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Nationalism, imperialism, and Nagorno-Karabakh
-- By ArmanAntonyan - 16 Feb 2023
I have long wondered: if I could be published tomorrow in the New York Times, what would I say about Karabakh, and what would it matter? Recently, I happened to meet the person that did it—Chris Bohjalian, a bestselling author who has published op-eds in the NYT and other big papers about Karabakh. With his pen, he has reached a level of fame higher than most authors ever will. I asked him what did it all matter, and how he kept going seeing that the violence continued. He told me that he asks himself the same question every day, and that you just have to keep trying no matter what.
I was happy to find the closure of his answer. It led me to conclude that it doesn’t matter what I write about Karabakh, in the sense that I won’t be saving the lives of Karabakh Armenians. It didn’t even matter when the US called on Azerbaijan to end its blockade of the Lachin Corridor—which has cut the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh off from the world for six months now. These people live at the edge of destruction, and at this point many, if not most are likely to move out of Karabakh once they are allowed to. The Armenian government is ready to give them up, too: its prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has announced that Armenia is prepared to recognize the region of Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. Yet Armenia is not prepared for the likely consequences of this decision—120,000 refugees in a country of 3 million, for one thing.
Bigger issues are at play, beyond the capacity of national rhetoric. The issue is not just that the world’s eyes are on Ukraine, to the exclusion of other conflicts. The fate of Armenians in Karabakh is tied cruelly to the success of the Russian imperial project in Ukraine. Russia was bombing my great uncle’s city of Kharkiv last year. The fact that Russia did not successfully conquer his city and many others in Ukraine opened the door for Azerbaijan to conquer a village in Karabakh last year—one that was in the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers since 2020—and to kill hundreds of Armenian soldiers in border incursions. The EU’s decision to wean off of Russian oil forever has lead it to deepen its strategic partnership with Azerbaijan, another petro-state. Russia, meanwhile, is also more dependent on Azerbaijan and its close ally Turkey than ever. Despite its security alliance with Armenia, Russia cannot currently afford to prevent Azerbaijan’s aggression. All these factors have made the uneasy peace made between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the 2020 war only more lopsided. The factors that lead to my great uncle’s safety also mean that my cousin, who will be conscripted to the Armenian army soon, is more likely to be killed in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
In this patchwork, the Armenian Prime Minister believes that by recognizing Karabakh as Azerbaijan, and by alienating Russia, he is cutting Armenia’s Gordian Knot and paving the way to the Western panacea. But the collapse of Russian power would create a vacuum that would lead to the rise of Turkish power in the Caucasus. A century ago, during World War I, when imperial Russia was collapsing to the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian troops’ withdrawal from the Caucasus and Western Armenia spelled the continuation of the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman and then Turkish Republican troops. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the final straw that spelled war between Karabakh Armenians and Azerbaijan. Today, the pain of a weakening Russia can be felt in Nagorno-Karabakh the most. It is a cause for excitement in Azerbaijan, and elsewhere too. The Ukrainian government sporadically speaks in support of Azerbaijani conquests in Karabakh, and hopes to open “second fronts” in places like Georgia. It makes sense—their very existence is threatened too. Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, whose party is the main opposition in Georgia, recently stated that “Ukraine will break through the front, Russia will disintegrate, and we will have a chance to regain Abkhazia … Georgia should prepare for a common border with Ukraine.” This is an extreme view, but it becomes increasingly reasonable the more Russia weakens.
Zooming out from Nagorno-Karabakh, imperial webs hold together the uneasy status quo in the Caucasus today. The de-facto republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia survive on the patronage of Russia. 20 percent of Georgia’s territory is occupied by Russia through these states. I have no love for Soviet borders, but the impact of this is that hundreds of thousands of Georgians have been displaced from their homes for decades. It also enables Abkhazians and Ossetians to exercise their genuine will for self-determination. It is difficult not to descend into cynical realism and simply conclude that everyone fends for themselves and their own interests as the natural order of things.
One alternative is to reject the idea that these nations are natural units with inherent “interests” (the same logic that justifies the invasion of Ukraine). The Marxists came to this conclusion over a century ago when they decried bourgeois nationalism deployed against the working classes. Indeed, workers’ movements in the Caucasus created transnational solidarities during the Russian Empire, and, despite its horrors, the Soviet Union did build somewhat of a Soviet internationalism. One can see the levers of capital in the Karabakh conflict: British mining companies invest in Karabakh mines, supporting the war, Turkish construction companies tied to Erdogan rebuild Karabakh, Azerbaijani oil attracts international powers, and oligarchs on both sides maintained their mandates based on the conflict. However, to reduce the conflict to the manipulation of ruling classes feels both patronizing and reductionist. In any case, who is interested in taking brave steps to deconstruct their nationalist framework in an international system that does not reward it?
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