma de Najicheván, un exclave también azerí.…  Seguir leyendo »

Occidente debería evitar un Nagorno-Karabaj

Al igual que las guerras civiles, los conflictos étnicos y religiosos suelen terminar de una manera: con la derrota total de una de las partes. Estos enfrentamientos despiertan pasiones tan intensas que los acuerdos de paz son extremadamente difíciles de negociar y, cuando se alcanzan, son fundamentalmente frágiles, prácticamente imposibles de aplicar y con muchas probabilidades de colapsar. La guerra por Nagorno-Karabaj –un enclave de unos 120.000 armenios cristianos dentro del territorio de Azerbaiyán, de mayoría musulmana– no es una excepción.

A finales de los años 1980 y principios de los 90, Nagorno-Karabaj fue el escenario de una sangrienta campaña de limpieza étnica mutua.…  Seguir leyendo »

Armenios de Nagorno Karabaj cruzan la frontera con Armenia tras huir de sus casas, el pasado 19 de septiembre.ANATOLY MALTSEV (EFE)

Frente a su demanda insaciable de energía, Europa se encuentra hoy en un dilema ético y político a la hora de asegurar el suministro de gas. ¿Se puede permitir aceptar el gas que ofrece un régimen dictatorial acusado de violaciones de derechos humanos y crímenes de lesa humanidad? ¿Y los beneficios económicos de semejante acuerdo justifican que el mundo occidental sea partícipe, aun indirectamente, en una limpieza étnica?

Mientras la pura ética y los valores de la UE exigen un “no”, los líderes europeos han optado por un rotundo “sí”.

Tras la guerra que se produjo entre Azerbaiyán, la autoproclamada República de Nagorno-Karabaj (Artsaj) y Armenia en el año 2020, la invasión por parte del primero de más del 70% de la región, las masacres y la deportación forzosa de la población armenia autóctona de Artsaj, la presidenta de la Comisión Europea, Ursula von der Leyen, se reunió con el dictador de Azerbaiyán, Ilham Aliyev, el 18 de julio de 2022 con el fin de formalizar un acuerdo alternativo al gas ruso.…  Seguir leyendo »

A truck carrying Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh on the road between Kornidzor and Goris, Armenia, September 28, 2023. Alain Jocardi/AFP/Getty Images

This year marked the 850th anniversary of the death of the Armenian poet and apostle Nerses Shnorhali (Nerses the Graceful). Nerses, who had the arduous duty of leading the Armenian church soon after the dissolution of Armenia’s eastern kingdoms and the dispersion of its people, rose to the challenge by becoming a musical and poetic innovator, ingeniously conceiving of, among other things, the Bible as a book of riddles written in an accessible Armenian vernacular. The resulting volume is a compendium of the creation of the world. One of the riddles reads:

Though it is wingless, featherless,
It goes faster than the swallow.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘The Armenians know well what sorry destiny awaits them if they stay.’ People fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh arrive in Kornidzor, Armenia, on 28 September 2023. Photograph: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA

The world has just seen an end to centuries of Armenian existence in Nagorno-Karabakh. All ethnic Armenians have left the disputed region, travelling in a caravan of cars over the border to Armenia. The Armenian children now displaced will hate the Azerbaijanis, just as I once hated the Armenians for what they did to me. I was a victim of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, when it was Armenia that was victorious, and it ethnically cleansed all Azerbaijanis from its lands. I am speaking out, hoping to be a small pebble, lodged in this endless cycle of violence.

Before the first war, inside Azerbaijan’s borders there existed the “Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous oblast”, a majority-Armenian island, so to speak, of mountainous land, with the culturally significant, majority-Azerbaijani citadel Shusha right in the middle.…  Seguir leyendo »

1er octobre 2023 au point de contrôle de Latchine. — © EMMANUEL DUNAND / AFP

L’Azerbaïdjan chante victoire, crimes et mensonges à l’appui. Pays voisin de la plus petite république indépendante de l’ex-URSS, la pétrodictature d’Ilham Aliyev persiste dans l’inversion accusatoire. Un acte terroriste fictif lui a suffi pour répandre la terreur en menant une guerre éclair le 19 septembre dernier. Riche de ses ressources en hydrocarbures, elle a investi des centaines de millions de dollars dans le lobbying international et dans la diplomatie frelatée dite du caviar. Grâce au soutien direct et indirect des grandes puissances, de la Russie aux Etats-Unis en passant par Israël et la Turquie, elle jouit d’une suprême impunité aux dépens d’une morale fossilisée.…  Seguir leyendo »

