Skirmishes between Azerbaijan, Armenia a sign of diplomatic failure

The past week marked one of the most intense phases of the recent conflict, where almost every day the warring sides engaged in heavy fighting. The death toll from these border incidents was reportedly seven -- four Azerbaijani and three Armenians -- last week.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry repeatedly said over the weekend and on Monday that there was heavy gunfire due to Armenian attacks which were repelled by retaliatory military action. The Armenians, however, say the opposite, and claimed that Azerbaijan was showering Armenian positions with bullets in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh territory, to which Armenia responded.

“The skirmishes seem to be the result of the combination of increasing frustration with the deadlocked peace process,” Elnur Soltanov, an expert at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, said in an interview with Today’s Zaman.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group-brokered peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have yielded no results so far and Azerbaijan has repeatedly vowed a return to war if diplomacy fails to find a lasting solution to the dispute.

Twenty percent of western Azerbaijani territories are currently under Armenian occupation.

The United Nations Security Council adopted four consecutive resolutions in the early 1990s, ordering Armenia to withdraw its troops from the occupied provinces. Armenia says Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh have a legitimate right to self-determination and that Armenia occupies seven adjacent regions bordering the disputed region.

Recalling earlier deadly border skirmishes between the two countries, Rövşen İbrahimov, a professor at Baku’s Qafqaz University, told Today’s Zaman that the latest skirmishes were not new incidents. The expert confirmed that the intensity of fighting had visibly increased and was the result of a palpable provocation by “[Armenian President Serzh] Sarksyan’s team” to display the “deconstructive stance” of Azerbaijan, as it rejected the Madrid principles, which Azerbaijan embraced.

Azerbaijan earlier this year announced that it accepted the Madrid principles that constitute a basis for the settlement of the conflict. Due to Armenia’s reluctance to accept the document, OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs presented a revised form of the principles to the Armenian side this year. Although Armenia promised to declare its position, the country still remains indifferent to the document -- a move interpreted by some as a means of gaining more time during the conflict.

Azerbaijan says that both parties earlier agreed on the plan that Armenia begins, without any conditions, withdrawing from the five occupied provinces. Then the gradual withdrawal from Kelbajar and Lachin provinces, which connects Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, would be discussed by the parties.

During the latest phase of the negotiations, parties discussed the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan says it is ready to grant the “highest autonomy on earth,” yet it must stay within Azerbaijani territories. Armenia claims Karabakh’s status needs to be decided before it would proceed with a withdrawal of Armenian troops from the occupied territories.

During a recent visit, Peter Semneby, the European Union Special Representative for the South Caucasus, who met with the Azerbaijani authority to discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, expressed the EU’s concern over the recent border skirmishes.

Four Armenian troops and one Azerbaijani soldier were killed in an exchange of fire in the region on June 18, just one day after the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan met -- together with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev -- and agreed to continue internationally mediated efforts to resolve the conflict. Armenian President Sarksyan, speaking to reporters on June, 19, on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, said the clashes resulted from Azerbaijani provocation -- which was “all the more unacceptable” since it occurred just hours after the meeting.

Azerbaijan later complained of Sarksyan’s position during the talks in Russia, saying that Sarksyan surprisingly backtracked from an earlier agreed position, which was the withdrawal of Armenian troops from five provinces.

The Minsk Group proposed several solution packages, but all were rejected. “On the other hand, the Armenian side, both to prevent the shift of military dynamics in favor of Azerbaijan -- even in terms of perception -- and to appease its domestic audience, could be taking a hard military stance,” Soltanov said, implying that Armenia was increasing its war rhetoric inline with its breach of cease-fire agreements. The expert said both sides were probably testing the will and capacity of the other side. “Whoever started it first, there appears to be tit for tat, which means the violence is beginning to spiral,” he said.

Experts earlier warned that the conflicts in the Caucasus were not really “frozen.”

“This is a classic case of military escalation and a clear outcome could be full scale war,” Soltanov warned, adding that the chances for such a war were not high, but given the absence of good will and healthy levels of communication, things could spiral out of control and degenerate in to large scale military engagements.

Noting that the situation should once again alert the international community to the fact that a ceasefire is not peace, Soltanov said that unless the Armenian military occupation of Azerbaijani territory was ended, the region would experience another bloody war.