By Ammaar Muhammad Saleem
Amid various ongoing wars and conflicts in the realm of geopolitics, the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict is one of the longest territorial and ethnic disputes which shows how the so-called moguls of peacekeeping have ignored the lives of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Over the years, tens of thousands of people were killed and several millions were displaced amid reports of ethnic cleansing and massacres committed by both the sides.
Nagorno Karabakh is a forested and mountainous region lying geographically in Azerbaijan populated by Armenians as the majority. The first war of Nagorno Karabakh started in the mid-1980s when the separatist groups and the local government of Artsakh had major military clashes with the Azerbaijani military. In 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Azerbaijan and Armenia achieved statehood and the peace kept by the Soviets also dissolved with it.
There were expulsions of ethnic Armenians from Azerbaijan and ethnic Azerbaijanis from Armenia and the Armenian-controlled areas. To bring peace and stability to the region, the Minsk group was formed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) co-chaired by Russia, France, and the United States of America in 1994. It tried to organise negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia at various rounds of summits.
A ceasefire was brokered by the United Nations Security Council and Russia through the Bishkek Protocol. Even though the war was won by the Republic of Artsakh and Armenia, the region of Nagorno Karabakh was internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory. The region is controlled by the local legislature of Artsakh and Armenian militias and believes itself to be an independent nation.
The Bishkek declaration brought relative stability to the region until the 2010s when the caviar diplomacy of Azerbaijan was exposed through a slush fund of 2.9 billion dollars being used to bribe European and American politicians to promote the pro-Azerbaijan agenda. In 2020, stability broke down and the biggest military confrontation since the 1990s happened with six weeks of fighting. Both sides suffered severe casualties, both military and civilian. Azerbaijan won the territories and a deal brokered by Russia was signed in November for peace and stability, according to which Armenian forces had to withdraw from the region.
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