Armenian servicemen checking the cars of Karabakh Armenians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh near Kornidzor, Armenia, 29 September 2023. Photograph: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA

The president of the self-declared “Republic of Artsakh”, Samvel Shahramanyan, has dissolved all institutions of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh and almost all Karabakh Armenians are now thought to fled the enclave being reintegrated into Azerbaijan. What lessons can be drawn from the tragic epilogue of this three decades-long secessionist conflict in Europe?

The images of long queues of cars escaping mountainous Karabakh to neighbouring Armenia bring back dark memories of ethnic cleansing that Europe thought had been relegated to its past. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its imperial follies, trenches and wanton destruction, catapulted Europe back into the harrowing days of the world wars, the flight of ethnic Armenians rewinds us to the Balkans of the 1990s – or even further back, to the end of the Ottoman empire during the first world war.…  Seguir leyendo »

Cars pass next to a Russian peacekeeper vehicle, as they leave Karabakh to Armenia. (Photo by EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty Images)

In a military offensive on 19 September, in 24 hours Azerbaijan finally forced the surrender of the Karabakh Armenians – after 31 years of local, internationally unrecognized rule.

The terms of surrender include the disarming of the Karabakh Armenian armed forces and the dissolution of the territory’s three decades-old de facto political institutions.

A mass exodus of the civil population ensued, even as Karabakh Armenian representatives engaged in a long-delayed dialogue with Azerbaijani officials over the terms of their integration as Azerbaijani citizens.

Few believe, however, that significant numbers of Armenians will remain after the protracted hardship of blockades, shooting at agricultural workers, intimidating rhetoric, repeated escalations, and a large-scale military assault.…  Seguir leyendo »

Des Arméniens du Nagorny Karabakh en route pour l'Arménie. 26 septembre 2023 — © Stepan Poghosyan / keystone-sda.ch

L’exode des Arméniens du Karabakh, une déportation provoquée par une politique délibérée de nettoyage ethnique d’une région arménienne enclavée dans l’Azerbaïdjan depuis le début de l’époque soviétique, est une tragédie de plus dans l’histoire du peuple arménien. Contre le principe de l’autodétermination et du droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes, qui avait conduit les Arméniens de cette région à autoproclamer l’indépendance de la République d’Artsakh, l’Azerbaïdjan a fait valoir le droit à recouvrer son intégrité territoriale. La reconnaissance du principe de l’intégrité territoriale de l’Azerbaïdjan (en référence à la Déclaration de Alma-Ata et sur la base de la réciprocité) par le premier ministre arménien, Nikol Pachinian lors d’une rencontre à Prague sous les auspices des dirigeants européens en 2022, semble donc mettre un point final à l’affaire.…  Seguir leyendo »

Después de 35 años de luchas, la guerra entre Armenia y Azerbaiyán por Nagorno-Karabaj parece a punto de acabar con la victoria total azerbaiyana. Las tropas rusas, teóricas aliadas y garantes del bando armenio, han permanecido pasivas. Esto se explica porque en los últimos meses Armenia estaba virando claramente hacia Occidente, saliéndose de la órbita rusa. Sin embargo, eso se debe en parte a que los rusos ya les habían dejado en la estacada en septiembre de 2020, precisamente como castigo por sus veleidades pro-occidentales.

La humillación militar de 2020 obligó al Gobierno armenio a mantenerse como vasallo de Rusia, pero dieciséis meses después, Putin invadió Ucrania.…  Seguir leyendo »

Fuerzas pertenecientes al Ministerio del Interior de Azerbaiyán custodiando la carretera Fuzuli-Shusha. Foto: Aykhan Zayedzadeh (Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0).

La tercera guerra de Nagorno Karabaj ha acabado en menos de 48 horas, con la capitulación de los armenios ante la superioridad militar de Azerbaiyán y la pasividad tanto de Rusia como de la Unión Europea (UE) y Estados Unidos (EEUU). Aunque se trata de un conflicto local de larga data, desde 2020 se ha convertido en el espejo de la rivalidad entre Rusia y Turquía en la región y del declive de la influencia de Moscú en el espacio post soviéticoahora acentuado por la guerra en Ucrania y el conflicto entre Rusia y Occidente.

