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nagorno karabakh
How Can Americans Support Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh?
The U.S. should support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Oct 10, 2020
Americans are dealing with an upcoming general election, a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 of us, and corporate news media whose business model has degenerated to selling different versions of "The Trump Show" to their advertisers. So who has time to pay attention to a new war halfway around the world? But with so much of the world afflicted by 20 years of U.S.-led wars and the resulting political, humanitarian and refugee crises, we can't afford not to pay attention to the dangerous new outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bloody war over Nagorno-Karabakh from 1988 to 1994, by the end of which at least 30,000 people had been killed and a million or more had fled or been driven out of their homes. By 1994, Armenian forces had occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, all internationally recognized as parts of Azerbaijan. But now the war has flared up again, hundreds of people have been killed, and both sides are shelling civilian targets and terrorizing each other's civilian populations.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been an ethnically Armenian region for centuries. After the Persian Empire ceded this part of the Caucasus to Russia in the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, the first census ten years later identified Nagorno-Karabakh's population as 91% Armenian. The USSR's decision to assign Nagorno-Karabakh to the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923, like its decision to assign Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, was an administrative decision whose dangerous consequences only became clear when the U.S.S.R. began to disintegrate in the late 1980s.
In 1988, responding to mass protests, the local parliament in Nagorno-Karabakh voted by 110-17 to request its transfer from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR, but the Soviet government rejected the request and inter-ethnic violence escalated. In 1991, Nagorno-Karabakh and the neighboring Armenian-majority Shahumian region, held an independence referendum and declared independence from Azerbaijan as the Republic of Artsakh, its historic Armenian name. When the war ended in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh and most of the territory around it were in Armenian hands, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled in both directions.
There have been clashes since 1994, but the present conflict is the most dangerous and deadly. Since 1992, diplomatic negotiations to resolve the conflict have been led by the "Minsk Group," formed by the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) and led by the United States, Russia and France. In 2007, the Minsk Group met with Armenian and Azerbaijani officials in Madrid and proposed a framework for a political solution, known as the Madrid Principles.
The Madrid Principles would return five of the twelve districts of Shahumyan province to Azerbaijan, while the five districts of Naborno-Karabakh and two districts between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia would vote in a referendum to decide their future, which both parties would commit to accept the results of. All refugees would have the right to return to their old homes.
Ironically, one of the most vocal opponents of the Madrid Principles is the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a lobby group for the Armenian diaspora in the United States. It supports Armenian claims to the entire disputed territory and does not trust Azerbaijan to respect the results of a referendum. It also wants the de facto government of the Republic of Artsakh to be allowed to join international negotiations on its future, which is probably a good idea.
On the other side, the Azerbaijani government of President Ilham Aliyev now has the full backing of Turkey for its demand that all Armenian forces must disarm or withdraw from the disputed region, which is still internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Turkey is reportedly paying jihadi mercenaries from Turkish-occupied northern Syria to go and fight for Azerbaijan, raising the specter of Sunni extremists exacerbating a conflict between Christian Armenians and mostly Shiite Muslim Azeris.
On the face of it, despite these hard-line positions, this brutal raging conflict should be possible to resolve by dividing the disputed territories between the two sides, as the Madrid Principles attempted to do. Meetings in Geneva and now Moscow seems to be making progress toward a ceasefire and a renewal of diplomacy. On Friday, October 9th, the two opposing foreign ministers met for the first time in Moscow, in a meeting mediated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and on Saturday they agreed to a temporary truce to recover bodies and exchange prisoners.
The greatest danger is that either Turkey, Russia, the U.S. or Iran should see some geopolitical advantage in escalating or becoming more involved in this conflict. Azerbaijan launched its current offensive with the full backing of Turkey's President Erdogan, who appears to be using it to demonstrate Turkey's renewed power in the region and strengthen its position in conflicts and disputes over Syria, Libya, Cyprus, oil exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean and the region in general. If that is the case, how long must this go on before Erdogan has made his point, and can Turkey control the violence it is unleashing, as it has so tragically failed to do in Syria?
