Diplomats Scramble to Keep Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict from Reigniting—but Why Is It Happening Now?

The so-called “frozen conflict” between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory may be thawing out in the post-Crimea world of Russian expansionism.  That would be bad news for the safety and stability of the rest of the Soviet successor states and for the Middle East as well.

The blurry, contested line between Armenian and Azeri areas was the first part of the wobbling Soviet Union to flare into war—as early as 1988, years before Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia became independent in 1991.  Some history: those three nations had established brief independence during the Russian Civil War that raged for years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.  When they were absorbed into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by victorious Bolsheviks in the 1920s, guarantees were given to protect the rights of the ethnic Armenian minority in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of what was now the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, and to resolve the border dispute eventually.  But that became moot as Josef Stalin exerted brutal central control over the entire U.S.S.R. and repressed national identities other than Russian.  For decades, it did not matter where the boundaries between republics and sub-republics and fictively labeled “autonomous regions” were if everyone’s lives were run directly from the Kremlin anyway.

But the 1980s saw a revival of Armenian aspirations to expand into Armenian-populated areas of Azerbaijan, and, not always even unconsciously, to exact vengeance on Turkic-speaking Azeris for the 1910s and 1920s genocide by Anatolian Turks in the “Western Armenia” region that was forcibly absorbed into the new Republic of Turkey.  A six-year war ended in 1994 with an Armenian victory, the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, mostly Azeris, and the establishment of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R., a.k.a. Artsakh Republic), a supposedly independent Armenian puppet state carved out of western Azerbaijan.  The N.K.R. was ethnically cleansed of Azeris and Kurds, bankrolled by the fiercely nationalistic Armenian diaspora (especially in the United States), and backed both diplomatically, militarily, and financially by Armenia and, less directly, Russia.

Since 1994, peace talks have dragged on without result and a shaky cease-fire has held—just barely—on the border between the N.K.R. and Azerbaijan proper.  As long as things did not flare up again, it was a situation the international community could live with and mostly, it hoped, afford to ignore.  Till now.  So far in August, though the figures are disputed, twenty people have been killed along the cease-fire line, including young civilians, and including flare-ups along the tensest part of the shared border, that between Armenia and the Azeri exclave of Nakhchivan, wedged between Armenia, Iran, and Turkey—tensest because no one, no one, wants Armenia and Turkey to start shooting at each other.

Armenian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles with the Nagorno-Karabakh flag

On one level, none of this is unheard of: each year since 1994, dozens of incidents have occurred along the border, mostly snipers mistaking civilians for hostiles when they stray too close to the hot zone.  Each month, each country routinely issues a list of the other side’s supposed cease-fire violations.  But none of it has been game-changing.  What is different in the past three weeks has been the numbers: more deaths along the border than in the average year over the past decade of “peace.”  And the usual propaganda issuing from both Yerevan and Baku about these incidents is using more heated rhetoric than usual.  Ambassador James B. Warlick, Jr., the U.S. co-chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.) committee on Karabakh called the Minsk Group, went so far as to declare earlier this month, “Unfortunately, the armed conflicts in the region show that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not ‘frozen’ anymore.  You cannot explain to the family of an injured or a dead soldier that it is a frozen conflict.”  And John Heffern, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, recorded a special video message to both sides in the conflict, urging peace.

An emergency meeting in Sochi, Russia, between Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, and the Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan ended last week with nothing to show and the situation more tense than ever.  This week, on August 18th, the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey met in Nakhchivan, a meeting which mainly ended with Tbilisi and Ankara expressing determination to stay out of the Karabakh mess at all costs.  Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) is activating its water-carriers in the U.S. Congress to escalate anti-Azerbaijan rhetoric—a losing battle in some ways, since the Armenian government has hitched its wagon to the isolated and despised Putin regime (see relevant articles from this blog here and here).

