Despite the ceasefire of last weekend the Karabakh war has continued much as it did over the previous fortnight. The Azerbaijani army has maintained its steady advance, but now out of the plain and into the settlements of Nagorno-Karabakh proper (i.e. the highlands). It has secured Hadrut, whose fall was a great moral blow to […]
On Friday night it was announced, after 12 hours of meetings in Moscow, that “a humanitarian ceasefire” has been agreed to between Armenia and Azerbaijani in Karabakh. After the Saturday 12.00 start of the ceasefire, as the Azerbaijani forces stood down, it appears there were further Armenian artillery barrages and attacks, perhaps aimed at recovering […]
This week I gave an Interview with CBC Azerbaijan on the present Karabakh conflict. I stated my position clearly: “I believe the current outbreak of hostilities to be entirely the responsibility of the Armenian Government of Mr Pashinyan. It has resulted from a series of provocations that have given Azerbaijan little option but to remove […]
‘Great Britain against Russia in the Caucasus’ is about how the geopolitical relationship between Imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia had a transformative effect on the destinies of Ottoman Turks, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. From the Great War of August 1914, the course of history for these empires and peoples of Transcaucasia, was irrevocably altered and set […]
For most of the 19th Century Great Britain and Tsarist Russia confronted each other in a geopolitical struggle known as the Great Game. During this period Britain supported the Ottoman Empire as a giant buffer state against Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean. But in 1907 the Great Game against Russia was suddenly suspended in the […]
John Hume was an absolutely unique force in politics in the North of Ireland. He stood head and shoulders above every other constitutional nationalist politician in political ability. He was indispensable to the Peace Process and its success and the achievement of the Good Friday settlement. His community was very fortunate it found a man of […]
The Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, has been addressing a Conference in Yerevan to celebrate the lost Treaty of Sevres. He made a statement at that conference praising the lost Treaty of August 1920 and indicated that he would like to see it revived from the dead, presumably to carve up […]
The funeral of Volunteer Bobby Storey has created something of a palaver. Palavers, of course, are not unusual in the weird political construct of ‘Northern Ireland’. They are the very stuff of the communal grind and they gain extra purchase when they occur within one of the two communal blocs rather than between the two. […]
The flare up of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which has resulted in a number of military and civilian deaths and fears of a new war in the region, is all about Armenia and its unbalancing since the coming to power of its present Prime Minister, Nicol Pashinyan. There is a strong tendency in the […]
To understand the point of this article we need to revisit something that George Curzon (later Lord) said in the British Parliament. At the time Curzon was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and he said it in the course of defending traditional British policy with regard to the Ottoman Empire, on behalf of Lord […]