Russia and Iran have nothing to gain and everything to lose from an escalating war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and are both calling for peace. Armenia's popular Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to power after Armenia's 2018 "Velvet Revolution" and has followed a policy of non-alignment between Russia and the West, even though Armenia is part of Russia's CSTO military alliance. Russia is committed to defend Armenia if it is attacked by Azerbaijan or Turkey, but has made it clear that that commitment does not extend to Nagorno-Karabakh. Iran is also more closely aligned with Armenia than Azerbaijan, but now its own large Azeri population has taken to the streets to support Azerbaijan and protest their government's bias toward Armenia.
As for the destructive and destabilizing role the United States habitually plays in the greater Middle East, Americans should beware of any U.S. effort to exploit this conflict for self-serving U.S. ends. That could include fueling the conflict to undermine Armenia's confidence in its alliance with Russia, to draw Armenia into a more Western, pro-NATO alignment. Or the U.S. could exacerbate and exploit unrest in Iran's Azeri community as part of its "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.
At any suggestion that the U.S. is exploiting or planning to exploit this conflict for its own ends, Americans should remember the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan whose lives are being lost or destroyed every day that this war rages on, and should condemn and oppose any effort to prolong or worsen their pain and suffering for U.S. geopolitical advantage.
Instead the U.S. should fully cooperate with its partners in the OSCE's Minsk Group to support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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Last US Cluster Bomb Maker Shuts Down, But the Munitions Still in Use Worldwide
Cluster bombs in Yemen and Syria are causing 'unacceptable human suffering and deserve a strong response,' new report says
Sep 01, 2016
The last remaining U.S. cluster bomb maker has closed up shop, citing "regulatory scrutiny and reduced orders for the internationally banned munition," Foreign Policy reports.
Rhode Island-based Textron Systems made the announcement just months after the Obama administration blocked the transfer of a CBU-105 shipment to Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups had been pressuring the U.S. government to take action amid evidence that the Saudi-led coalition had used cluster bombs in Yemen, possibly hurting and killing civilians.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) spokesperson Mary Wareham told Foreign Policy, "Textron was the last U.S. manufacturer of cluster munitions, so this decision now clears the path for the administration and Congress to work together to permanently end U.S. production, transfer, and use of cluster munitions."
Now there is even more support for that call. On Thursday, a coalition of human rights groups known as the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), founded by HRW, published a report which found that cluster bombs in Yemen and Syria are causing "unacceptable human suffering and deserve a strong response."
"More countries are endorsing the ban on cluster munition use enshrined in the Convention on Cluster Munitions," Wareham said in a press release (pdf) for the report. "All countries concerned by the near-daily reports of cluster munition attacks in Syria should call for an immediate end to the use and encourage the users to embrace the international ban on these weapons."
Casualties from cluster bomb use in 2015 were recorded in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, while casualties from the remains of the weapons--which operate by splintering into mini-bombs, or "bomblets," that can detonate long after a battle has ceased, much like landmines--were recorded in those three countries as well as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad, Lebanon, Laos, and the regions of Nagorno-Karabakh and Western Sahara.
Of those casualties, the report found, 97 percent were civilians.
Although the Obama administration banned the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia this year, the U.S. has not signed the 2008 convention, which prohibits the use, sale, and transfer of the weapons and requires provision of victim assistance and the destruction of cluster bomb stockpiles within eight years.
"Countries that have yet to ban cluster munitions should revisit their position and stand in solidarity with victims of these weapons by making a commitment to join the international treaty," Wareham continued. "The question is not why, but why not join the sole international instrument specifically dedicated to ending the suffering caused by these weapons."
Jeff Abramson, coordinator of the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor initiative, added that "countries are making progress" in implementing the convention, but that "more resources and better use of existing ones are needed" to ensure safety for residents and aid to survivors.
And while the U.S. may have officially stopped cluster bomb production, American banks are still major financiers of companies that manufacture them.
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To End No Wars
In a world awash with weak states, powerful weapons, and crumbling institutions, conflicts can easily continue for generations — and perhaps never end.
Mar 10, 2016
Jason Smith was both very unlucky and very lucky.
His bad luck began on February 20, 2015, when he was walking back to his home in McAdoo, Pennsylvania on a very cold evening. He doesn't quite remember what happened, but he thinks that he tripped and fell face down into the snow. He lost consciousness and remained that way for the next 12 hours. He stopped breathing. His heart stopped pumping blood. When paramedics pulled him from the snow, they declared him dead.
