Conflict in the Caucasus: when the soldiers are younger than the war they are fighting

There is a certain mood in Azerbaijan these days. My first taste of it came on a recent flight from Istanbul to Baku. As the Azerbaijan Airlines plane prepared for take-off, the pilot made an announcement to thunderous applause from the cabin. A neighbour translated his words: “Our armed forces have liberated the city of Zengilan. Glory to our army. Glory to our president and commander-in-chief.”

Landing in Baku a few hours later I was greeted at passport control with fluorescent signs: “Karabakh is ours. Karabakh is Azerbaijan”. Further patriotic spectacles awaited me when I checked into my hotel: the trio of flame-shaped skyscrapers that dominate the skyline of Baku were covered in giant images of Azerbaijani soldiers waving flags, illuminated by 10,000 high-power LED lights. It did not seem like the backdrop to peace talks.

The contested city in question, Zengilan, sits close to the southern edge of Nagorno-Karabakh, a beautiful wooded, mountainous stretch of land less than 5,000 square kilometres in size, which few people outside the Caucasus could point to on a map. Yet this forgotten region, in a forgotten part of the world, is now threatening to trigger a conflict of far wider consequence.

Nagorno-Karabakh was the focus of a bloody war between Azerbaijan and Armenia from 1992-94, in which 30,000 people died. Though violence over the disputed area has flared periodically since then, the fighting that erupted in late September seemed to open a new and more dangerous chapter.

For weeks missiles and shells have been launched at urban areas on both sides, killing dozens of civilians. Successive ceasefires have been broken. Armenia says that half of the 150,000-strong population of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh have been displaced; those who stay cower in basements to avoid the shelling. Though few Azerbaijanis live in Nagorno-Karabakh these days – hundreds of thousands were displaced from Armenian regions in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the government refuses to say how many of Azerbaijan’s troops have died. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said on October 22nd that the overall death toll was “nearing 5,000”.

The current conflict has deep roots. The area is a patchwork of religions and ethnicities. Nagorno-Karabakh, which is populated by ethnic Armenians, who are Christian, sits within the internationally recognised borders of Muslim Azerbaijan. The peoples of Azerbaijan and Armenia both claim Nagorno-Karabakh as their Jerusalem, the cradle of their civilisation, central to their identity and statehood. Both countries identify deep cultural links with the area, the historical home of Armenian princes and Azerbaijani poets.

During my time in Baku, I realised that shows of nationalism were designed not to rally people around the flag – they needed little encouragement – but to channel the upsurge of national sentiment. Equally, the 9pm curfew in the city, and blocking of social media there, were aimed at managing uncontrolled expressions of nationalism, as well as the government’s claim to be preventing terrorist attacks and the spread of disinformation.

The existence of an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan is no historical accident. In 1918, as the Russian empire crumbled, the three Caucasus republics declared their independence, only to be captured by the Bolsheviks soon after. Lenin assigned the predominantly Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh to Soviet Azerbaijan a century ago, as a prize for securing control over its oilfields, and in the hope of installing a red beacon in the Muslim world.

Nagorno-Karabakh is only one of many such outposts that litter the former Soviet states today. Centralised powers have long viewed local allegiances with suspicion and sought to assert a unifying political ideology over what they see the divisive influence of ethnicity or religion. So it was in the Caucasus: Lenin hoped that communism would supersede other identities.

It didn’t. Fear, not faith, kept the Soviet Union together. Nagorno-Karabakh was the first ethnic conflict to blow up on Mikhail Gorbachev as he started loosening Moscow’s repressive grip on the Soviet empire in the 1980s. In February 1988 demonstrators gathered in the enclave’s capital to demand that the region become part of the Armenian Soviet Republic. A week later a mob staged a bloody pogrom against ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait. The violence shattered the façade of friendship between nations within the USSR.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the violence escalated into full-scale war in 1992. The conflict killed tens of thousands of people and forced a million more out of their homes. Backed by Russia, Armenia took over Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts, depriving Azerbaijan of a large chunk of its territory. For Armenia that victory was a foundation of its post-Soviet statehood. In Azerbaijan, it was a cause of trauma and humiliation. Yet Russia saw the continued dispute as a way both to maintain influence over its former vassals and to block Turkey’s influence in the region.

Today the pieces have all shifted. A recent oil boom in Azerbaijan has fuelled both military spending and popular demands to correct what most of the country’s population sees as a historic injustice. Armenia’s current, populist prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, did not establish his credentials in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, unlike previous leaders, and seems to be compensating with incendiary rhetoric.

Meanwhile the historical imperial rivalry between Russia and Turkey continues to play out. By backing Azerbaijan militarily, Turkey is entering Russia’s former backyard, just as Russia has done with Turkey during recent conflicts in Syria and Libya, once part of the Ottoman Empire. In the past Russia has restrained Azerbaijan from attempting to regain territory by force; now it appears to be giving it a green light.

As ever, the people of the Caucasus are caught in the middle. Many of the soldiers now fighting on each side are younger than the conflict itself. The wounded and displaced civilians are unlikely ever to see a light show on a skyscraper. As nations rise and fall, and wealth ebbs and flows, one story remains the same. The fate of those on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh relies on geopolitical games playing out far, far away.■

Correction (October 26th): A previous version of this article stated that Nikol Pashinyan was Armenia's president. He is Armenia's prime minister, and this has been changed.

PHOTOGRAPHS: LORENZO MELONI