Presidents Aliyev and Sargsyan

Why now?  Surely it has much to do with the new cold war between Russia and the West.  Russia had always aligned itself far more with the Armenian side in the dispute.  Russia under Putin regards itself as a Christian country, and a large component of the conflict is sectarian: Armenians are mostly Christian, and Azeris, like most other Turkic-speaking peoples, Muslim.  Azerbaijan became a natural ally of Turkey, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a quixotically aspirant European Union (E.U.) member state, and a long-time enemy of Armenians.  And the puppet-state model used by Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh is identical to the approach used by Russia in the supposedly independent republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia carved out of Georgia, the partly-ethnic-Russian-populated Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Transnistria) carved out of Moldova, and, before its annexation, the briefly “independent” Republic of Crimea within Ukraine.  The Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine, currently the scene of a war between Ukrainian and pro-Kremlin forces, are further examples.  After Crimea’s annexation, Abkhazia and South Ossetia began clamoring for annexation as well, and Transnistria and the N.K.R. began asking for, if not annexation by their sponsoring states (Russia and Armenia, respectively), at least the diplomatic recognition that Russia and a handful of toadying allies like Nicaragua and Venezuela grant to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  So the N.K.R. is getting restless.  Some there are confident they can win an endgame, like the one apparently playing out in Ukraine.

Expanding outward, Iran and Syria are also allies of Russia and Armenia, while the U.S., Israel, and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq are allied with Azerbaijan and Georgia.  So the seemingly imminent independence of Iraqi Kurdistan and eventual control of Syria by Western-leaning forces in that civil war are prospects that are making Russian and Armenian nationalists eager to make the N.K.R.’s status official.  What we are seeing could be engineered provocations by the Armenian side—or by the Azeri side, though they are less motivated to unfreeze the conflict.

Or are they?  Some Armenian observers have a different fear.  They see Russia’s diplomatic isolation and the international sanctions against it as motivating factors behind a new initiative by Putin to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Azerbaijan’s favor, as a way of making nice with the West.  In this view, Putin encouraged Aliyev to shatter the cease-fire so Putin could play peace-maker and put Armenia in its place.  Like many paranoid nationalist theories, this one is full of holes.  For one thing: why would the international community care so much about what happens way over in the South Caucasus that it would forgive Putin for stoking conflict in Ukraine that directly threatens to embroil all of Europe and destabilize the global international order?  And why would Putin shrink the territory where he exerts influence?  The Armenian theory holds that it is part of a longer game by Putin to bully Azerbaijan into joining the new Eurasian Union trade bloc (also containing Belarus and Kazakhstan) into which Putin has already bullied Armenia into joining.  To sum up: Armenian nationalists, by allying themselves with Russia, have painted themselves into a corner and now feel that the whole world opposes them.  It sort of does, actually, and the Armenian government sort of asked for it.  That kind of feeling of ethnonational grievance and persecution is a dangerous cocktail: it makes leaders take military risks (think Adolf Hitler or Putin).

As an observent reader pointed out, Iceland, despite being blue in this map, is not actually in the E.U.  See comments below.

With war already engulfing all of Syria, all of Iraq, and half of Ukraine, both Armenia and Azerbaijan would do well to dial back the rhetoric, lower their weapons a bit, and let this conflict freeze over again.  No good can come of a thaw.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Looking for a scary Halloween costume?
How about “Naughty” Armenian Ultranationalist?

California Assembly Passes Resolution Approving Ethnic Cleansing

The Armenian National Committee of America pushed

California’s joint resolution on N.K.R.

The California state assembly passed a resolution on May 8th to recognize the sovereignty of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.) (a.k.a. Artsakh Republic), an Armenian puppet state which the newly independent Armenia’s military, with the help of Russian forces, carved out of the newly independent Azerbaijan in the early 1990s in the wreckage of the imploded Soviet Union.

After the vote, California legislators posed with delegates from the N.K.R.

The N.K.R. is not recognized as independent by any recognized independent country, not even by its patron, the Republic of Armenia, but symbolic resolutions have been passed recognizing it in various local legislatures and city councils in the vast Armenian diaspora, including the legislatures of Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island and of New South Wales in Australia, and, just last month, the city council of Los Angeles.  The California vote was expected.  The state has hundreds of thousands, some say almost a million, ethnic Armenians, mostly concentrated in greater Los Angeles.  There are, for example, only three cities in Armenia itself that have more Armenian residents than just one L.A. suburb, Glendale.  By contrast, there is only a negligible number of Azeri-Americans.

The California resolution passed with a vote of 70 to 1.  The only “no” vote was by Rocky Chávez, a Republican representing Oceanside, a San Diego suburb.  Armenian pressure groups play a huge role in pushing through symbolic pro-N.K.R. resolutions around the world, especially in the United States.  California’s Armenian diaspora also provides funding and support to the N.K.R.