Here's where the luck comes in. Jason Smith's body temperature dropped below 68 degrees, which put him into a state of hibernation. The emergency personnel transported Smith to a nearby hospital where the staff performed CPR. After another couple hours, doctors filled him up with new, oxygenated blood. His heart resumed beating. After a two-week coma, Smith woke up. He'd lost his toes and his pinkies to frostbite, but his brain had miraculously survived intact.
Or perhaps it was not a miracle. After all, hypothermia is now frequently used in hospitals in the treatment of heart attacks. Doctors have known for some time that lowering the body's temperature can help it recover from trauma.
Many countries today find themselves in Jason Smith's face-down-in-the-snow predicament. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia are all suffering massive trauma, in this case as a result of armed conflict and outside intervention. Having fallen into the category of "failed states," they are all practically DOA, at least as functioning entities.
It's always possible that a miracle cure -- a robust peace treaty followed by some form of nation-building -- will end the bloodshed in these countries and gradually knit their disparate parts back together.
But I wouldn't count on it.
In some cases, the wars will just continue, as they have in Afghanistan and Iraq ever since the celebrated application of U.S. shock-and-awe tactics. Missions can be declared accomplished, and expeditionary forces withdrawn. But Pandora's horrors cannot be so easily reboxed. We've gotten accustomed to wars that have finite terms, like the American Civil War or World War I. But at one time conflicts stretched across generations, like the Hundred Years' War between England and France. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could conceivably last that long as well.
If they're lucky, such conflict-ridden states might endure the same intermission that Jason Smith experienced. The wars won't end. They will just be frozen, the temperature of the conflict brought down through a succession of ceasefires. At some point in the future, these failed states might be brought back to life, perhaps when some of the trauma has healed or the infections of hatred have subsided. In this best-case scenario, the countries involved might lose some extremities -- a Crimean pinkie, for instance -- but they will be fortunate to have pulled through the worst of it. On the other hand, these countries might fall apart no matter how long their deep freeze lasts, just as all those hopeful immortals who've opted to bury their dead bodies in tanks of liquid nitrogen will never likely thaw back to life.
This raises a fundamental question about the current world situation. It's become commonplace to speak of the global war on terror as a "forever war." But perhaps the problem runs a great deal deeper.
Perhaps we are no longer able to end any wars.
The Elusive Peace
The quintessential frozen conflict of our era is over 60 years old.
The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice. No peace treaty marked the end of combat.
In other words, for more than 60 years, the war between the two Koreans has been in a state of suspended animation. North and South have exchanged artillery fire, clashed at sea, and maintained a nearly non-stop war of words during that period. At any point, up to and including the current period of deteriorating relations, the war could have turned hot. Yet for the most part, Koreans in North and South have gone about their separate business, often inured to the trauma of having their peninsula torn in two.
Frozen wars are not the same as cold wars. After all, the United States and Soviet Union never actually fought against each other, not directly at least. A frozen conflict, meanwhile, is one that was once hot and has since iced over.
The term "frozen conflict" has been most often used in conjunction with wars on the Russian periphery -- in Moldova, Georgia, and now in Ukraine. In all three cases, separatists backed by Moscow carved out their own semi-autonomous regions -- in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and now the Donbass. The fighting has largely tapered off. The separatist regions have been recognized by only a handful of other states. These are stand-offs with no easy solutions in sight.
It's not just a post-Soviet problem. Look at the map through this lens of "frozen conflicts" and you see that much of the world has fallen into this crevasse. Many of the world's hotspots are in fact in a deep freeze: Kashmir, Israel-Palestine, the Taiwan Strait, Burma, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Sudan, southern Thailand, northwest Pakistan, eastern Congo, eastern Saudi Arabia.
In fact, it's very difficult to find a peace that is as clear-cut and durable as the one that prevailed between France and Germany after World War II or that exists today between the United States and Vietnam. The war in Bosnia ended in 1995 with the Dayton Accords. Angola ended a 27-year conflict in 2002. The conflict in Aceh ended in 2005. The Sri Lankan government brought an end to the civil war in that country (though largely through brutality rather than diplomacy).
