The Armenia-Azerbaijan military balance is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and Jane's Intelligence Review has just published a good reported analysis (subscription required) by Emil Sanamyan that has a lot of interesting points. Among them:
-- "Upon closer inspection, Azerbaijan's purported 'military budget' incorporates not just the paramilitary forces outside the Ministry of Defence but also state prosecutors and even courts, with an apparent intention to inflate the overall figure for propaganda effect."
-- "The combined Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh defence army total is estimated by Jane's to be around 300 T-72s, considerably larger than the 110 officially declared by Yerevan. Azerbaijan is thought to maintain around 350 to 400 T-72s... Baku has declared only 217 tanks, although it it likely that this figure was designed to appear under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty ceiling of 220."
-- "[F]or now it is the Azerbaijani UAV capability that provides the most immediate potential for escalation. Armenian defence officials have confirmed that Azerbaijan has begun flying its UAVs close to the Line of Contact that separates the two sides, with several such flights reported since 2008. In mid-2010, two Armenian Su-25s were dispatched to try to intercept these UAV flights."
-- "Armenian officials also claim that Armenia has begun to domestically produce UAVs and that more than a dozen have already entered service, with the aim of co-ordinating artillery fire. These have yet to be seen publicly."
Azerbaijan on March 4 kick-started the manufacture of unmanned aircraft, most probably to peek into the goings-on in Armenia and Armenian-guarded, breakaway Nagorno Karabakh.
Defense officials yesterday updated Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on their progress with the domestic production of Israeli-designed drones. The two models, Orbiter 2M and Aerostar, both manufactured by a local company, AZAD Systems Co., can cruise for five and 12 hours at altitudes of six and 10 kilometers, respectively.
Armenia, which occasionally exchanges gunfire with Azerbaijan, in the past has complained about Baku reportedly flying drones over disputed Karabakh.
Drones have become a popular defense toy elsewhere in the South Caucasus, too. Some two months before the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, a Russian jet shot down an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance aircraft that was hovering over breakaway Abkhazia. Since the war, Moscow has offered to sell Abkhazia Russian-made drones.
The Azerbaijani models, financed by a $3.12-billion defense budget, may not have attack capabilities, but their presence similarly promises to add tensions to an atmosphere already charged with war rhetoric.
Azerbaijan's ambassador to Georgia, Namik Aliyev, offered a little public service announcement the other day. It went something like this:
"People of Georgia be warned! THEY are here! They are snapping up lands and property on your coast, they are singing and dancing in your beachfront bars and restaurants. But one day soon, they will organize themselves into a force, wipe out other ethnic groups, claim your country as their historic homeland, and set up an empire that will stretch from sea to sea (the Black and Caspian Seas, to be specific)."
In Ambassador Aliyev's telling, these are, of course, the Armenians.
Claiming that Azerbaijan’s nemesis, Armenia, is on the verge of fulfilling an eons-old dream of establishing a “Velikaya [Great] Armenia,” Aliyev on February 23 urged Tbilisi to join forces with Baku to stop the process of "Armeniazation" before it is too late.
Georgia may respond with an awkward laugh to such wild prophecies, and try to change the subject, but Azerbaijan is, in fact, pressing the Caucasus’ hottest button.
All three Caucasus countries tend to long for those episodes in their histories, however brief they may have been, when they dominated their surrounding area. While a frequent subject of jokes within Georgia, any mention of a "Great Armenia" can spark no-holds-barred debates between Georgians and Armenians over which majority-Christian nation has the right to what land. And a history debate can go a long way in the Caucasus.
The Azerbaijanis know that. Which begs the question . . . why try to set one off now?
In the nationalist Caucasus, many people often view the term "peace activist" as a synonym for "traitor." But, in the case of Armenian theater actor/director Georgi Vanyan, promoting peace is all about promoting ordinary well-being. Vanyan plans to set up a peace village in Georgia, where the Caucasus’ most implacable foes -- Armenians and Azerbaijanis -- can interact free of government restrictions.
The free communication zone would be established in the Georgian village of Tekalo, located not far from the Armenian and Azerbaijani borders. Vanyan, who has also tried to stage Azerbaijani film festivals in Yerevan, hopes that the site would become the venue for all confidence-building projects involving the two countries, Global Voices South Caucasus Editor Onnik Krikorian reports. The project proposes capitalizing on the precedent of peaceful coexistence between ethnic Azeris and Armenians in Georgia.
Underlying the initiative is also Montesquieu's premise that "peace is the natural effect of trade" -- a notion reflected in Georgia's current push for a pan-Caucasus free trade zone.
Not long ago, many Armenians and Azerbaijanis, indifferent to bombastic war rhetoric at home, actively exchanged goods at a market not far from Tekalo. The project will try to bring some of that back.
Azerbaijan is seriously preparing for war with Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorny Karabakh, the country's defence minister told international peace mediators in Baku on Friday.
"Azerbaijan is seriously preparing to liberate its territories," Safar Abiyev said in comments published by the ministry's press service.
It's hard to know how seriously to take these sorts of statements; the phrase "bellicose rhetoric from Baku" is by now a firmly entrenched cliche of Caucasus journalism. Still, that statement sounds, to my ears, more blunt than normal.
One of the most interesting parts of the recent International Crisis Group report (pdf), was its speculation about what would happen in a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Karabakh. It concluded that, while Azerbaijan has an obvious advantage in military spending, a variety of other factors could give Armenia an edge:
Former President Ter-Petrossian, was careful not to present the 1990s war as a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in order to emphasise the battlefield role of Nagorno-Karabakh forces and to downplay the Armenian army’s involvement. The present Armenian leadership makes no such pretence. A premeditated resumption of hostilities by Armenian forces is not likely, but cannot be ruled out, as Yerevan commentators and some military officials, notably in Nagorno-Karabakh, warn of a “preventive war” if the entity comes under imminent threat.
