Azerbaiyán (Continuación)

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 »

Manifestantes se reúnen cerca del edificio del gobierno armenio en Ereván después de que Azerbaiyán lanzara una operación militar en la región de Nagorno Karabaj. Reuters

Recuperaba el filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben en su vasta obra una figura arcaica del Derecho romano: el homo sacer, que era aquella persona marginada de la sociedad a la que se podía matar sin considerarse esto como un homicidio.

Agamben nos transporta de aquella sociedad romana a la actualidad para advertirnos que el homo sacer sigue existiendo. Existe cuando un Estado considera abiertamente como desechable a una parte de su población. Cuando un gobierno expulsa sin escrúpulos de sus hogares a una minoría étnica. Es decir, cuando la política decide quién debe vivir y quien morir.

Hoy, los armenios de Artsaj son el homo sacer.…  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 »

Azerbaijani servicemen stand guard at a checkpoint at the Lachin corridor, the Armenian-populated breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region's only land link with Armenia, as Azerbaijani environmental activists protest what they claim is illegal mining, on December 26, 2022. Tofik Babayev/AFP/Getty Images

Nothing about Luis Moreno Ocampo’s testimony to the US Congress last week was subtle. The legendary former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court told the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that there is reasonable basis to believe that a genocide is underway in Nagorno-Karabakh, where an estimated 120,000 Armenians have been deprived of food, fuel and medical supplies for more than eight months.

Nagorno-Karabakh — known as the Republic of Artsakh by local Armenians — a mountaintop region populated by ethnic Armenians, has been officially within the borders of Azerbaijan since the days of the Soviet Union. Local Armenian authorities have vied for independence from Azerbaijan for decades, leading to an ongoing political and military conflict.…  Seguir leyendo »

Relatives and friends of those killed during the fighting for control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region visit the Yerablur Military Memorial Cemetery. Photo by KAREN MINASYAN/AFP via Getty Images.

After a hiatus of several months, Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations resumed in May – and readouts from intensive meetings in Washington, Brussels, Chisinau, and Moscow suggest an agreement on normalization of relations between the two states is feasible.

There is now a critical mass of issues at the inter-state level on which eventual agreement looks possible, such as border delimitation, resolving humanitarian issues, and the much-discussed connectivity agenda. Many observers sense a historic opportunity to finally turn the page on 35 years of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

For the first time in many years, it is the stronger side – Azerbaijan – which appears to be pushing for a negotiated outcome, within a context where Armenian deterrence and its capacity to resist have broken down.…  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 »

El puente de Judafereín, que separa Azerbaiyán de Irán. ADP

Mientras buena parte del mundo se sentaba a celebrar el día de Navidad, miles de personas se manifestaban en la plaza del Renacimiento de Stepanekert, capital de Artsaj (Nagorno Karabaj) para exigir el fin del bloqueo planificado por parte de Azerbaiyán al que se ven sometidos sus habitantes desde el 12 de diciembre.

Ahí viven 120.000 personas de etnia armenia que ven amenaza su supervivencia por la crisis humanitaria. El corredor de Lachín/Berdzor, única carretera que conecta Stepanekert con la República de Armenia está cortado. El transporte de civiles, el traslado de enfermos a hospitales, los víveres, las medicinas y la economía de Artsaj están bloqueadas.…  Seguir leyendo »

An Azerbaijani soldier stands on the road to Shusha, a town in Nagorno-Karabakh controlled by Azerbaijani forces. On the other side of the fence, a Russian checkpoint looks over the parallel road used by Armenians. CRISIS GROUP

An Azerbaijani soldier stands on the road to Shusha, a town in Nagorno-Karabakh controlled by Azerbaijani forces. On the other side of the fence, a Russian checkpoint looks over the parallel road used by Armenians. CRISIS GROUP

If the war in Ukraine has reverberated across crises worldwide, its impact has been especially acute in the South Caucasus. Two years after their latest war over Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan appear headed toward another confrontation. Russia’s travails in Ukraine have upset calculations in the region.

A new war would be shorter but no less dramatic than the six-week conflict in 2020. That war, which killed more than 7,000 soldiers, saw Azerbaijani forces rout Armenians from parts of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and nearby areas, all of which had been held by Armenian forces since the early 1990s.…  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 »

Mapa antiguo de Europa Central

Tema

¿Qué representan la guerra en Ucrania y los conflictos recientes en el espacio post soviético?

Resumen

La reanudación de las hostilidades en Nagorno-Karabaj entre Armenia y Azerbaiyán y en la frontera de Kirguistán y Tayikistán, así como las tensiones continuas en los conflictos congelados de Transnistria (en Moldavia) y Osetia del Sur y Abjasia (en Georgia), han puesto de nuevo el foco sobre el espacio post soviético, planteando la cuestión de si la guerra en Ucrania es la causa de las hostilidades recientes y si podría tener un efecto dominó y crear más inestabilidad en la región.

