Avedis Hadjian
With hundreds dead on both sides, the war between Armenian and Azeri forces in Karabakh — in Armenian, Artsakh — a mountainous enclave in the Southern Caucasus, is now anything but ‘frozen’, as it has long been described. A tenuous ceasefire had held since 1994, when the population of this historically Armenian region secured its de facto independence, in close cooperation with the Republic of Armenia. Peace has mostly prevailed since then, except for a four-day war in 2016 and a major flare-up last July.
The immediate cause of the fighting that broke out on 27 September is Azerbaijan’s attempt to reclaim territory that was within its borders during the Soviet period. After the Caucasian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party initially recognised Karabakh’s right to autonomy and promising it to Armenia following the republic’s sovietisation in 1920, Joseph Stalin, then commissar of nationalities of the Soviet Union, intervened, and the Soviets gave Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 1921. Armenians argue that this decision flies in the face of its history of continuous autonomy under Armenian princes since at least the eighth century and, more importantly, its population being more than 90% Armenian. In 1923, the Soviet government proclaimed the enclave an autonomous region within the Socialist Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
