Day: October 1, 2023

The post The week in pictures: Thousands flee Nagorno-Karabakh as European leaders discuss migrant crisis – Euronews first appeared on The South Caucasus News.

By Luke Coffey

This has been a historic week in the South Caucasus. For Azerbaijan and Armenia, one chapter in a long and often deadly story has ended. Now both sides must look toward the future.

After intense fighting in the region in the early 1990s, Armenia ended up occupying a sizable area of Azerbaijan, including the Karabakh region, for almost three decades. During this period, Yerevan propped up a separatist government, the so-called “Republic of Artsakh,” led by ethnic Armenians and not recognized by any other country in the world.

During the 2020 Karabakh War, Azerbaijan regained control of most of its territory. The resulting ceasefire agreement left a small section of Karabakh out of the hands of Baku and under the supervision of a Russian peacekeeping force.

On Sept. 19 this year, Azerbaijan launched a military operation to retake the remaining parts of Karabakh. The Russian peacekeepers on the ground sat idly by and did nothing. In less than 24 hours, a ceasefire was agreed and the Armenian forces, and Armenian-backed separatists, laid down their weapons.

For international observers of the South Caucasus, what has happened in the past few weeks in Karabakh should not have come as a surprise. There are a few factors that led to the recent events. Firstly, there is a perception that Russia is weak in the region right now as a result of its quagmire in Ukraine. Azerbaijan was never happy with the presence of Russian troops on its territory in the aftermath of the 2020 Karabakh War, and Baku has been looking for the right time to make a move that might lead to their departure from the region.

Secondly, “presidential elections” for the so-called “Republic of Artsakh” were held by the Armenian separatists in Karabakh this month. Unsurprisingly, Azerbaijan considered these elections to be illegal and needlessly provocative. They were not alone in this. There were also strong statements of condemnation from the Council of Europe, the EU, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Organization of Turkic States.

Thirdly, there was the issue of transit links. For countries such as Azerbaijan located in the heart of Eurasia, transport connections to the outside world are key. As part of the agreement that ended the 2020 war, Azerbaijan committed itself to building a new road connecting Armenia with the section of Karabakh under the control of the Russian peacekeepers.

This was accomplished in 2022, a year earlier than was required by the 2020 ceasefire agreement. In return, Armenia pledged to “guarantee the security of transport connections” between Azerbaijan proper and its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, through Armenia’s Syunik province. This has yet to happen. Understandably, the lack of progress on this promise has frustrated Baku.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what the world saw play out in Karabakh over the past couple of weeks was the culmination of more than three decades of diplomatic failures. Since the early 1990s, four UN Security Council resolutions were passed calling for the “cessation of all hostilities and the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces” from Azerbaijan. None were ever enforced.

The war in 2020 should have served as a wake-up call for the international community to redouble its efforts to find a long-lasting and durable peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but all efforts failed.

Now that Azerbaijan has restored control over its territory, the hard part begins. Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis who were forced out of their homes in the 1990s will want to return. Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians, most of whom will distrust the government in Baku, will need to be integrated into Azerbaijani society.

While there have been many cavalier claims, mainly by commentators in the West, thousands of kilometers away, of genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Karabakh, there is so far no evidence that this is taking place. There has been a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians leaving for Armenia but the government of Azerbaijan has made it clear that they can remain if they wish.

Azerbaijan must now ensure that ethnic Armenians who do decide to stay receive all the usual protections afforded to minority groups in dozens of countries around the world, including freedom of religion and the ability to preserve their Armenian language and culture. Considering the diversity that already exists in modern-day Azerbaijan, there is no reason to assume that this would be a problem. But it will take years for trust to be restored.

As with any conflict, there are winners and losers. Azerbaijan is obviously a clear winner. Turkiye, as Azerbaijan’s top ally, is also a winner. Russia and Iran are the losers in the aftermath of the recent fighting.

For Moscow, its influence in the South Caucasus is waning as its problems in Ukraine continue to mount. Tehran, meanwhile, has maintained a cozy relationship with Armenia for years in an attempt to undermine Azerbaijan’s influence in the South Caucasus. This will now be more difficult.

