Global Courant
“Welcome to Karabakh Telecom. The number you called does not exist,” says an emotionless female voice.
The number belongs to an ethnic Armenian woman stuck in Stepanakert, the now former de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist state deep in the mountains of Azerbaijan that is unrecognized even by its main backer, Armenia.
The woman’s husband was injured and suffered severe burns after a fuel storage facility exploded Tuesday near Stepanakert, a town called Khakendi in Azerbaijan, killing dozens.
A day later he was flown to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, but the family remains in Stepanakert, amid dire shortages of food, medicine and other necessities.
“This is a nightmare. It’s just a trap,” the woman’s relative in Ukraine told Al Jazeera.
“My entire family – three aunts, their children, grandchildren, my grandfather – are all homeless.”
Also homeless are the tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh after the country gained de facto independence on September 2, 1991.
(Al Jazeera)
The proclamation followed the first war between two ex-Soviet countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan. It claimed some 30,000 lives and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Azeris, many of whom fled to Russia.
Armenian and separatist forces captured seven districts around Nagorno-Karabakh that linked the state with Armenia and became a no man’s land littered with ghost towns and minefields.
The standoff was dismissed as one of the former Soviet Union’s “frozen conflicts,” in which the separatists and poor Armenia seemed to far exceed their military and economic weight.
Triumphant separatist leaders came to power in Armenia, forming a “Karabakh clan” widely accused of corruption that suppressed economic growth, foreign investment and embezzled lavish donations from diaspora Armenians for new weapons and military equipment.
After nearly three decades of poverty, isolation and flare-ups of violence, the separatists lost districts and other key areas in a war with Azerbaijan in 2020.
After 32 years and 26 days of unrecognized independence, and another flare-up earlier this month, Nagorno-Karabakh ceased to exist.
On Thursday, separatist leader Samvel Shakhramanyan signed a decree stating that state institutions in the region will be dismantled and that the small state, known locally and in Armenia as Artsakh, will cease to exist on January 1, 2024.
Also on Thursday, David Babayan, Karabakh’s former top diplomat, surrendered to Azerbaijani authorities.
A day earlier, Ruben Vardanyan, an ethnic Armenian who earned billions in Russia but moved to Karabakh and was one of the “ministers” there, was arrested and taken to the Azerbaijani capital Baku.
The news was received with cheers in Azerbaijan.
“Today is a historic day and we must pay dues to (Azerbaijani President Ilham) Aliyev and the Azerbaijani soldiers,” Baku-based analyst Emil Mustafayev told Al Jazeera, adding that he thinks the conflict is “definitely” over.
“Today we are witnessing how separatism ended on the territory of Azerbaijan.”
He said a “new phase of development” lies ahead for Azeris and ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh as the latter were granted full citizenship rights.
“Of course the beginning will be difficult, there is mistrust,” he said. “But I am sure that in ten years we will see a different picture, with developed Karabakh and happy Armenians.”
But the vast majority of Armenians in Karabakh distrust Baku’s promises.
Thousands of their cars slowly trudge towards Armenia through checkpoints with Azerbaijani soldiers and Russian peacekeepers – and are seen from space.
About 85 percent of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population – which until last week numbered 120,000 people – has already left, with most remaining residents likely to move as well.
“My aunt is the only one left in her neighborhood in Stepanakert, her daughter-in-law is a (medical) doctor, and the doctors will be the last to leave,” an ethnic Armenian man now living in Uzbekistan told Al Jazeera.
His father is buried in Stepanakert and he is ready to receive all his relatives.
He is also convinced that the end of Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence was engineered by the leaders of Russia and Turkey earlier this month.
The influence of Russia, Turkey
On September 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Russia has supported Armenia for decades and has close ties with Azerbaijan, while Turkey has strongly supported Azerbaijan by supplying advanced weapons and drones in the 2020 war.
Two weeks after the meeting, four Azerbaijani soldiers and two civilians were killed by landmines that Baku said had been planted by separatists.
Azerbaijani forces fought their way into Nagorno-Karabakh, and a day later the lightning offensive ended when Russia agreed to a ceasefire.
“After their meeting, (Azerbaijani forces) were given the order (on Karabakh), were released and ran after us,” the man said. “Putin abandoned Armenia and decided to turn it around.”
Analysts pointed to other trends and miscalculations that led to Baku’s victory.
One of them is demography.
Despite high birth rates, emigration to Armenia, Russia and the West has drained the Dubai-sized state over the years, whose official population peaked at around 140,000.
Armenia’s population also shrank to about 2.7 million, while oil-rich Azerbaijan today has more than 10 million inhabitants.
The number of ethnic Armenians from Syria, who fled the civil war and gained free land in Nagorno-Karabakh, was small and could not reverse the population trend.
“It is understandable that even 140,000 people could not withstand the much larger and growing population of Azerbaijan,” Nikolay MItrokhin of Germany’s University of Bremen told Al Jazeera.
The second biggest problem was the military problem.
The separatists, Armenia and the global Armenian diaspora invested little in building the second line of defense, mainly in mountain strongholds, Mitrokhin said.
They relied on outdated strategies and did not take into account new developments that had been tested in the Middle East.
“They poorly disguised military equipment, but simply did not think about it,” Mitrokhin said of the 2020 war.
“They abandoned Baku’s efforts to modernize its military in the 2010s and did not buy drones and jeep-mounted mobile artillery units, something that was affordable for Armenia and Artsakh,” he said.
During the 44-day war, separatist and Armenian forces moved in large groups or in trucks. Their trenches were wide but shallow, their artillery and positions remained in place for days, becoming easy targets for drones.
Some observers and Armenian officials claimed that the swarms of drones hit tanks, missile systems, artillery, trenches and troops from Turkey, and that Ankara allegedly sent “mercenaries” recruited in Syria.
Armenian officials and Western media also claimed that Turkey had deployed thousands of “mercenaries” recruited from pro-Ankara areas in Syria. Azerbaijan and Turkey denied the claims.
The war cost Azerbaijan almost 2,800 soldiers and billions of dollars in weapons.
And finally, the combined economies of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh were too weak and corrupt to support the military.
“The economy was weak, crime-ridden, if not mafia-like,” Mitrokhin said. “Foreign investors, especially those from the Armenian diaspora, did not want to invest knowing the local mores – or got burned by them, to be precise.”
