Armenia this week
Experts see status quo, potential risks for Karabakh, Caucasus
The majority of U.S. and Western European experts expect the status quo in the Karabakh conflict and regionally to persist in the foreseeable future, according to the Armenian Assembly of America (AAA)’s research and recent congressional testimony by regional specialists. In spite of such expectations, a study by the International Crisis Group (ICG), “Nagorno Karabakh: Viewing the Conflict from the Ground,” published earlier this month, urged a renewed push for a peaceful settlement, including popular diplomacy, while warning that “resumed war appears a real possibility.”
A cease-fire agreement signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh has held for over 11 years, even in the absence of international peacekeepers and serious progress in negotiations. But Azeri President Ilham Aliyev continues to threaten a new war, unless Armenians agree to unilateral compromises. Most recently, capitalizing on growing oil production and price, Aliyev promised to double the Azeri military spending to $600 million next year. Armenian leaders have dismissed such threats and expressed commitment to a peaceful settlement. While diplomatic contacts between the sides continue, no breakthrough is currently anticipated.
The ICG report warned that with rising hate rhetoric and military spending, “time for a peaceful settlement may be running out” and an inter-ethnic divide “becomes virtually unbridgeable.” ICG is due to release a follow-up report that would include “specific recommendations on… issues that must be treated in a peace agreement and on what needs to be done to further inter-communal reconciliation.”
But speaking at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee hearings on threats in Eurasia last week, Brookings Foundation’s Fiona Hill and Carnegie Endowment’s Martha Brill Olcott argued that the Caucasus’ “frozen” conflicts, including the one between Azerbaijan and Karabakh, are likely to remain unresolved through 2010. In a separate survey conducted by the AAA last summer, nearly two-thirds of 24 U.S. and European experts queried agreed with this view. One-fifth of respondents, who saw some sort of resolution, predicted either confirmation of Karabakh’s independence or its formal unification with Armenia. None predicted an arrangement whereas Azerbaijan would gain even formal control over Karabakh.
In their congressional testimony, Hill and Olcott disagreed on risks posed by these conflicts. Hill argued that “factors fostering instability in Eurasia… outweigh those in favor of stability” and that “there is every chance” for at least temporary escalation in areas of unresolved conflicts, as recently happened between Georgians and Ossetians. Olcott sounded more optimistic, suggesting that while potential risks exist, they should not be “over-dramatized.”
Olcott noted that while “there is always a danger that some future Azerbaijani government will feel competent to take on Armenia militarily,” such threat remains an “abstract one” partly because “Armenia has maintained [its] level of military preparedness.” Similarly, none of the experts who took part in the AAA survey believe that Azerbaijan could launch a successful military campaign in the foreseeable future.
Most observers also agree that the Aliyev regime would retain power through the parliamentary election this November, and would use force should the opposition activists take to the streets to protest likely fraud as two years ago. Speaking at the Washington, DC-based American Enterprise Institute this week, an Azeri opposition leader Isa Gamber complained that the U.S. was not pushing hard enough to democratize Azerbaijan.
But the National Journal’s Bruce Stokes and other commentators at the same event countered that both the government and the opposition were interested in power rather than democracy and trying to “play” the West for support. Stokes predicted that in Azerbaijan “things would get worse before they get better.”
The Armenian Assembly of America
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