Clashes that leave more than 170 dead in two days revive the historic Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and threaten the fragile peace process sponsored by the European Union
The convulsive Caucasus, the historical scene of tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan due to the particular borders defined in the Soviet era, experienced a day of peace this Thursday by surprise. The weapons fell silent when no one expected it. Both sides respected the ceasefire reached on Wednesday after two days of clashes that left more than 170 dead and threaten to undermine the fragile EU-sponsored peace process.
The involvement of the international community, according to the Armenian National Security Council, worked a miracle that, however, no one believes will be prolonged. Previously, Russia, a traditional mediator in the region, also announced a truce that was broken. Both countries accused each other of bombing.
This new episode of a historic struggle, aggravated at the end of the 1990s in the context of the disintegration of the USSR, has caused numerous casualties in the two belligerent armies, in addition to the exodus of hundreds of Armenian civilians residing in the border areas of this important strategic territory in southeastern Europe that suffers from deep political, cultural and ethnic divisions, with Nagorno-Karabakh at the heart of the entrenched conflict. The area is inhabited by a majority Armenian population, but international borders draw it integrated into Azerbaijan.
cession of territory
The fighting that began on Monday is the most serious since 2020, when more than 6,500 deaths were recorded and Armenia was forced to cede territory. It was the tip of an iceberg that hides at its base political-territorial discrepancies that also dot religions and that since the fifties of the last century has added tens of thousands of victims due to the policy implemented in the region by Josef Stalin, always a supporter of the strategy of divide and rule to avoid any kind of homogeneity in all the Soviet republics.
The dictator never did anything to try to resolve the conflicts in this important mountainous region, the scene of centuries of struggles for control plots. He was always an advocate of creating small republics within each republic. This is also the case in Chechnya, Georgia or even Ukraine, in the Donbas region.
For the Government of Yerevan, the area of Nagorno-Karabakh (Upper Karabakh) is part of its unrealistic idea of bringing together the territories that have historically been populated by the Armenian Christian-Orthodox ethnic group. However, the approximately 150,000 inhabitants of this religion who reside in the area since 1923 have been under the control of the Azeri authorities, Muslims, although they enjoyed a slight autonomy, a kind of ‘ghost state’ sustained by an endless conflict of the type ethnonationalist that fed back during the disintegration of the former communist bloc of the Cold War.
The conflict, far from seeing an end, is still very much alive at a time that is already very difficult for the region due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, the current geopolitics makes resolution difficult, since both Armenia and Azerbaijan seem to be under the expansion program designed by Vladimir Putin. Many see there the next battlefield.
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