2 Aug 2010
Armenia and Azerbaijan hurtling towards all-out war?!
… or just stoking domestic support as usual?
Such is the question I posed in my most recent article in the Faster Times.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have had quite a summer of discontent, and it’s already come to blows once. Is now the time that the two sides will fight it out once and for all?
"Occupant killer" Ensign Mubariz Ibrahimov.
“Bellicose” has become the favorite word of South Caucasus diplomacy this summer as rhetoric and actions have been ramping up between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the past few months despite several moderated peace summits, leading some to fear a definitive heating up of the two nations’ frozen conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
After backing an ethnic-Armenian secession movement in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan in the early 1990’s, Armenia continues to militarily control most of Karabakh and other Azeri lands.
To a certain extent, these new daggers in the dialogue are not surprising as politicians from both sides have made diplomatic sniping into a sort of sport, but Azerbaijan has increasingly shown its dissatisfaction with the peace talks, with statements focusing on a expedient resolution “by any means possible.” On June 25, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said publicly that if the long-running peace talks did not yield a positive result soon, then Azerbaijan was prepared to retake Karabakh and the Azeri territories surrounding it by force.
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