Paid for in Moscow, planned in Yerevan,
carried out in Khojaly, applauded in Sacramento

Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people died in the Nagorno-Karabakh War from 1991 to 1994, most of them killed by the Armenian military, which was aided by mercenaries from Russia and elsewhere and tacitly and covertly backed by Russia.  Thousands of Azeris were expelled from Azerbaijani territory to make room for Armenian settlement, and thousands of Kurds were cleansed from the Lachin corridor, which was not part of the Nagorno-Karabakh region but was conquered in order to provide a land bridge between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia and is now part of the N.K.R. Many see the Nagorno-Karabakh War as Armenian revenge for the genocide of Armenians by Anatolian Turks in the early 20th century (which the Turkish government still denies) and compensation for Armenian lands farther west lost to the Turkish Republic after the First World War.  Azeris speak a Turkic language and are often called “Turks.”

California is in lock-step with the Armenian army.

But, as discussed in a recent article in this blog, the overt and covert war against Ukraine by Russia, Armenia’s strongest ally, may be changing the dynamics of the N.K.R. issue.  Armenia was one of only 11 countries to back Russia’s annexation of Crimea earlier this year in a United Nations vote (as reported in this blog), alongside pariah nations like North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.  Azerbaijan, like Turkey, is a U.S. ally, and the Armenian government, which has signed onto President Vladimir Putin’s “Eurasian Union” trade bloc established as a rival to the European Union (E.U.), is openly hoping that the Kremlin will formally recognize the N.K.R. and possibly help Armenia expand its borders in other aggressive ways as a way of extending its own influence.

Assemblyman Mike Gatto spearheaded the N.K.R. resolution.

Last month, as reported in this blog, Azerbaijani lobbyists succeeded in defeating a similar N.K.R.-recognition bill in Vermont, and they have pushed anti-N.K.R. legislation in Hawaii, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

Armenians demonstrate in Los Angeles with the Nagorno-Karabakh flag

After the California vote, Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, a Democrat from the L.A. suburb of Burbank, whose grandparents fled the Nagorno-Karabakh region in pre-Soviet days, told the chamber, “This is one of those issues, probably one of the hallmark issues, that’s led me to want to serve in public service and to be here. This has been the tormented history of a group of people who have been very determined to pursue their freedom.”

After the First World War, Armenia was supposed to be a large independent state;
the Young Turks killed that idea.

The Republic of Armenia’s expansionist aims are increasingly piggy-backed onto Putin’s quest to rebuild the Soviet Union and restart the Cold War, but apparently that news hasn’t yet reached Sacramento.  If the crisis in Ukraine continues to lurch toward war, more Californian assemblymen and assemblywomen may wish they had voted with Rocky Chávez.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Related articles from this blog:
“Vermont Snub on Karabakh May Signal Crimea Crisis Has Derailed Armenian-American Pressure-Politics Gravy Train” (April 2014)
“Rogues’ Gallery: Everyone Seems to Be against Crimea’s Annexation, but Who’s for It?; or, What Do Kim Jong-un and Ron Paul Have in Common?” (April 2014)
“The Power of Pressure Groups: 3 California Lawmakers Advocate Nagorno-Karabakh Independence” (Oct. 2012)
“Massachusetts Recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh Republic!” (Aug. 2012)
“The Armenian Genocide Debate: Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Politics of Memory” (April 2012)

Vermont Snub on Karabakh May Signal Crimea Crisis Has Derailed Armenian-American Pressure-Politics Gravy Train

For decades, the Armenian-American political lobby in the United States has pushed aggressively to chalk up symbolic victories by pressuring state and other legislative bodies into granting utterly-nonbinding “recognition” to the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), the Armenian puppet state which the newly independent Republic of Armenia, with the help of Russia, carved out of Azerbaijan’s western flank in a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in the late 1980s and ’90s.  The N.K.R. has essentially no recognition in the real world of international diplomacy, except from three puppet states of the Russian Federation: Abkhazia and South Ossetia (within Georgia) and Transnistria (within Moldova).  Not even Armenia or its close ally, Russia, recognizes the N.K.R.  But the Armenian National Committee of America (A.N.C.A.) and other groups have successfully cajoled the state legislatures of Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, as well as the Los Angeles city council, to “recognize” the N.K.R.  (Abroad, Australia’s state of New South Wales recognizes it too.)

Armenian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles display Nagorno-Karabakh flags.

