U.S. sends Baku signals, OSCE struggles to stay relevant

BAKU

Six months have passed since Azerbaijan abruptly ended an almost 30-year war with Armenia.

The final 44-day blow, dealt in an overwhelming display of pyrotechnic proportions, restored Baku’s control over seven districts occupied by Armenia since 1993-1994.

Although indeed some issues remain – including the final status what is now a shell of the former USSR district of Nagorno-Karabakh still held by an increasingly irrelevant Armenian “separatist” area home to less than 40,000 people. Yet cut past the officialdom, and there is not much of a rush to “determine” the status of the district. There never was. Baku always regarded it – as did all countries – as part of Azerbaijan. Not even Armenia itself recognised the mountainous region, which though the remaining inhabitants, though self-identifying as Armenian, speak a dialect quite distinct from the standard Eastern Armenian used in Yerevan, or even Western Armenian, used among Armenians in Turkey and much of the huge diaspora.

30 YEARS OF CONFABS, GRANTS TO ORGANISED EXPERT GROUPS HARD TO PART WITH

Some analysts and a few bureaucrats still cling to what seems to be almost a warped hope that the conflict lives on. After all, NGOs professing to be dedicated to allegedly bringing the two countries closer together became haunts for conference-goer types. Some lived off the conflict for nearly three decades. Governments, foundations, and other entities wrote checks for a third of a century for all manner of exotic “conflict prevention and reconciliation” projects. The intentions may have been good. The results were either close to zero, and some say the security-oriented NGO gravy train merely perpetuated an industry of airy pronouncements and pontification – often by a “club” of people and “experts” who went to the same conferences and ran their exclusive “gigs” as just that – exclusive to them and mostly irrelevant – and more accurately – unknown – to average people in either country.

Meanwhile, usually smaller NGOs, those dedicated to helping the poor, improving access to water, assisting farmers or small businesses, never attracted the amount of funding or attention they deserved, their missions evidently too mundane for the high-flying club that for 30 years was too involved in more grandiose projects.

War, as they say, is good business.

Some “experts” on the region still seem hell-bent on emphasising absolutely understandable and normal post-war issues, like the complexity of re-opening transport between the two countries, diplomatic relations, and claims over reparations.

And, of course, what remains of the former Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan as early as 2006 basically agreed the final “status” of the district might be put off for many many years, and despite routine language and rhetoric, the issue clearly is not a matter of any particular urgency to either. As mentioned, no country recognises Nagorno-Karabakh as anything other than a district, albeit estranged, of Azerbaijan. Though there are clear ethnic issues between Armenians and Azerbaijanis – 30-year wars and ethnic cleansings have a way of complicating friendships – the relationship cannot be “fixed” by the same “experts” attending important sounding conferences or showing up for Zoom calls of supposedly profound importance.

War indeed can be an excellent business for foreign conflict resolution NGO conference-goer experts in expensive suits.

But peace can be a bit more risky. Try and find a way to make a quick buck from it.

AZERBAIJAN OPENLY DARED TO SCOFF AT OSCE, UNFAZED BY REBUKES  

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev recently blasted the nearly 30-year Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) with its so-called “Minsk Group” mediating effort, co-chaired by Russian, French and U.S. diplomats, as effectively having been a sham. His last broadside came in April. But Azerbaijan essentially stopped taking the effort seriously many years ago and viewed it as more as a welfare programme for bureaucrats who merely wanted to maintain a status quo that was illegal under international law according to four unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that Armenian forces end their occupation.

Aliyev told military officials in Baku that both he and his father, former leader Heydar Aliyev, never had much – if any – confidence in the formalistic, plodding process. President Aliyev said Baku played along with the dog-and-pony show out of a lack of alternatives – all the while very openly amassing a huge pile of high-tech weapons.

The contingency plan for war was a secret to no one in the region or with those familiar with it. It was practically shouted about, and discussed. The Azerbaijani weapons purchases from around the globe were official budgetary expenses. Far from denied or hushed, they were widely publicised.

A 1994 “ceasefire” negotiated by the OSCE did help prevent Azerbaijan from losing more land to occupation, but the truce was never close to effective. There was no real international monitoring. Barely – and rarely – was there a day without skirmishes or violence of one sort or another, and inevitably, suffering – and too many young soldiers dying before they were even 20 years old.

In 2012 alone Azerbaijan reported over 10,000 “ceasefire” violations. Armenia counted less due to varying methodologies – but Yerevan also reported many ceasefire breaches. Often daily, and frequently deadly, crippling Armenia’s very weak economy, and forcing Azerbaijan to spend billions on weapons which, if not for the occupation, officials said could have been used for basic human needs.

The accompanying OSCE mediating mission did very little except – perhaps unintentionally – cement what Azerbaijan and almost everyone else agreed was an unsustainable status quo. Despite many hardworking diplomats from the organisation, it really had no mandate or power to do much beyond standard protocol or score the occasional diplomatic triumph.

And the territories which Armenian forces occupied and trumpeted as “historic lands” – and in the more delirious twistings – the restoration of an ancient Armenian empire dating to 2104 B.C. – were never developed or settled. Thus the vast, empty expanse, mostly devoid of life, were visited only by the odd diplomat or analyst or war journalists – were some of the most forlorn, scary, and eerie places on the planet.

The fact that the co-chair countries were Russia and the U.S. (hardly known for eager bilateral cooperation of late) and France (which Azerbaijan wanted to replace because even French diplomats said privately the large Armenian diaspora in the country was an issue Paris had to consider when its politicians ran for office), did not help propel it to diplomatic glory.

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES TAKEN APART IN UNIQUE AND PAINFUL WAYS

Armenian forces didn’t have to over-exert themselves in taking the seven districts that they occupied in 1993-1994.