Elsewhere, peace has been elusive. Ethiopia and Eritrea still squabble over disputed territory. The Turkish government and Kurdish separatists, after having apparently achieved a peaceful rapprochement, are now renewing hostilities. The Colombian government and the major rebel group FARC were supposed to sign a peace agreement this month, but it now looks like that won't happen. Virtually everywhere else that conflict is ongoing, diplomats have failed to cajole the warring factions into signing peace treaties.
Steven Pinker may well be right about the declining levels of violence in the world. But there hasn't been a corresponding increase in sustainable peace. We've frozen our devils in place in the hopes that the better angels of our nature will one day wing into sight to save us from ourselves.
Exhibit A: Syria.
Syria and Beyond
It would be premature to list Syria as a frozen conflict.
The ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia has only been in place for about two weeks -- since February 27. It doesn't apply to areas under the control of the Islamic State or the al-Nusra Front. And since Turkey considers the Kurdish rebels in Syria to be terrorists and Russia often classifies any group opposed to the government of Bashar al-Assad in similar terms, the very term "ceasefire" lacks substantive meaning. According to some estimates, 135 of people have died during this period of suspended hostilities -- and that's only people in the area covered by the ceasefire. Elsewhere in Syria, another 552 people have been killed. And the number of civilian casualties has increased in the last couple days.
At several points during the Syrian conflict, it seemed as if Assad was on his way out, defeated by anti-government rebels and the Salafists of the Islamic State. When Russia intervened on the government's side, it managed to achieve exactly the same outcome as in Ukraine, bolstering a beleaguered minority determined to dig in its heels. Stalemate is a key ingredient of a frozen conflict.
Of course there was no guarantee that Syria could have avoided a frozen outcome if Russia had stayed out of the conflict. The divisions in the country -- ethnic, confessional, ideological -- ensure that it will be very difficult to recreate any version of the old Syria in the future. The hatreds run deep, violence has become endemic, and outside actors have too many contradictory objectives to find a satisfactory resolution.
The situation in Syria demonstrates the sheer difficulty of reaching peace in today's world. There are five main reasons why peace is so often beyond our grasp.
The world is awash in weapons. The volume of major weapons transfers went up 16 percent between 2010 and 2014 compared to the previous four-year period, and the United States is the leading driver of the $76 billion industry. Arms supplied to one faction often end up in the hands of its enemies, making arms embargos and targeted weapons transfers nearly impossible. And just as we have an explosion of shootings in the United States because of the availability of handguns, wars are much more likely to start, continue, and resist resolution because young men continue to have access to truckloads of sophisticated weaponry.
Both international and regional institutions are weak. The United Nations and regional bodies like the African Union are too weak to force combatants to lay down their weapons, too weak to provide enough peacekeepers to enforce a ceasefire, too weak to provide sufficient funds to rebuild conflict zones and ensure that strife doesn't return. Such institutions remain weak in part because:
Superpowers like the United States and would-be superpowers like Russia and Turkey are determined to achieve their goals by force. The United States continues to practice a la carte multilateralism, supporting only those international efforts that intersect with its national interests. As long as Washington continues to rule by drone, forget about a robust international rule of law and the institutions required to uphold it. And don't expect other countries to do anything other than follow the leader.
States are weaker too. Thanks to the prevailing orthodoxy of neoliberalism -- and its requirements to privatize, restrict government "interference" in the economy, and cut back on welfare provisions -- states have fewer nation-building levers at their disposal and therefore command less loyalty from their citizens. Consequently,
Particularism is flourishing. Ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism have greater appeal in the absence of strong consolidating ideologies. In many countries, ideologies such as Arab nationalism, Marxism, and liberal democracy have all failed to secure peace and prosperity. It's no surprise, then, that people are turning to ideologies that are far narrower in scope and audience.
Twenty-five years ago, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thereafter, we were supposed to embark on a path of peace and prosperity. But somehow, we lost our way. We tripped. We fell. And now we find ourselves, like Jason Smith, face down in the snow. If we're lucky, we'll get pulled out in the nick of time, our various traumas frozen in suspended animation. We will have lost something in the process, but we will survive.
But we may not be lucky. Despite our fine words and the efforts of hardworking diplomats, we may no longer be able to end wars. Live by the sword, die by the sword -- and there are no medical miracles that can save us from that terminal illness.
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