Some reckon that the Armenian lobby is the third most powerful immigrant-minority lobbying group in U.S. politics, exceeded in influence only by the Jewish and Cuban-American lobbies.  They have also been pushing for recognition of the Armenian genocide at the hands of Anatolian Turks a century ago as a genocide, something the U.S. has over the decades resolutely refused to do, mostly to avoid offending Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally.  There are perhaps as many as a million and a half Armenian-Americans in the U.S., mostly in southern California and New England.  There are, for example, only three cities in Armenia itself that have more Armenian residents than there are in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles.  For legislators confronted with an N.K.R.-recognition bill, the choice is between capitulating, passing the bill, and moving on, on the one hand, or, on the other, needlessly alienating and infuriating a powerful ethnic lobby.  There is, by contrast, almost no Azeri-American community of any size to exert pressure of the same kind.

Mammad Talibov tells the Vermont Senate the Azeri side of the story.

But the Armenian lobby’s winning streak, in New England at least, ended last week when Vermont’s state senate declined to wade into South Caucasus politics and recognize the N.K.R.  Vermont senators debating on the resolution were paid a visit by Yusif Babanly of the U.S. Azeris Network and a legal attaché from the Azerbaijani embassy in Washington, D.C., Mamma Talibov.  Babanly and Talibov gave the (in America, rarely heard) Azeri perspective on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and emphasized the strategic relationship between the U.S. and oil-rich Azerbaijan.  Azeris are closely related to the Anatolian Turks of Turkey proper, both culturally and linguistically, and Azerbaijan is a front-line state in the U.S.’s cold war with Iran.  (The Azeri lobby, which is closely linked to Turkey, is no stranger to manipulation and propaganda either.  See an article from this blog which touches on Azeri and Turkish efforts to build up the very minor 1992 “Khojaly Massacre” into a full-fledged “genocide” by Armenians.)  Mostly, the senate threw up its hands and decided the situation on the ground was too complex for the body to take a position on it.  As Norm McAllister, a Republican senator said, “We’re never going to know in this little committee who’s actually telling us the whole story.”

Earlier, in 2004, Vermont’s governor, James H. Douglas, officially recognized the Turkish genocide of Armenians during the First World War.  There are not a lot of Armenians in Vermont, but they include the novelist Chris Bohjalian, possibly the most prominent Armenian-American writer, who has written novels about the genocide and lives in Lincoln, Vermont.  It was Bohjalian who brought the N.K.R. recognition issue to Montpelier.

Chris Bohjalian poses before a statue in Yerevan, Armenia,
of William Saroyan, another Armenian-American writer.

Not only that, but Armenian-Americans are on the defensive elsewhere.  They only just barely managed to scotch Azeri-initiated bills this spring in Mississippi and Tennessee on recognizing Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity—i.e., declaring the N.K.R. illegitimate.  Hawaii, South Dakota, and Wyoming also rejected pro-Azerbaijani bills in February.  Similar Azeri lobbyists to those that swayed Vermont were involved in those states’ efforts as well.

Armenians with their national flag

Why did Azeris manage to keep Vermont in their column—or at least out of Armenia’s—after trying and failing to do so in those other five states?  The answer may have something to do with Crimea.  Armenia was one of only eleven countries which (as discussed recently in this blog) sided with Russia and against Ukraine in a recent United Nations General Assembly vote condemning Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.  Others in that small club included some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, like North Korea, Syria, and Sudan.  It is possible, in fact, as an Armenian politician recently suggested (discussed recently in this blog), that Kremlin arm-twisting brought Armenia into Russia’s new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc with Belarus and Kazakhstan, using the threat of seeing to it that Armenia would lose its grip on the N.K.R. (which many Armenian nationalists hope, and most of the rest of the world fears, could be among the next territories President Vladimir Putin is eyeing for annexation).  We may never know whether the Armenian government was bullied by Putin into backing him at the U.N. or whether it found immoral and hypocritical reasons of its own for doing so.  But Armenia’s international standing has taken a hit.  Pre-Crimea, it was a mere detail of Caucasus geopolitics that Armenia was more aligned with Russia while Georgia and Azerbaijan were more aligned with NATO and the West.  But after Crimea, it matters quite a bit.  Supporting Armenia’s foreign-policy agenda is now, in a not so indirect way, support for Putin’s new cold-war project of aggressively expanding the territories in which Russians—and allied nationalities, like Armenians—are in charge.  “Recognizing” N.K.R. is, for state legislatures today, not just taking an irrelevant position on an obscure struggle.  It’s actually siding against U.S. interests.