The outcome of the conflict for Armenia is complicated, especially when we consider the long term. On one hand, its armed forces have been devastated and there is a feeling of betrayal by Moscow, its top military and economic ally.

However, it is quite possible that the normalization process and peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan (and someday between Armenia and Turkiye) could create new economic opportunities in the region. Now that the conflict is over, international investors might be willing to channel billions of dollars in direct investment to the region. As residents of the poorest country in the region, the Armenian people need this.

As the Armenians find peace with their neighbors, their reliance on Russia might diminish. This could create an opportunity for Yerevan to move closer to the Euro-Atlantic community. However, this will not happen quickly and will likely require a generational change in Armenian society.

On Oct. 5, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in the Spanish city of Granada during a summit of the European Political Community. It is too early to speculate what the outcome of this meeting might be. However, let us hope it is the beginning of what will be a process that brings peace, stability and economic prosperity to the South Caucasus.

For too long this region has suffered. The international community should redouble its efforts to get all sides around a table and find a lasting peace.

• Luke Coffey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. X: @LukeDCoffey

Twenty-five years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an academic at the University of Warwick began work in the Russian archives to map the sophisticated regime that made the Soviet Union the most secretive state that ever existed.

A new book, based on decades of research, describes the complex layers of secrecy within the Soviet Union, what secrecy hid, what the state gained and lost because of it, and what we can learn about how secrecy is used in Russia today.

Emeritus Professor of Economics Mark Harrison at the University of Warwick and author of Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism says: “The Soviet Union’s archives hold many millions of secret documents. Their volume is far greater than the government information that was released into the public sphere. But the biggest secret was the huge gap between the appearance and reality of the communist party dictatorship. To all appearances, the Soviet state was decisive, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Behind the scenes, the state was ruled by procrastination, indecision, groupthink, mistrust, fear, and disinformation. This gap was hidden by secrecy.

“The communists were the most diligent state-builders of the twentieth century. The political leaders valued secrecy because it bought them security of tenure. But secrecy was extremely costly. The price they paid was in a state machine that was far less capable than the one they pretended to deploy. There was a secrecy/capacity trade-off.”

“Ordinary people who had no direct connection to power also paid the price of secrecy. Not only were they denied the freedoms of an open society. In addition, they knew that the secret police held information about their background and lives. You didn’t know what that information was or how it affected your life. A promotion might be mysteriously blocked, or an application to travel abroad that was refused without reason. You would never know why. You could only suspect that there was something in your past that the state knew about. And there was no appeal process.”

A measure of the scale of the Soviet Union’s secret state compares the number of US and Soviet  secret informants at the height of the Cold War:

“In 1976 the FBI had around 1500 undercover informants. In a slightly earlier year, 1968, the KGB had 165,000 informants. Given that the Soviet population was slightly larger than the American population at the time, the difference was 1:100.”

What we can learn about Russia’s secrecy today

The digital age we are now living in is more adapted to disinformation than to censorship. Yet, the secrecy /capacity trade-off continues to operate, explains Professor Harrison:

“President Putin chose to plan and launch the invasion of Ukraine in complete secrecy, to preserve his freedom of action and achieve surprise. But in doing so he sacrificed a large part of his invasion force. With more transparent decision making, Russia’s soldiers would not have invaded Ukraine thinking they were on an exercise, and President Putin would not have sent them into battle believing that he could win the war in three days.”

Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism by Mark Harrison, published by Stanford University Press (2023), is out now.

WARSAW — Several countries have accused members of the Russian Orthodox clergy of collaborating with Russian security services, pushing Kremlin policy inside the church and even recruiting spies from within.

On Sept. 21, Bulgaria deported Russian Archimandrite Vassian, guardian of the Orthodox parish in Sofia, along with two Belarusian priests. In a press release, the Bulgarian national security agency says that clergy were deported because they posed a threat to national security. “The measures were taken due to their actions against the security and interests of the Republic of Bulgaria,” Bulgarian authorities wrote in a statement, according to Radio Svoboda.

These reports were also confirmed by Russia’s ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, who told Russian state news agency TASS that the priests must leave Bulgaria within 24 hours. “After being declared persona non grata, Wassian and the other two clerics were taken home under police supervision to pack up their belongings. Then they will be taken to the border with Serbia” she said.