The President of the Armenian “Republic of Artsakh” Samvel Shakhramanyan signed a document on 28 September which decreed the dissolution of all “state institutions and organisations” by January 1 2024. This effectively ending the existence of “Artsakh” and signalled the absorption of the population as full and equal citizens into the Republic of Azerbaijan. 

What the West continued to call Nagorno Karabakh is, therefore, no more. It has gone into the dustbin of history, to coin a phrase of Trotsky. It fell like a pack of cards in little over 24 hours on September 19th when measured force was applied to it by the Azerbaijan Army in a lightning offensive. Without Armenia, and without Russia, it was nothing. It had claimed self-determination for decades, ever since it found it could not join with Armenia (Miatsum) without bringing Armenia down with it, as an affront to international law. But it was incapable of actual self-determination, being only a pseudo-state, a false front of Armenia, which the Armenian Prime Minister decided he could do without, after the trouble it had caused him in 2020.

The Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was an arbitrary construction of Stalin. In 1920-1 the Bolsheviks recaptured the South Caucasus for Russia after seeing off the British and defeating the Whiteguards in the Civil War. When it was decided in the 1920s by the Soviet Kavburo, after much discussion, that the Karabakh region should remain a part of Azerbaijan the Bolsheviks were faced with the problem of a large community of Armenians who inhabited the mountainous region of the province. It was decided to create a small autonomous region within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic with boundaries that would create a population of three-quarters Armenians and one-quarter Azerbaijanis. Around it lay 7 regions with large Azerbaijani majorities, some of which lay between it and the neighbouring Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. For the previous 5 years war and massacre had characterised relations between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over territory that was in dispute between them.

The settling of the national question in the South Caucasus by Stalin cannot be described as a failure. It was the Soviet Union itself that failed and took the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast with it. 

This happened when General Secretary Gorbachev went in for “Leninist democracy” – a contradiction in essence – and destabilised the very thing that held everything together, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the interests of improving what could not be improved, Gorbachev rubbed the bottle in which there was a genie and let the genie of Armenian nationalism out to wreak havoc. Yerevan took to the streets en masse and the Armenians took Gorbachev’s freedom to mean their freedom from Azerbaijan, and the catastrophe began. Brotherly Comrades did not do such things and Soviet leaders did not let them. But between 1987 and 1990 they did and everything unravelled.

Did the Armenians prompt the meltdown of the Soviet Union or did the meltdown of the Soviet Union prompt the meltdown of Nagorno Karabakh? That is a moot question.

In the chaos of the meltdown the Armenians, who organised an army and managed to import an effective force of volunteers from Lebanon and elsewhere, led by Monte Melkonian, repulsed the efforts of the dysfunctional and disorganised Azerbaijan Republic to defend its territory, and won the First Karabakh War. In the course of the war around 18,000 Azerbaijani civilians were killed, along with 12,000 hastily organised soldiers thrown into battle. 750,000 Azerbaijani civilians were driven out of Nagorno Karabakh and 7 adjacent regions, conquered by Armenian forces in its extravagant victory.

Heydar Aliyev, who came back to rescue his country, signed a ceasefire with Yerevan in 1994 to cut the losses of the Azerbaijan Republic. He sensibly resisted the signing of a treaty and set about the long task of building a functional state and army. His work was continued by his son, Ilham, to fruition in 2023. But all the while the Armenians, resting on the laurels of victory, and confident on their martial superiority, over a race they considered inferior, refused to make a settlement that involved the trading of land for peace. Any Armenian who even contemplated exchanging some of the occupied territories, like Levon Ter Petrosyan did, was quickly dispatched to obscurity. Gerard Libaridian, adviser to Ter Petrosyan, tells it like it is in his new, wonderfully informative book, ‘Precarious Armenia’.

It was the Armenians who killed Nagorno Karabakh. They replaced it with “Artsakh” – a vast newly created ethnically homogeneous entity carved out of the old Oblast and 7 surrounding regions of Azerbaijan, emptied of their population. And they killed and etnically cleansed on a vast scale in the name of “Genocide prevention.”

Nagorno Karabakh could only exist in the context of Socialist fraternity among Brotherly Proletarians and it was inappropriate to the new era of nationalism. 

The Soviet national settlement in the South Caucasus lasted for 70 years and it enabled Armenians and Azerbaijanis to peacefully live together in Karabakh. It also enabled 350,000 Armenians to live peacefully and prosperously in Azerbaijan, while 210,000 Azerbaijanis remained safely and securely in their homes in Armenia. However, it was the mass movement from 1987, to detach NKAO from Azerbaijan and join it to Armenia that set off the chain of events that led to the killing and intimidation of Azerbaijanis in Armenia and Armenians in Azerbaijan, which produced great movements of population from their homes of generations.

