Karabakh always ready to give proper response to Azerbaijan: Bloomberg

PanARMENIAN.Net - Bloomberg published an article by Sara Khojoyan and Anthony Halpin, detailing the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and the mounting casualties caused by ever-more powerful arsenals of weapons. The article reads:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin plunges deeper into his military adventure in Syria, the specter of an older war much nearer to his own doorstep is reawakening.

“Their shooting is increasing,” said Simyon Sarayan, a 25-year-old front-line soldier from Nagorno-Karabakh, whose Armenia-backed forces took the territory and seven adjacent districts of Azerbaijan before Russia brokered a 1994 cease-fire. “We’re always on alert and ready to give a proper response.’’

While fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan would bring more turmoil to the region, analysts say the risks of a full-blown war dragging in other powers are limited.

The confrontation dates back to the dying days of the Soviet Union when a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan flared into a war that killed 30,000 and created 1 million refugees. Mediators led by the U.S., France and Russia have failed to bring peace since the truce. Armenia says the enclave’s Christian Armenians, who declared independence from largely-Muslim Azerbaijan in 1991, have the right to self-determination. Azerbaijan demands respect for its territorial integrity.

What has changed is the economic balance of power as Azerbaijan has attracted $50 billion from BP Plc and its partners in recent years. Military spending increased 30-fold in the past decade and are planned at $4.8 billion in 2015.

That doesn’t deter Nagorno-Karabakh’s defense minister, Levon Mnatsakanyan, who says one of the first targets of any new war will be a BP-operated oil pipeline that’s less than 50 kilometers from the conflict zone and carries as much as 1.2 million barrels daily from Baku to Turkey’s Ceyhan.

“This is a very serious financial resource for Azerbaijan and we need to deprive them of these means,” he said in a Sept. 30 interview in the capital, Stepanakert. “If we’d known the situation would be like this today, we’d never have signed that truce 20 years ago.’’

Nagorno-Karabakh President Bako Sahakyan equated weapons sales to Azerbaijan with similar supplies to Islamic State, now facing Russian air strikes in Syria. Even so, Armenians don’t want fighting to escalate and “we’ll do everything possible to secure our state,’’ he said in an interview last month.

Observing from afar is Putin, who showed Russia’s intention to keep a grip on the former Soviet regions of the Caucasus when it fought a 2008 war with Georgia.

Armenia hosts Russia’s only military base in the region and they have a mutual defense pact. Russia sells arms to both Armenia and Azerbaijan, however. Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, shut its border with Armenia to support Azerbaijan on Karabakh, “which is very sensitive for us,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in January.

Stretching out the status quo may be the Armenians’ best strategy. “Time is working for us,’’ Karen Mirzoyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s foreign minister, said in an interview last month. “The more time passes and the more successful we are in strengthening our statehood, the closer we are to international recognition of our independence.’’

With Azerbaijan vowing Nagorno-Karabakh “will remain an inalienable part of’’ it, increased violence remains possible.

Greater use of heavy weaponry has led to the “worst casualty rate since the 1994” truce as Azerbaijan seeks to challenge the outcome of the war, though “the conflict remains politically choreographed,” IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review reported on its website Tuesday.