The Armenian catastrophe The small nation chose war, not compromise

Rapidly spreading nationalisms turned neighbour against neighbour. In Azerbaijan, Armenians were killed in the streets in a series of pogroms. Homes were looted and victims were raped, murdered and burnt alive by mobs. When the USSR collapsed, in 1992 the two newly established nations declared war.

The Armenians prevailed, securing control over the region and forcing nearly half a million Azerbaijanis from the seven occupied districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the largest of several exoduses happening in both directions. And in 1994, after a ceasefire was agreed, the smaller, poorer, land-locked Armenia emerged victorious. Even though Armenia’s occupation of the seven districts was a violation of international law, all attempts at reconciliation failed. After years of mutual enmity, pogroms and atrocities on both sides, there was no trust left.

Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first President of independent Armenia and leader of the Karabakh movement, wanted to give the occupied territories back. But he was toppled in 1998 by hardline ministers who rejected the compromise. Nationalist ideas, brewing for decades, burst into the open and the new uncompromising rulers entered an alliance with the previously banned Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It said that the seven districts around Karabakh were historic Armenian lands; they had been liberated, not occupied.

 The Armenians’ “greatest error” was “to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a ‘Greater Armenia’ on territory emptied of the people who had lived there”, wrote the historian Ronald Grigor Suny. The irredentist ideology which was legitimised in the Nineties would be Armenia’s downfall.

Meanwhile, revisionism took over in both nations’ academia where the study of history was hijacked and “transformed into political ideology… to justify mass violence”. In Azerbaijan, “historians became soldiers of the head of state”. While their defeat in the war caused a wide-spread trauma among ordinary people, on the state level, it led to a policy of “systematic hatred towards Armenians”, according to a European Parliament resolution.

But if Baku’s defeat gave way to mass trauma and state-level hatred, Yerevan’s victory allowed for mass ignorance. Outside fringe nationalist groups, very few actively embraced the occupation. Many simply did not know their country was occupying lands whose pre-war population was majority Azerbaijani. A tiny minority of intellectuals on both sides, though, condemned their side’s atrocities and called for reconciliation. In response, Azerbaijan arrested the critics, and it continues to do so. In Armenia, peaceniks were simply ignored. Seen as hippie lunatics in a region where might makes right, they were dismissed by analysts convinced of their “pragmatic” interests and “realist” strategies.

But the irony is that self-proclaimed realists were promoting an irredentist fantasy. It is not just that there was never any moral justification for the occupation of the seven districts. There was never a chance Armenia would be allowed to get away with it. “Despite the diplomatic efforts of different administrations, the Armenian side never managed to get the international community to endorse its position,” the historian and diplomat Jirair Libaridian told me in 2020.

The political hardliners who had pushed Ter-Petrossian out soon realised there was no other choice but compromise. Serzh Sargsyan, a former Karabakh commander, was one of them. Once President in 2008, he engaged in serious negotiations and put forward a plan that would include an immediate return of five of the seven occupied districts. “I was ready to be labelled a traitor as long as I could solve the issue,” he told me in 2021.

The West and Russia were supportive of the plan, but Azerbaijan showed no interest. And before the deal was even put on the table, Sargsyan’s time was up. Mass opposition rallies paralysed the capital and forced him to resign. The leader of the protests, a little-known MP called Nikol Pashinyan, would win a landslide election. And he became the most popular leader in Armenia’s independent history — living in a modest flat and driving an old car, he appeared like a man of the people. His call for an anti-corruption crackdown appeared to herald a new era.

Internationally, he decided to do things differently, too. Appointing a failed cigar entrepreneur as his top foreign policy adviser, not only did he poke Russia left and right, but he endorsed the old Karabakh nationalism. Worse even, Pashinyan’s vision of the conflict was shaped by the nationalist propaganda of the old regime. He cited conspiracy theories promoted by his predecessor’s mouthpieces and led a rally under nationalist slogans in Karabakh itself. His cabinet sponsored construction in the occupied districts and threatened to take more of Azerbaijan’s lands.

There was little doubt as to what was coming next. While Azerbaijan was buying Bayraktar drones and holding unprecedented drills with the Turkish army, Armenia was oblivious of the sorry state of its own military. Moreover, Armenians believed that they would find support in the West, encouraged by such signs as the country of the year title bestowed upon them by The Economist. In the worst case, they hoped that Russia, as their formal ally, would forgive their trespasses and come to their rescue. But Armenia’s leadership was deluded.

In the war that followed, in the autumn of 2020, the Armenian army was all but annihilated. Azerbaijan managed to retake the seven occupied districts and around half of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, driving tens of thousands of its residents out. In just 44 days, up to 4,000 Armenians were killed. It is a percentage of population comparable to Ukraine’s losses in the ongoing war.

Unsurprisingly, Russia refused to interfere, and the West showed even less interest. In the end, Putin drafted a ceasefire agreement and dispatched 2,000 of his troops to serve as peacekeepers in what was left of Armenian-held Karabakh. And, three years later, with Russia distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan launched a military operation against the remainder of Nagorno-Karabakh. As the Armenian population fled, Russian peacekeepers stood by and so did the Armenian leadership.

A century of tragedies culminated in this. “With the carelessness of inexperienced and ignorant men we did not know what forces Turkey had mustered on our frontiers,” Armenia’s first Prime Minister Kajaznuni wrote in 1923 of the fall of the first independent republic, and his verdict largely stands true today. The Armenian elites, Kajaznuni complained a century ago, failed to see that their cause “was an incidental and trivial phase for the Russians, so trivial that, if necessary, they would trample on our corpses without a moment’s hesitation”.

In April 2023, Pashinyan made a similar confession. He told the Parliament he was “guilty of not surrendering lands”, a decision that “resulted in thousands of victims”. After presiding over a defeat, he was disabused of nationalist notions and said he would pursue “a peace agenda”.

But a year after the fall of Karabakh, the peace between the two neighbours still has not materialised. With the tables now fully turned, Azerbaijan has little incentive to compromise. It is both stronger militarily and more important globally, with its oil reserves and natural gas deals with both Russia and the EU, as well as close cooperation with Israel.

In Turkey, Azerbaijan has a powerful and steadfast ally, something that Armenia lacks altogether. Whatever hopes it put in Russia, the fall of Karabakh buried them for good. But its dramatic turn to the West is a bold and dangerous gamble: overly dependent on Russian money, tourists, and natural gas, Armenia is playing a risky game.

Meanwhile, nationalist dogmas still dominate the conversation. For many, the role that the occupation and mistaken policies played in Armenia’s troubles are still taboo. Instead, the government blames everything on Russia, hoping to find a sympathetic audience in the West. Some point to the Biden Administration’s broken promise to prevent the expulsion of Armenians from Karabakh, while for others the European Union is to blame for cosying up to Baku and its gas exports. Finally, many are bitter with Israel, as it became a leading arms supplier to Azerbaijan in recent years. But very few mention Armenia’s hubris.

Over the past 30 years, various options safeguarding Armenian presence in Karabakh were on the table, but they were never good enough. “Freedom or death — we did not see a different option. So we chose death,” wrote the journalist Tatul Hakobyan. And, for small nations tempted by the phantoms of a glorious past, that should sound a warning.

---

Grigor Atanesian is a journalist and a BAFTA-winning documentary filmmaker.

atanessi