La guerra local y rivalidad regional entre Rusia y Turquía

Los orígenes del conflicto de Nagorno Karabaj se remontan a la decisión de la Unión Soviética de incluir una región poblada por mayoría armenia en la República de Azerbaiyán.…  Seguir leyendo »

In an image from a video, a Russian guard stands near the gate into a camp near Stepanakert in Nagorno-Karabakh. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP)

In 2021, President Biden recognized the 1915 removal of Armenians from their lands in Anatolia, in today’s Turkey, as genocide. The United States had been silent on the issue for more than a century, and its silence had grievous consequences.

Today, Armenians need global leaders, including Biden, to stop a new genocide — one that started this past winter and is now evolving into a more brutal phase.

On Tuesday, after a months-long blockade and military buildup along the border of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan’s military launched an attack. Within a day, Azerbaijani forces quickly overwhelmed local defenses, killing more than 200 people, including civilians.…  Seguir leyendo »

Armenians rally in Yerevan on Thursday following Azerbaijani military operations against Armenian separatist forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. (Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images)

It was Mao Zedong who said that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. That harsh lesson certainly applies to the long-running battle between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh — where Azerbaijan this week imposed its sovereignty by force of arms.

For Armenians, who live in the long shadow of the 1915 Ottoman genocide, the plight of an estimated 120,000 ethnic Armenians in Karabakh has been haunting. Lacking the military power to rival Azerbaijan — and without protection from Russia, the United States or even Armenia itself — the Karabakh Armenians were forced to surrender in two days.…  Seguir leyendo »

The long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has created partnerships in the South Caucasus that cut across religious, ethnic, and geopolitical lines in surprising ways. Iran, which is ruled by Shiite clerics, has provided an economic lifeline to Christian-majority Armenia, whose primary backer has long been Russia. Meanwhile, Israel and Sunni-majority Turkey have formed a strategic alliance with predominantly Shiite Azerbaijan. And the two Shiite-majority countries in the mix, Iran and Azerbaijan, remain locked in a bitter, decades-long dispute over territory and identity.

For almost three decades, with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict frozen in a stalemate, this configuration was mostly seen as a case of politics making strange bedfellows: curious, but not a cause for alarm.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian peacekeepers deployed in the Lachin corridor, which connects the region of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, December 26, 2022. Tofik Babayev/AFP/Getty Images

There’s an old joke about a turtle being mugged by a gang of snails. When asked to describe the attackers, the turtle says he’s not sure, it all happened so fast. Blockades warp time in a similar way: the pain they inflict is both immediate and protracted.

Today is the seventy-third day of the blockade of the Lachin corridor, the only road that connects the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia and the rest of the world. Nagorno-Karabakh is bordered on all sides by Azerbaijan, which initiated a war against the enclave in 2020 that ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Now the 120,000 ethnic Armenians who live there are entirely isolated, prohibited from passing freely into or out of the region, and denied access to food, fuel, and medical supplies.…  Seguir leyendo »

A Russian peacekeeper guards the Lachin Corridor, which has been blocked by Azerbaijani protesters since December 12, 2022 -- cutting off ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh from the outside world. Tofik Babayev/AFP/Getty Images

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its devastating humanitarian fallout, it would be a leap to cast Moscow in the role of a peacemaker. But in one corner of the world that’s exactly what has happened.

In the wake of a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, Russia was left to broker a ceasefire and keep the two sides in check. The United States and the European Union, which had once played a balancing role in the South Caucasus, effectively pulled back from active diplomacy and let Russia act as the sole mediator. Moscow deployed peacekeepers on the ground to calm and monitor the situation.…  Seguir leyendo »

Azerbaijani protesters gather on the Lachin corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh on Dec. 13. Resul Rehimov/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A woman in a crowd of protesters clutched a lifeless dove in her hand, its head flopping back and forth as she waved her arm in the air. The bird had apparently been squeezed to death while she spoke into a megaphone, delivering an impassioned speech honoring Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in the 2020 war for Nagorno-Karabakh.

With dark humor, the strangled dove came to embody the broken peace process in the South Caucasus. The bird and its human handler were part of a show of political force by Azerbaijan in the Lachin corridor, the sole road connecting Armenians in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to the outside world.…  Seguir leyendo »