A rapid arms buildup, botched peace talks and a pick-up in fatal frontline clashes. If this sounds to you like a recipe for potential disaster in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, chances are the Brussels-based International Crisis Group would say you're right.
In a February 8 report on the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory, the ICG warned that there is an "urgent" need to prevent the chance of a renewed, full-scale war over Karabakh.
While the report finds that neither Baku nor Yerevan "is planning an all-out offensive in the near-term," it underlines that the current situation "could easily spin out of control."
The ICG puts a large part of the emphasis for change on existing international negotiation mechanisms. After nearly 19 years of talks and no real breakthrough in sight, some might question the practicality of that suggestion, but a lack of viable alternative options makes criticism difficult.
(Editor's Note: The ICG receives funding from the Open Society Institute. EurasiaNet.org is financed through OSI's Central Eurasia Project.)
The disputed territory Nagorno Karabakh is preparing for its first flight in nearly two decades after its airport shut down in 1991 amidst the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and Karabakh separatists over the region, RFE/RL's Armenian service reports.
With Karabakh’s status in abeyance, the airport in the capital, Stepanakert, is unlikely to have an international arrivals section. All flights will be bound for Armenia, the territory's ethnic kin and sovereign best friend.
Karabakh's de facto aviation officials expect the daily Stepanakert-Yerevan flights on Air Artsakh (Artsakh is the name widely used by Armenians for Nagorno Karabakh) to begin in May. A round-trip ticket on the airline's three 50-seat CRJ200 jets is expected to cost from $50 to $60, Regnum reported.
How Karabakh plans to deal with the International Civil Aviation Organization, which assigns the airport codes used in flight plans, is an unknown. Karabakh is recognized officially as part of Azerbaijan; under ICAO rules, therefore, it presumably would be up to Baku to request that the Stepanakert airport gets an international code.
The Georgian government faced a similar tussle last year when breakaway Abkhazia claimed that it would receive an international code for its airport via Russia.
In considering the long-term prospects for a new war in Nagorno Karabakh, the key factor is of course Azerbaijan's growing wealth, especially relative to Armenia's stangnancy. But that could lead to two opposing results: either Azerbaijan would not want to risk damaging its vibrant economy by starting a war, or its oil-funded military will be so much stronger than Armenia's that trying to retake Karabakh would be inevitable.
Azerbaijan scholar and consultant Svante Cornell has written a new book on the country, Azerbaijan Since Independence, which he introduced at an event yesterday in DC. And the part that was most interesting to me was that he came down very much on the side of war being inevitable.
His argument: that while an Azerbaijan invasion of Karabakh would elicit international condemnation, it would probably be short-lived and not amount to much, comparable to what happened with Croatia when it ethnically cleansed the Serb-dominated eastern part of the country in the 1990s. (UPDATE: I should have mentioned originally, this assumes that the invasion would be quick; if not, a protracted conflict would cause a lot of foreign companies to not be interested in operating there.)(SECOND UPDATE: Cornell writes to clarify that the above are not his personal views, but those of "parts of the Azerbaijani leadership." That was clear in his talk, in my writing I just unfortunately conflated his views and the ones he was reporting. My apologies.)
In addition, Azerbaijan, as the party unhappy with the status quo, always has an interest in keeping the situation at high tension. And that raises the risk of an accidental escalation of a small incident into a full-scale war.
Another proxy battle between Azerbaijanis and Armenians is playing out in the US as the Azerbaijani Diaspora community tries to put the kibosh on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) plans to air an Armenian-made documentary on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
In an October 20 letter to the network's management and ombudsman, two American-Azerbaijani groups charged that the film, "A Story of People in War and Peace" by Armenian journalist Vardan Hovhanisyan, offers a slanted take on the 1988-1994 Azerbaijani-Armenian war over Karabakh.
“[T]his documentary about the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict … would present a rather perverted interpretation of controversial history to the PBS viewer[s],” wrote the Azerbaijani-American Council and Azerbaijan Society of America.
The film tells the post-conflict story of Karabakh via the retrospective of Hovhanisyan’s own experiences as a war reporter and prisoner. The Azerbaijani Diaspora groups claim the film ignores the plight of ethnic Azeri victims of the conflict and is meant to sway public opinion in the US. “As PBS is a publically [sic] funded service based on taxpayer contributions, we appeal for your common sense to cancel the broadcast of this documentary,” the letter reads.
The tussle marks an increase in Azerbaijani attempts to match the political and PR efforts of well-oiled Armenian Diaspora lobbies in the US. In the past, Azerbaijani groups have pressured such US corporate heavyweights as Google and Microsoft on Karabakh-related issues.
The $3.1 billion in requested military spending is almost one billion larger than the entire national budget of Azerbaijan’s cash-strapped arch-rival Armenia. Shaken by an economic crisis, Armenia may be hard-pressed to match oil-rich Azerbaijan’s defense spending, but few doubt that Yerevan will try.
“Gunpowder is an agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted,” American writer Ambrose Bierce wrote. Neither guns nor troublesome conflicts are in short supply in the South Caucasus, as the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia displayed. Baku said many times that if Armenia does not surrender the occupied Azerbaijani territories, Azerbaijan will take them by force. Does the increased military spending somehow fit into that option? So far, the answers are few.