It appears that the level of peaceful co-existence in Soviet times will never be achieved again and it looks today, after 30 years of bitter conflict, an amazing accomplishment. But, of course, a man like Stalin and a system like the Soviet Union could never be credited with such a thing by right-thinking people, could they?

But it is clear that the era of nationalisms, brought in by the collapse of the Soviet State, does not permit those kind of community relations.

That is why the criticism of the Western media that has been levelled against Azerbaijan in recent days has been so bizarre. Phrases like “ethnic cleansing” have been bandied about with abandon, without care for the truth or historical context.

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry in the 1990s, in a preliminary report S25274, defined “ethnic cleansing” as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons or groups from the area” and in its final report, S1994/674, “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from geographic areas.” 

What happened in 1991-4 was obviously “ethnic cleansing”. The motive of the Armenians was the forced and permanent migration of Azerbaijanis to clear the ground for “Artsakh”. It was encouraged by “terror-inspiring” events like the Khojaly massacre, where armed Armenians went into an unarmed village, early in the war, and killed over 600 civilians, and where people were driven over high mountains at gunpoint and froze to death in their thousands in the dead of Winter. 

What has happened in the last few days, in contrast, is the voluntary migration of Armenians, against the wishes of the Azerbaijan Government, who made it very clear they were welcome to stay. It has supplied the Armenians swiftly with electricity, fuel and medical supplies and offered full equality and a more prosperous future. There were no “terror-inspiring” events against the Armenian civilian population and only a targeted operation against purely military targets, with little loss of civilian life.

It has always been said by the leaders of Karabakh Armenians that their people would never be prepared to live under Baku’s authority. They would leave rather than submit to the rule of inferior Azerbaijanis. Can this section of Armenians be said to have been ethnically cleansed when their aim was to either rule a territory they have cleared of untermenschen or leave it if they couldn’t? Armenia’s Ambassador to Ireland’s comment to RTE that the “forced depopulation” of the indigenous Armenian people from Nagorno-Karabakh was “a tragic loss for the Armenian people and for civilisation.” It seems that the Armenian Ambassador still lives in the world of the “civilising mission”.

Perhaps the ethnic Germans of East Prussia and Eastern Europe are the closest analogy there is to the Karabakh Armenians. But I have never seen any sympathy for these people in Europe that the fleeing Armenians now receive. One need not wonder why that is – but Europe dare not say it.

Some of the Armenians who now depart are obviously fearful of remaining, despite assurances of equal citizenship and amnesty by Baku. Some might be right to be fearful, if their past actions constituted war crimes, and they might be brought to justice. Others may have been convinced by their leaders or neighbours that terrible things would happen to them. After all they have been told for generations that the Turk (and Azerbaijani Turk) is a barbarian, born to kill and massacre Christian Armenians, as part of their genetics. Wasn’t this something said once by eminent civilised people in the West? Is it any wonder that people who have absorbed such propaganda for generations would choose to leave?

It is said by the Armenian diaspora that “Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh has been a land for Armenians for hundreds of years.” But that is not the point. The relevant fact is that it is only in the last 30 years that Karabakh was controlled by, and was the exclusive preserve of, Armenians. Previous to that it was administered by the Soviets, the Republic of Azerbaijan, the British Empire, the Russian Empire and independent Azerbaijani Khanates, going back to the 18th Century. Before that it was fought over by the Safavid (Turkic) Persians and Ottoman Turks. 

The Azerbaijan Government cannot keep its Armenian population by force, if it chooses to leave. The prophesy by David Babayan, aired on the BBC, that there would be a “Biblical Exodus” of Armenians, like God’s Chosen People going into exile, has indeed come to pass. The numbers are disputed. The Armenians have claimed that there were 120,000 in “Artsakh” but the President of Russia tells us there were only 57,000. It is in interest of Armenia to double count to maintain the narrative of persecution and they had counted 100,000 departures by Saturday 30 September! And the West has reported that figure without troubling their newly employed “fact checkers” who seem to exist for only one purpose. But one thing is certain, very few Armenians remain in Azerbaijan.

There is little doubt that the swift collapse of Nagorno Karabakh was essentially due to geopolitics, and Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan’s “pivot to the West.”

In 2020, when Azerbaijan won the Second Karabakh War and reduced “Artsakh” to a rump of the old Oblast, an agreement to end the War, brokered by President Putin, left 2,000 Russian Peacekeepers in place in the remaining Armenian controlled area. They were to remain there until 2025 and it was thought that the Kremlin might keep them there longer, if it could find a way. It was generally believed that the repopulation of the 7 surrounding areas and their redevelopment for suitable living would be such an arduous task that Baku might even agree to an extension of their presence, until 2030.

