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“Nothing special is happening,” a frustrated local journalist tweeted recently about a humanitarian crisis in her post-Soviet homeland. It’s just our neighbor, she explained, “trying to finish the ethnic cleansing.”
Anush Ghavalyan, a TV presenter, wasn’t talking about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but a disputed region called Nagorno-Karabakh, a self-declared independent republic nestled within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan, but with deep cultural and historical links to Armenia. A year and a half ago it became the site of a bloodbath when energy-rich Azerbaijan sought a violent solution to the century-old conflict over who controls the region. Despite the November 2020 ceasefire that sealed Azerbaijan’s partial victory, persecution of the remaining indigenous Armenian population continues. And, even as the war in Ukraine has drawn the world’s attention to the consequences of depending on Russia for energy, this lesser-known conflict also shines a light on how fossil fuels can become a weapon of coercion—and whether the world is really ready to break their grip.
Following the Russian Empire’s WW I-era collapse, the South Caucasus region saw the reemergence of Armenia and Georgia as independent states, joined by their new neighbor Azerbaijan. Competing territorial claims among the three contributed to their eventual Sovietization. When it came to Nagorno-Karabakh, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw an autonomous Armenian province under Azerbaijani administration as conflict resolution. Two post-Soviet wars, in the early 1990s and in 2020, would prove him wrong.
Part of Stalin’s calculation was based on economics: Azerbaijan’s energy riches made it more important to him. All these years later, the country is still a case study in how controlling energy resources…
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Source : time
