On September 13 and 14, Azerbaijan led an unprecedented offensive on the territory of the Republic of Armenia. Despite the ceasefire between the two parties, sporadic clashes along the border continue to cause casualties on the Armenian side, which has counted more than 200 dead since the start of hostilities. Unbearable videos and images of desecrated corpses and summary executions of prisoners have circulated on the Net suggesting war crimes committed with complete impunity by the Azeri special forces.
This is Azerbaijan’s second military aggression against the Armenian people in less than two years. Recall that in the fall of 2020, the Turkish-speaking country invaded the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, thus sealing the fate of this self-proclaimed republic in 1991. Today, what is at stake is the very sovereignty of the Armenia with the violation of its territorial limits.
The European Union (EU) sent a civilian mission to this area last Friday to help delimit the borders. The same EU which, earlier this summer, signed a gas delivery agreement with Azerbaijan to mitigate its expenditure on Russia in this area. This shows how the dice are stacked on the issue. Any diplomatic solution resulting from this mediation would risk further weakening the Armenian nation, even sounding its death knell.
The Armenians are a thousand-year-old people, whose greatest tragedy was perhaps to have historically occupied a territory at the junction of two belligerent colonial powers, the Russians and the Ottomans. Just over a hundred years ago, 1.5 million Armenians (nearly half the population at the time) were to be scapegoated and killed at the hands of the Young Turk government in the process. of a war which pitted them against the Tsar – a genocide still denied to this day by Ankara.
Since then, two major events have completely reconfigured the geopolitics of the region. First, the end of the First World War, which gave birth to present-day Turkey. Then, a few decades later, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought in its wake the creation of three sovereign states in the South Caucasus — Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan — three countries with different national identities and divergent strategies. All wedged between the three powers with neo-imperial aspirations that are today’s Russia, Turkey and Iran.
The fact remains that the historical function of the Caucasus has never changed through the ages: that of being the crossroads between Asia and Europe. Two thousand years ago the spice and silk route passed through it. Today, it is gas pipelines and pipelines from Baku that cross the region to supply Europe with fossil energy. President Aliyev seems to be multiplying provocations to create a new corridor that would cross Armenia, in order to directly connect Turkey to the shores of the Caspian Sea, whose offshore oil reserves are estimated at 2 billion tons, in addition to the 400,000 billion cubic meters of gas fields.
In the context of the current energy crisis, it is therefore not surprising that the Armenian cause is eclipsed in favor of the war in Ukraine, which has greatly weakened Russia (Armenia’s traditional ally) and completely redefined the game of alliances. and powers in the region.
Since the start of the conflict, Canada has contented itself with a terse declaration, on the occasion of Armenia’s Independence Day, on September 21. However, Azeri soldiers were seen crossing the border on foot, thus violating the territorial sovereignty of Armenia.
As a country that defends human and minority rights, Canada—and all Western countries—must do everything possible to protect the Armenian people, who are an indigenous people of the Caucasus. Otherwise, the entire region would risk becoming de-Westernized, which would leave this minority at the mercy of pan-Turkish geostrategic interests. And would doom the Armenian people to its disappearance.