Erdoğan’s nationalist rhetoric plays into tragic tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh
Fighting continues across the plains and mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, and despite calls for ceasefires from Moscow, the Azeris and Armenians seem set to slug it out for a third week. Casualties are mounting – at least 600 combatants in the first fortnight. Countless civilians, running to the thousands, have been hit, killed and injured, and forced to flee
It may be a remote corner of the Caucasus, but this nasty fight has big implications for the conduct of war and peace across the wider Eurasian neighbourhood.
The battle over the predominantly ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh – area 1,700 square miles, population about 190,000 – has been going since the dog days of the Soviet era. In 1988 Armenia, part of the USSR, attacked neighbouring SSR Azerbaijan to carve out an independent, Armenian ethnic, entity in Nagorno-Karabakh, later declared the independent republic of Artsakh, which is not recognised internationally – to put it mildly.
A rickety truce was established in 1994. By then at least 30,000 had been killed and about a million displaced. There have been flare ups since the truce, which was guaranteed by the Minsk Group of France, USA, and Russia.
The big change came in 2018 when Armenia itself underwent a mild revolution and the progressive, human rights campaigner Nikol Pashinyan, now 45, became prime minister. Azerbaijan began complaining that the Armenians were deliberately engineering a population explosion in the enclave and its seven neighbouring districts, with families averaging five children.
Azerbaijan, predominantly made up of Turkic and highly-secular Muslim Azeris, sensed a new threat. Under the grip of Ilham Aliyev and his clan since 2003, the style of autocratic governance is more Soviet era in style than that of Armenia. One Israeli commentator, Anshel Pfeffer described the country of nine and a half million as being a standard “Caucasus kleptocracy.” Baku is the centre for huge Caspian gas and oil exports, through six strategic pipelines to Turkey, southern Europe and Israel, amongst others. It has a mafia culture as notorious as that of Palermo.
Reporting from the front line has been thin – understandably so given the potency of the new weaponry in play, armed drones and precision-guided missiles. The commentary has been full of a battery of geopolitical clichés, from “ancient hatreds”, to “ethnic cleansing”, “population exchange and displacement” and good old-fashioned “irredentism.” All have some validity.
Dwelling on the clichés, though, tends to miss what is so deadly in the mix this time round. For a start, there is the role of the main sponsors – above all the opportunism in the name of a new Ottomanism by Turkey, and the naked expediency of the Netanyahu coalition in Israel in arming and training the Azerbaijanis. Israel gets oil and gas from Baku, and sees Azerbaijan, and the Azeri population as an ideal base for spying and covert activity against neighbouring Iran. There are 13 million ethnic Azeris in Iran, a third more again than live in Azerbaijan itself.
Russia is an ally of both Armenia and Azerbaijan, though it only shares a border with the latter. Armenia has been seen as a model ally in the Tashkent 1994 alliance of Collective Security Treaty Organisation, led by Moscow and made up of a string of central Eurasian former Soviet satellites and clients, with Afghanistan and Serbia having observer status. Conspicuously staying out are Uzbekistan and Georgia, with Azerbaijan leaving in 2012.
Russia had hoped to use CSTO as the platform for peace talks for the present conflict. This has failed. So, too, has diplomacy in the name of the Minsk trio of Russia, America and France, set up in the truce between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1994.
Russia is now harvesting the crop it has sowed consistently under Vladimir Putin in the undermining of treaty organisations and agreements, such as the Intermediate Forces Treaty, the OSCE and the North Atlantic Conference with Nato. Moscow has been credited with aggression by deception and propaganda and a posture of no-war-no-peace attributed to the present defence chief General Valery Gerasimov. The insurgency in Donbas in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, the assaults of fake news from the Internet Research Agency – IRA – the poisoning of the Skripals are all ascribed to this policy.
And it goes on. Today we hear news that Russia is using fake news offensives to rubbish the Oxford Covid vaccine – before it is even in production .
Russia has had to use military force, more than Moscow wanted I suspect, in the ongoing chaos of Syria, locked in with Iran to propping a flaky Assad, and in Libya. Warplanes, drones, regular troops and mercenaries of the Wagner military company have been put in the field, with distinctly questionable results.
In the South Caucasus, Moscow’s levers of war and peace aren’t working. Putin noticeably is not offering to send forces in war or for peace – and to either ally, Armenia or Azerbaijan. This record of diplomatic failure is a sign of conspicuous weakness.
