The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is like something out of a comic novella, a Ruritanian scrap over sterile mountains. Three years ago, I visited the disputed region for the first time traveling with Armenians, having secured an Azeri visa because I did not want to make any kind of statement about the status of the territory. As I gazed from the helicopter at the empty snowscapes beneath, I wondered at the tribalism that could inflict so much misery over so little. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands displaced, for the sake of barren and largely unpeopled uplands.
The origins of the dispute lie in the breakup of the USSR. Nagorno-Karabakh was a mainly Armenian enclave within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. As long as both Armenia and Azerbaijan were ruled from Moscow, its status did not much matter. But with independence, the Armenians in Karabakh proclaimed their sovereignty, and, in the ensuing war, Armenia ended up capturing not only most of the enclave but also a large chunk of Azerbaijan proper, forming a consolidated bloc of land.
Neither side will contemplate concessions. For Azeris, it is a legal question. Karabakh, as they see it, is a portion of their territory wrenched away by force, a view broadly backed by the international community. For Armenians, the issue is one of self-determination. Karabakh had always been a largely Armenian-populated territory, awarded to Azerbaijan almost whimsically by the Soviet authorities.
Does any of this matter outside the region? Yes. For one thing, each combatant has a much larger ally. Armenia is backed by Russia, albeit in a fitful way designed to ensure that the Kremlin retains its presence in the Caucasus, which a complete end to the conflict might make superfluous. Azerbaijan is backed more openly by Turkey, which was accused last week of shooting down an Armenian aircraft.
“So what?” you might be thinking. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Recep Tayyip Erdogan is exactly a Western ally. Might this not be one of those Iran-Iraq, pity-they-can’t-both-lose situations?
The trouble with that argument is that the losers are the Armenian and Azeri people, not Putin or Erdogan, both of whom are strengthened by military crises on their frontiers. Quite apart from the broken families, the grieving mothers, the wasted resources, conflicts make people more authoritarian. Azerbaijan is an autocracy, and, while Armenia retains the forms of parliamentary government, its opposition figures can at times find themselves locked up or exiled. Armenia has been territorially ascendant since the 1990s, but it pays a huge cost for its control of those sparse highlands. Eighty percent of its borders are closed, inflicting needless poverty on a people whose diaspora population is recognized everywhere else for its enterprise.
Is there a solution? Yes, and it would be obvious to both sides if they could get past their histrionic “blood of our martyrs” rhetoric. The answer is a territorial readjustment, a land for peace deal. Nagorno-Karabakh, which was ethnically mixed before the conflict, should be divided, partly absorbed into Azerbaijan and partly allowed formally to accede to Armenia, with a land corridor to connect it. In return, Armenia should withdraw from all the other territories it occupies, most of which it accepts are legally part of Azerbaijan.
Could such a deal be made to work? Logically, yes. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the president who led a newly independent Armenia to seize Nagorno-Karabakh in the first place, believes that land swaps would have ended the conflict in 1997. But he was howled down as a traitor by a country in which the blood was up. On the other side were the Azeris who favored such a deal.
Wars, like epidemics, flick switches in our brains, making us more intransigent, less compromising, less tolerant of dissent. When, during that visit three years ago, I suggested to my Armenian hosts that they should settle from a position of strength, that the balance had shifted since the 1990s, that Azerbaijan had used its oil revenues wisely, building up both its military strength and its international support, not least as a successful example of a secular Muslim state that enjoyed cordial relations with Israel, they goggled at me in horror, as though I had insulted their fallen soldiers.
In the end, though, there is no other solution. Moscow is offering to arbitrate talks, but it has no interest in a lasting peace. Turkey is quite content to use the conflict to stoke patriotic feelings at home, Azeris being an ethnically Turkic people. France is pitching in openly behind Russia and Armenia. In the absence of an honest broker, I’m afraid things will continue to deteriorate.
