Azerbaijan may resume war against Armenia if the country recognizes the independence of the controversial Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, the Azeri Defense Minister said on Tuesday. At a meeting with the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Jim MacDougall, Safar Abiyev said the longstanding conflict over the enclave posed a threat to the security of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The pipeline is set to start delivering Caspian Sea oil to the Mediterranean.
Abiyev was quoted by AP as saying the Armenian leadership declared that it may recognize the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. If it does, it could lead to the resumption of fighting, he said. Armenia said last month that it could officially recognize Nagorno-Karabakh if negotiations on its status reach a dead end.
A 1994 cease-fire ended a six-year war that left Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, in Armenian hands. Some 30,000 people were killed and 1 million displaced. The region’s self-declared independence is not recognized internationally.
In case you missed it — doing your hair that year or something — Nagorno-Karabakh is a chunk of the middle of Azerbaijan that's populated almost exclusively by Armenians. In the very declining days of the Soviet Union, Azeri yahoos showed up at 4th Army motor pools and said friendly things like "Give us some of those combat vehicles or we'll kill you!" The guards were the usual 18-year-old draftees, either ethnic Russers longing to go home to Ekaterinburg or Novosibirsk, or locals who thought it'd be a good idea to have a BMP in the garage. They stood aside while the yahoos drove off in their equipment, to drive up and down the streets in Armenian neighborhoods shooting things up and hollering "Death to the Armenian scum!"
In response, the Armenian yahoos went to 4th Army motor pools and said things like "Give us some of those combat vehicles or we'll kill you." They then proceded to drive up and down the streets of Azeri neighborhoods, hollering "Take that, Turban Boy!" Occasionally two columns of stolen BMPs would meet up and shoot it out. The Armenians were better shots, which caused the Azeris to decide to expel all the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh as a threat to newly-created state security. Armenia took the side of Nagorno-Karabakh and the two fought a brief but ugly little war, with Azerbaijan cutting off the electricity and fuel shipments to the enclave in the dead of winter. The newly-created Armenian military beat up the newly-created Azeri military, which wasn't distinguished by any vestige of tactical competence.
It still remains a "pox on both their houses" situation. The Azeris felt no obligation to protect their citizens of Armenian background, and the Armenians were willing to try and annex a portion of Azerbaijan completely surrounded by the rest of Azerbaijan. |
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