When Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, spoke by phone on Thursday with President Trump’s nationwide safety adviser, he raised a fragile subject: Why is nothing being finished to cease a longtime United States ally, Turkey, from utilizing American-made F-16 jets in opposition to ethnic Armenians in a disputed mountain area?
Mr. Pashinyan’s name to the nationwide safety adviser, Robert O’Brien, adopted an eruption of heavy combating in and round Nagorno-Karabakh, a distant territory on the middle of probably the most enduring and venomous of the “frozen conflicts” left by the collapse of the Soviet Union within the late 1980s.
The breakaway enclave, legally a part of Azerbaijan however managed by Armenians for the previous three many years, has seen many army flare-ups through the years. However the present combating, Mr. Pashinyan mentioned in a phone interview, has taken on a much more harmful dimension due to Turkey’s direct army intervention in assist of Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally.
On Sunday, information stories mentioned, the forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan, each former Soviet republics, exchanged rocket hearth, with missiles falling on Azerbaijan’s second largest metropolis, Ganja, and on the Armenian-controlled capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. All sides accused the opposite of focusing on civilians whereas denying finishing up any assaults itself on residential areas.
The battle has set off alarms in regards to the dangers of a wider warfare and put america, with its massive and politically influential Armenian diaspora, within the uncomfortable place of watching Turkey, a significant NATO ally, deploying F-16 jets in assist of Armenia’s enemies.
“America,” Mr. Pashinyan mentioned, “wants to clarify whether or not it gave these F-16s to bomb peaceable villages and peaceable populations.” He mentioned that Mr. O’Brien had “heard and acknowledged” his considerations and promised to arrange a cellphone dialog between the Armenian chief and President Trump.
That chance to rally america to Armenia’s facet vanished only a few hours later when President Trump introduced that he had examined constructive for the coronavirus.
However Mr. Trump’s well being points, analysts say, have solely accentuated his administration’s disengagement from a battle that gives no simple diplomatic victories. It has confounded many years of efforts to resolve a dispute that has left Armenians in command of not solely Nagorno-Karabakh however massive swathes of Azerbaijani territory outdoors the breakaway enclave.
Mr. Pashinyan declined to say whether or not Armenia could be able to give up any occupied Azerbaijani land as a part of a attainable peace settlement, insisting that this was less than him however a matter for the leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, a nominally unbiased entity dominated by ethnic Armenians.
Turkey mentioned on Sunday that Azerbaijani forces had retaken Jabrail, the most recent in a sequence of villages beforehand occupied by Armenia now mentioned to be again underneath Azerbaijani management on account of combating over the previous week. The declare couldn’t be independently confirmed.
The Trump administration, distracted by different greater points like China, has “merely not been paying consideration and been utterly disengaged,” mentioned Thomas de Waal, a British skilled on the area and creator of a ebook on Nagorno-Karabakh, “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.”
For Armenia, Mr. Pashinyan mentioned, the present combating, which started Sept. 27 after months of rising tensions, poses an “existential menace” due to the position of Turkey, whose precursor, the Ottoman Empire, killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians on the finish of World Battle I. The U.S. Congress and lots of nations have declared that slaughter a “genocide,” a label Turkey strenuously rejects.
Armenia, too, has selective recollections of the previous, with Mr. Pashinyan dismissing the worst atrocity of the 1991-1994 Karabakh warfare — the 1992 killing of a whole bunch of Azerbaijani civilians by Armenian fighters close to the city of Khojaly — as a “pure propaganda trick.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan have a long record of playing down or ignoring each other’s past traumas, a bent that has made all of it however inconceivable for both facet to simply accept professional grievances and has pissed off outdoors efforts to settle their feud over Nagorno-Karabakh.
“All sides focuses solely on their very own traumas and belittles these of the opposite facet,” Mr. De Waal mentioned. “This battle will go on for at the very least one other era except it may be smothered by a world safety operation” just like the one which tamped down warfare within the Balkans within the 1990s. That, Mr. de Waal added, “is extremely unlikely within the present worldwide scenario.”
Azerbaijan, Mr. Pashinyan mentioned, has lengthy harbored hopes of recovering Nagorno-Karabakh by pressure however was “inspired” by Turkey to launch its latest offensive in opposition to the Armenian-controlled enclave.
“This can be a continuation of the genocidal insurance policies carried out by Turkey in opposition to the Armenians,” he mentioned. He accused Turkey of not solely offering air assist but additionally recruiting Syrian fighters, whom he referred to as “mercenaries and terrorists,” to strengthen Azerbaijan’s army forces on the bottom.
Turkey has denied Armenia’s accusations, together with unsubstantiated claims {that a} Turkish F-16 final week shot down an Armenian jet. It has as a substitute attributed the spiraling violence to Armenia, with the international ministry in Ankara saying on Sunday that “Armenia is the most important barrier to peace and stability within the area.”
Although obscured by a fog of propaganda by all sides, the battle has clearly escalated past a neighborhood ethnic dispute into a much bigger wrestle as an increasingly assertive Turkey flexes its muscle in a area historically dominated by Russia.
Russia has a army base in Armenia and, with america standing again, Moscow has taken the lead in diplomatic efforts, to date fruitless, to calm the combating whereas avoiding a direct confrontation with Turkey, with which it’s already combating proxy wars in Syria and Libya.
Describing the battle over Nagorno-Karabakh between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan as a “civilizational entrance line,” Mr. Pashinyan mentioned the dispute “isn’t about territory” however includes far greater and extra necessary stakes.
“Armenians within the south Caucasus are the final remaining impediment in the best way of Turkish growth towards the north, the south and the east,” he mentioned.