La guerra en Ucrania no es la causa de las hostilidades, porque estas datan de mucho antes de aquella.…  Seguir leyendo »

A view of the settlement of Sotk, which is said was hit by Azeri shelling during recent border clashes with Azerbaijan, on September 14, 2022. (Photo by Karen MINASYAN / AFP)

On the night of September 12-13, violent clashes erupted along the eastern and southeastern border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The hostilities, which had been brewing since a ceasefire agreement signed under Russian the auspices two years before, continued until September 15. Over these 48 hours, Azerbaijani forces reportedly used heavy artillery and drones along a 200 km stretch of the border. According to the Armenian prime minister, the shelling deliberately targeted the civilian population and vital civilian infrastructures in 36 residential areas and communities.

The direct cause that re-sparked hostilities remains unclear, with Armenia and Azerbaijan blaming each other. The Armenian prime minister referred to the Azerbaijani shelling as an unprovoked and unjustified military aggression.…  Seguir leyendo »

Depuis début septembre, le régime azerbaïdjanais a relancé ses attaques contre l’Arménie. Alors que le démembrement territorial de ce pays souverain a déjà été entamé par les premières offensives voici deux ans, c’est la menace d’une épuration ethnique, peut-être même d’un nouveau génocide, qui plane aujourd’hui au-dessus des Arméniens de l’Artsakh.

Relation millénaire. Les liens culturels et diplomatiques entre l’Arménie et la France sont aussi forts qu’anciens. Notre pays a accueilli de nombreux Arméniens, dans les moments dramatiques qui frappèrent ce peuple. Français exemplaires dans tous les domaines, nos compatriotes d’origine arménienne ont su le rendre à notre pays tout en restant attachés à leurs racines, Cette diaspora ne fait que renforcer cette relation si singulière entre nous.…  Seguir leyendo »

Armenian army volunteer Armen Tadevosyan, 56, walks around the border town of Jermuk on Sept. 15. (Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty Images)

As Russia moves deeper into the Ukraine quagmire, the Kremlin is losing its military and diplomatic ability to mediate the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan — and the Biden administration is moving to fill that void.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan this week hosted what he called “direct and constructive talks” with Armen Grigoryan and Hikmet Hajiyev, his counterparts from Armenia and Azerbaijan, respectively. The meeting followed on-the-ground mediation efforts by Philip Reeker, the State Department’s senior adviser for the Caucasus region.

The White House meeting produced a “road map” for further peace negotiations between the two countries, according to Lilit Makunts, Armenia’s ambassador to Washington.…  Seguir leyendo »

Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev visiting the Lachin city after Azerbaijan's army took full control of the city in August 2022. Photo by Presidency of Azerbaijan / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The recent large-scale cross-border attacks inside Armenia by Azerbaijan, with reports estimating at least 286 people killed from both sides and hundreds more wounded, highlights the wider picture of a collapsing Russian-led security order in Eurasia.

Coming on 12 September, the attacks coincided with Ukraine’s successful counter-offensive in Kharkiv and fresh fighting between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. And Armenian appeals to Russia and its allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) for support met with muted responses, resulting only in the mobilization of a fact-finding mission.

Several key actors in Eurasia now see Azerbaijan as a critical – or at least important – partner in solving new problems flowing from the war in Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

In the shadow of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a series of clashes and a subsequent period of quiet have raised both fears about renewed fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh and hopes that diplomacy might still bring the parties closer to peace. In March, Azerbaijani forces seized territory around Farukh, an ethnic Armenian-populated village that has been patrolled by Russian peacekeepers since a ceasefire ended the 2020 war that upended an almost three-decade status quo in the region. The Armenian government, along with Nagorno-Karabakh’s de facto authorities, worried that the move might herald a broader Azerbaijani offensive, taking advantage of Moscow’s focus on Ukraine.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mourning the war dead in Yerevan, Armenia, December 2020. Artem Mikryukov / Reuters

As the ripples of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulse outward, they have left one region especially volatile: the South Caucasus. The Ukrainian conflict has paradoxically raised the likelihood of both further fighting and a negotiated peace in this area between the Caspian and Black Seas. The region was the site of a brutal war in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh—an Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijan—and adjacent regions. The 44-day war left around 7,000 people dead and saw Azerbaijan inflict a crushing defeat on Armenia, reversing territorial losses it had suffered in fighting during the 1990s. The war also left unresolved questions, lingering disputes, and simmering tensions.…  Seguir leyendo »

Police detain demonstrators during a protest against the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Yerevan, Armenia, on May 5. (Vahram Baghdasaryan/Photolure/AP)

In the shadow of the war in Ukraine, an unlikely peace process is taking shape to normalize relations between Armenia and its historic adversaries, Azerbaijan and Turkey. What is surprising about this diplomacy is that it appears to have the support of both the United States and Russia.

The negotiations are controversial in Armenia, which was battered by Azerbaijan in a bloody 2020 war over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and still bears deep emotional scars from the 1915 genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Protesters in Yerevan have denounced Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s opening to Baku and Ankara and have called for his resignation.…  Seguir leyendo »