The general belief in the South Caucasus was that Moscow would play the Armenians and Azerbaijanis off against each other to remain as long as possible, manipulating political forces in the region in the Kremlin’s own strategic interest, as had happened in Georgia with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And indeed, only recently did spokesman Peskov warn Yerevan that Russia had a historic place in the Caucasus.

However, then came the Ukraine War and the Kremlin remarkably was out-manoeuvred by both Yerevan and Baku. Russia’s difficulty was the South Caucasus’ opportunity!

The Ilham Aliyev Government played a skilful game in relation to Moscow. It had developed the Azerbaijan State into a substantial economic force with a professional and well-equipped army, and with an officer corps trained in Turkiye. Azerbaijan under the Aliyevs was a good neighbour to Russia, but refused to be intimidated by it. Putin made threatening noises and took some actions in 2020 aimed at deterring Azerbaijan from moving against “Artsakh” – but Aliyev called his bluff. 

Putin had to deal with the growing substance of Azerbaijan that had to be taken account of. Forget the Western propaganda, the Russian President is a pragmatist at heart, who respects strength where he finds it. Threat is, of course, a wholly different matter for Putin, as Georgia and Ukraine, earmarked for NATO, found out. Azerbaijan has never represented a threat to Russia and that was a deliberate act of State, since the Elchibey catastrophe.

Russia adopted a more even balance in the region as a consequence, moving from its traditional pro-Armenian position. And this put the Armenian nose out of joint because the Armenians felt entitled in relation to Russia due to history and the dependent relationship it had acquired that had been enhanced with the expansion into Karabakh.

Pashinyan, however, has been turned by the West. Annoyed at not being rescued by Moscow during the Second Karabakh War (a war of his own making) and presumably having received an offer he could not refuse from Washington, Pashinyan decided to jettison “Artsakh” in the interest of remaining in power and Westernising Armenia, to break its dependence on Russia. He calculated that Russia had been disabled by being lured into the Ukraine quagmire and it was the opportunity and time to strike out for freedom. He would blame the Russians for all Armenia’s and “Artsakh’s” misfortunes and opt for Western protection of his Government and State. He would be rewarded with protection by Washington.

It was this opportunism that did for what the West calls Nagorno Karabakh and begun the rapid collapse of the “Artsakh” pseudo-state. The US was never going to defend the unrecognised state in Karabakh, which it has always viewed as a Russian construction, existing in Moscow’s interest. In many ways there has been a confluence of interest between West and Russia, as well as Baku and Yerevan, in dissolving it.

Prime Minister Pashinyan really has been a gift from God for Azerbaijan. Any previous concern at what would happen in 2025, when the Russians could be asked to leave under the Trilateral treaty, faded into history. Putin and his peacekeepers, caught off balance by Pashinyan’s sudden about turn to the West, was forced to collaborate with Baku in the destruction of the pseudo-state, it had intended to uphold for as long as it could. Now having sowed the seed Pashinyan may reap the whirlwind – tens of thousands of angry Armenians from “Artsakh” will converge on Yerevan.

Nothing can be predicted in politics but some intriguing possibilities now appear in the South Caucasus. Both Baku and Moscow desire the opening of the Zangezur corridor, connecting the South Caucasus with Turkiye, which Russian forces will administer. Turkiye has opened its energy pipelines into Nakhchivan in anticipation of this. The Azerbaijan Foreign Minister, Hikmet Hajiyev, has stated that Azerbaijan’s only interest in the corridor is as a communications/infrastructure route. This is obviously to assure Iran that it will still have access into Armenia. And if Armenia goes West this will alter how Tehran looks at both Yerevan and the corridor. Eurasian development full steam ahead?

On the other side Armenia is becoming a battleground for geopolitics, with the first question being: will Washington defend Pashinyan? As Eric Hacobyan said: “Samantha Power has come to plant the US flag in Syunik” – meaning that the US has come to Armenia under the guise of humanitarians to deter Azerbaijan from an advance into the Armenian State. That Azerbaijan has no intention of doing such a thing is of no consequence. It is the US bridgehead, to get a toehold in Armenia.

In the 2019 Rand Report “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground”, after dismissing prospects for the West in Azerbaijan and Georgia, the illustrious US think tank notes the preferable option for the US is to “induce Armenia to break with Russia… The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United States were to succeed in this policy then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044) and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District.” (p.117)

The Rand Corporation mapped out practically everything that the US has done in the World lately, including the movement to back Ukraine and contest the Black Sea. Can it be doubted that it may be right on US intentions toward Armenia?

What a very good year the centenary of Heydar Aliyev’s birth has proved to be for the State he saved!