The Armenian lobby in the U.S. should have just stuck with the genocide question.  Their moral stance on that issue is unassailable.  Instead, they opted for mimicking the fundraising model of Jewish-American groups raising money for Israel in the early days of Israeli settlement.  In fact, the N.K.R. was largely built with money from Armenian-American donors.  But Armenia has now squandered the moral authority it enjoyed as a nation victimized by genocide.  Armenian-Americans had better climb down from their support for the N.K.R. now.  Because if Nagorno-Karabakh does become the next Crimea-type battleground in Putin’s Russo-fascist expansionist schemes, it could get very uncomfortable for them in the U.S.

You won’t see this picture on the Armenian National Committee of America
website: Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad with Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan

Oh, and one other thing.  The chair of the Vermont senate’s Government Operations Committee, Sen. Jeanette White, told a reporter while discussing the setting aside of the N.K.R. question, “I believe that countries should be able to determine their own destiny.  However it isn’t Vermont seceding from the U.S., which we have threatened to do.  It’s complicated.”  She is reminding us that Vermont has its own independence movement, a left-wing, environmentally-oriented movement called the Second Vermont Republic (S.V.R.).  (Vermont was an independent nation before joining the U.S. in 1791.)  So if Vermont ever does become an independent state, it can just forget about getting any diplomatic recognition from Armenia.  In the South Caucasus, people have long memories.  They never forget a slight.

Flag of the Second Vermont Republic

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Yorkshire City Home to Somali Diaspora Recognizes Independence of Somaliland

The Republic of Somaliland is treated by most of the world as an independent state, and it has functioned as one since 1991, when Somalia—of which it formed the northern third or so, on the Gulf of Aden—collapsed in civil war.  No state has ever formally granted it diplomatic recognition.  But Somaliland may have come a step closer to legitimacy this week as the city of Sheffield, in South Yorkshire in northern England, recognized its sovereignty.

The City Council decided on April 2nd, in an 83-to-2 vote (with one abstention), to recognize Somaliland’s independence.  The resolution called upon “the British government to recognise Somaliland as an independent state and to encourage other governments around the world to do the same.”

Sheffield’s population of a half-million is about 2% sub-Saharan African, including possibly as many as 12,000 ethnic Somalis (many of them Somalilanders).  There has been a Somali community in Sheffield since the 1930s.  Somalilanders in the United Kingdom include prominent figures such as the Olympic track-and-field gold-medallist Mo Farah (profiled two years ago in this blog).

Mo Farah, the world’s most famous Somalilander

Somaliland’s minister for foreign affairs, Mohamed Bihi Yonis, was on hand for the Sheffield vote, and stated, “Somaliland is a peaceful, democratic nation which has been striving to be recognised by the international community since declaring its independence in 1991.  Sheffield’s decision will help strengthen our campaign for recognition.”

Somaliland’s foreign minister, Mohamed Bihi Yonis, in Sheffield

Sheffield is the first significant jurisdiction outside the Horn of Africa to grant Somaliland recognition.  Even though it is legally meaningless, since Sheffield cannot conduct foreign policy, the foreign policy nonetheless may have an effect.  It is a strategy used extensively by the Armenian-American diaspora, for example, which has (as discussed before in this blog) used its large numbers to successfully pressure city councils and state legislatures to pass measures on recognition of the Armenian genocide at Turkey’s hands as a genocide (something the United States government refuses to do; see article from this blog) and granting diplomatic recognition to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), an Armenian—and to some extent Russian—puppet state which the fledgling Republic of Armenia carved out of the Republic of Azerbaijan’s southwestern flank in a bloody war of ethnic cleansing after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  California alone has more Armenians than Armenia itself, and observers estimate that the Armenian-American lobby is the most powerful immigrant-community political lobby in the U.S., exceeded in its influence only by the Jewish (Israeli) and Cuban-expatriate lobbies.

But after Russia annexed Ukraine’s republic of Crimea earlier this month, Armenia became one of only 11 United Nations member-states—alongside brutal regimes like those of Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—to side with Russia against a U.N. resolution condemning the annexation.  This has cast Armenian-Americans in a negative—even unpatriotic light—and is an embarrassment to jurisdictions such as the U.S. states of Massachusetts (as reported at the time in this blog) and Rhode Island (ditto), New South Wales in Australia (see article), and most recently the City of Los Angeles, who have supported the N.K.R., a puppet regime not much unlike the Russian one in Crimea that ushered in the annexation.  In fact, many believe the N.K.R. may be the next territory to be formally annexed, either by Armenia or by an expansive Russia.  The post-Crimea world order is also making it difficult for aspirant states like Somaliland to secure recognition, since they inevitably use many of the arguments used so disingenuously by the Russian government in regard to Crimea.