More blatant, and ominous, is the role of Israel. Since just before the conflict broke out on 27th September, relays of flights of Ilyushin Il-76 transport planes laden with missiles and ordnance have been taking off from the main Uvad Israeli Air Force base in the Negev. The new generation drones from Israel and Turkey are being seen by the Azeris as the game changers.
A whole quiver of Israeli drones have been deployed to Azerbaijan, including the Orbiter 1 and 3 drones and the Harrop, which act like cruise missile “suicide” drones – on the same concept as the World War 2 V2 rockets. Unlike the V2, they can loiter over targets for hours, and fire the latest satellite, precision-guided missions. The Israeli Hermes drones, in different variations, are being operated, too, and doubtless with Israeli ground crew.
Most armoured vehicles and infantry crossing open ground are highly vulnerable to such weaponry. Most British Army ground formations, for instance, lack the necessary effective counter measures to such weapons used at the most basic tactical level – which would require sophisticated jammers, counter-strike missiles and rockets and explosive reactive armour (ERA).
It is an ideal testbed for Israel’s new batch of close operations drones. Likewise, for the highly effective Turkish battlefield medium attack drones, especially the Bayaktar TP2. Developed over the past ten years by an engineer called Selcuk Bayaktar, who happens to be President Erdogan’s son in law, the drones have seen action now in four theatres, in Idlib in Syria, against the Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Libya and now Azerbaijan.
The TP2s turned the tide against the forces of General Khalifa Haftar, backed by Russia, the UAE, and Egypt, as they closed on the Libyan capital Tripoli earlier this year. The drones and the batteries of light transportable ground to air missiles by manpack or pickup are now in big demand in the brushfire wars across Africa and Asia.
While Russia tries to talk peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are firmly in the house of war. Armenia and the Armenians, with the earliest of Christian cultures, are the old enemy. Once a tolerated minority under the Ottomans, Armenians died by the hundred thousand, maybe a million, when they were forced to flee and starved on the waysides in 1915 during the First World War. This for the Armenians was their genocide, a charge which Turkish regimes have refused to countenance to this day.
This has spilled into a vehement onslaught on all things Armenian by the Erdogan propaganda machine. “Because of my country’s authoritarian turn, my background and my political leanings are enough to turn me into a target,” writes Garo Paylan an Armenian member of the Turkish parliament in the New York Times this week. There are just 60,000 Armenians now in Turkey, out of a population of 83 million. There is, however, an enormously powerful Armenian diaspora active in America, France and the UK.
Garo Paylan concludes that “If President Erdogan wants to be relevant, he should stop inflaming tensions in the Caucasus and support the cease-fire.”
He shows no signs of doing this. He says Armenia should withdraw from its the lands in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan is a natural ally, a component of the Erdoğan claim to lead a new Ottoman power, and his plans for Turkey to be the natural guardian of the 170 million Turkish and Turkic peoples. This lies behind Turkey’s latest bout of military assertiveness across the region – against Greece and the EU over Mediterranean gas and oil rights, showing force in Algeria, on the battlefield in Syria and Libya, in Somalia, and now in Azerbaijan where it has been supplying arms, trainers, and even mercenaries according to some reports.
President Macron believes that the EU should now face down Turkey’s new muscle flexing strategy. Close allies like Italy demur, and think Ankara should be soothed, mollified even, for fear of pushing it away from Nato as has by the EU.
None of this stops the Erdogan rhetorical extravaganza. Earlier this year, the Turkish president declared that Hagia Sophia, once the focal point of Orthodox Christianity, and made a secular museum by Ataturk, should become one of Istanbul’s main mosques. Even the Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of the city, trod more carefully by allowing it to remain a centre for Christian worship after his capture of Constantinople in 1453.
Erdoğan has now gone one further. At the recent opening of the Turkish parliament he declared that “Jerusalem is ours. One of our cities.” He also suggested that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place of Christ’s entombment, should be administered as it was, a mosque, in Ottoman times. As Zvi Bar’el noted in the Israeli daily Haaretz, this wasn’t a claim that Jerusalem should be a city for all Muslims, but it should actually be Turkish.
“We left in tears during World War I, and where the vestiges of Ottoman resistance can still be found,” Erdogan told the MPs – a flourish of narcissistic rhetoric that might trump even Donald J Trump.