At the time, Azerbaijan’s army was barely one, torn by regional divisions, outright treachery, mass evasions of obligatory military service by paying bribes as little as $10, incompetence, and greed.

Agdam was virtually undamaged in 1994 when Armenian forces overran outmanned, bickering, and often duplicitous Azerbaijani “commanders”. One, a half-literate wool merchant-cum-warlord by the name of Surat Huseynov even crowned himself a “Generalissimo” despite possessing essentially zero military acumen. His track record as a war-guru spoke for itself. Seven lost huge districts. If Huseynov had been a boxer instead of his unfortunate foray into his sage military tactics, he would have set a record for being knocked out in every bout.

In the process of taking the seven districts, Armenians ethnically cleansed more than 600,000 Azeris. Those who refused to leave (they were very few) were forced into slave-like labour, setting up shop for Armenian occupying troops – until the cut-rate forced laborers were no longer needed. Some were reportedly killed; others were just forced to leave the area – by foot – if they were lucky.

The utility of the occupied territories was simple: Cheap scrap metal and other stolen materials are competitively priced. Bricks were taken one by one, electrical wiring removed, trees felled to be resold in Armenia, and there was no effort in developing the massive amounts of lands, except to rename towns which evidently had some sort of deep, obscurantist meaning but was completely irrelevant in practice. There was virtually no ethnic Armenian presence in the seven occupied districts when they were occupied.

And lands regarded as part of “historic empires” are not generally subject to such wanton destruction, ecological damage, and with such disdain.

So that horrifying eerie poster child city of Agdam, referred to as “Azerbaijan’s Hiroshima,” because it was so methodically looted – a town of 60,000 virtually carted away over 27 plus years – got a nice new name. (Old and historically meaningful, according to radical ultranationalists in Armenia who represent only a tiny sliver of the population there).

It was rechristened Akna, apparently referenced in some old manuscripts as such.

There was one problem.

The vaunted “Akna” as it was very temporarily renamed by Armenians in 2013 (Agdam) and its environs had a population of zero upon its glorious reincarnation and still was at population zero when Armenian forces left. Down from an original 60,000, when the Azerbaijanis fled. A decline of 100 percent, which to this day is a world record. Armenian forces didn’t even bother to set up a military outpost there once they were done pillaging. Perhaps because there were no utilities, no water, and no habitable buildings left to set up camp in.

A few local ethnic Armenian stragglers occasionally passed thru the macabre city, and if lucky to avoid booby-trapped remnants of dismantled houses, they might score the odd pomegranate or apple from unkempt gardens.

Armenia had no choice but to leave the thoroughly trashed, dismembered city as part of a Russian-brokered peace deal in late 2020 which saved what little ethnic Armenian forces still clung onto in the Nagorno-Karabakh district from an even worse fate.

RARE CALL BY HIGH U.S. OFFICIAL

Perhaps as a result of Aliyev snubbing the OSCE and basically calling its mission a 30 year waste of time, and a fraud of little use – not only during the war – but moreover now, feathers in the OSCE’s plush and hushed HQ in Vienna flew like those of chickens in a wind tunnel.

So, evidently, as a demonstration that Washington was back on the international circuit after the Trump administration lost its atlases of the world for four years, U.S. Secretary of State Anatoly Blinken made a rare call to President Aliyev.

The official statement explaining the rationale for the call out of D.C. said the exchange involved human rights, democracy, and the “important role” of the OSCE – which is now relegated to the occasional prisoner exchange or other details. The OSCE on Thursday trumpeted the release of three Armenian POWs who were released by Baku in a formal statement evidently aimed at emphasizing its continued “role”.

But Blinken, perhaps sensing Aliyev was being too vocal in his lambasting of an organisation that Washington and Moscow were instrumental in setting up in the early 1970s as a vehicle for trying to find some common ground, picked up the phone not long after Aliyev’s harsh criticism – many high ranking United States diplomats have served with the OSCE at one time or another. The pillorying of such an organisation – which even many in its own employ regard as dysfunctional, staid, and of increasingly questionable relevance – is not great for budding diplomatic careers.

The OSCE was at its inception in 1973 – then referred to as the CSCE – set up for a clear and vital purpose. To at least avoid more wars in the then Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe or a modicum of coexistence between the old East Bloc and the West.

But despite the fact it was not mentioned in the State Department Press release – Blinken did indeed throw the Baku leader a bone not long after getting off the phone.

The day after the Blinken-Aliyev call, a senior US State Department official notified Congress that the Biden administration was extending the ban on what is known as “Amendment 907” to the Freedom Support Act to allow direct US assistance to Azerbaijan.

The powerful Armenian lobby in the US got that support suspended in 1992, and although now largely irrelevant as Azerbaijan is no longer a beggar-state, it has enraged Baku since it was put out as evidence of double-dealing, double standards, and corruption via expensive lobbyists and a congressional seat or two – as they saw it.

While symbolic and greeted positively in Azerbaijan, again, it means little – Azerbaijan is too affluent to any longer qualify for direct U.S. budget support. Still, the move was indeed welcomed.

It did have some real significance beyond window-dressing: the at least continued formal rejection of “907” was the second important decision that removed restrictions on cooperation with Azerbaijan, signed by Secretary of State Blinken over the past two months.

In March Blinken signed another document allowing the United States, within the framework of the Law on Foreign Operations and Programs for 2021, to allocate funds to finance Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, which essentially was tantamount to putting Azerbaijan in an equivalent category with its former Soviet republics and ending any sense of perceived unequal treatment.

“The provision of funds under this decision is in the interests of the national security of the United States,” Blinken explained his decision.