Somaliland has everything except a seat at the U.N.

The Sheffield vote on Somaliland may seem like a victory.  But, due to world events, recognition by the international community seems even farther out of reach than it did a month ago.

Monty Python’s Michael Palin, who was born in Sheffield, is an activist on behalf
of Somali asylum-seekers in the U.K.  He is shown here with his fellow activist, Musa Ibrahim.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Islam and the Second Crimean War: Russian Invasion a Calamity for Tatars but a Recruitment Windfall for Jihadists

Tatars rallying in Crimea in a plea for Turkish intervention

The Second Crimea War is about to burst forth, it seems.  The self-styled, Kremlin-installed government in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea declared on March 11th that it was now independent as simply the Republic of Crimea, and it will be holding a referendum on annexation to the Russian Federation in two days’ time (on March 16th).  But it can hardly be called a fair referendum: it will be held under occupation by the Russian military—something President Vladimir Putin, insanely, still denies is the case.  (The Kremlin says that the highly trained, Kalashnikov-toting soldiers in brand-new unmarked uniforms being transported around Crimea in Russian military vehicles are spontaneously organized “self-defense forces” of the local ethnic-Russian population.)  Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is massing its military forces on NATO states that border Ukraine—Poland, Romania—while Russia mobilizes troops along Ukraine’s rim in the Kremlin vassal state of Belarus and in the Russian plains along the Black Sea.  Whether this is just to intimidate Crimean voters, or whether it heralds in invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian mainland’s Russian-speaking regions as well is difficult to say.

Crimean Tatars feel more European than Russian.

The Western and Russian media are both portraying this conflict as a showdown between East and West, a settling of scores left over from the Cold War.  It is definitely that.  But the presence of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people in the Crimean peninsula complicates matters.  They are Muslim, and their history of ill treatment at Russian hands is extensive and bitter.  They will suffer the most if Russia’s plans succeed.  And it is the Tatar factor that could give the Second Crimean War a religious dimension as well and entwine it in a larger geopolitical battle with and among Muslim regional powers.

Tatars were the majority in Crimea and in what is now the south-central mainland of Ukraine until Czarist forces began pushing south in the modern period.  Tatars were decimated by deportation to Siberia and Central Asia by Josef Stalin as punishment for supposed colllaboration with Nazi Germany in the Second World War.  When Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, allowed many deported peoples to return home in the 1950s, Crimean Tatars were not on the list.  But they have trickled backk nonetheless, especially in the post-Soviet period and now make up between 12% and 13% of the Crimean population.  Russians are about 58% and Ukrainians about 24%.  In the Soviet era, Crimea was part of the Russian republic until Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.

It’s not a good time to be a Tatar.

The Tatar people have, by all accounts, been overwhelmingly against the annexation by Russia, and their leaders are calling for a boycott of the referendum, which the head of the Mejlis (Council) of the Crimean Tatar People, Refat Chubarov, insists will be fixed.  Within Ukraine over the past twenty years, they have enjoyed a privileged status even within Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea—a kind of special dispensation toward indigenous peoples that is antithetical to Putin’s authoritarian and ethnic-chauvinist style.  Tatars have been forming their own “self-defense units,” according to many sources, including both Russian sources, which note it with alarm, and radical Islamist sources, which note it approvingly.  Mustafa Dzhemilev (also spelled Cemil), a revered former chairman of the Mejlis, has even made an explicit call to arms.

Refat Chubarov rails against the Kremlin.

Things could get ugly for the Tatars.  Last week, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported first-hand accounts that ethnic-Russian gangs were drawing up lists of Tatar residents and marking their homes with “X”es.  The right-wing Ukrainian nationalist firebrand Dmitry Yarosh, from the neo-fascist Rightist Sector party, claims that Russians are preparing for a massacre of Crimean Tatars.

Turkey
Moreover, Tatars are looking to Turkey as a possible savior.  It was from the penumbra of the increasingly rickety Ottoman Empire that the Czars seized control of Crimea in the mid 19th century.  Turkey and Russia have been on and off regional rivals—mostly on—since then.  While the United States and western European governments wisely remain wary of getting involved in a ground war with Russia, Tatars are banking that Turkey just might.  Never mind that the slightest retaliatory move by Russia against an interventionist Turkey would trigger Turkey’s mutual-defense agreement as a member of NATO and put Russia on a war footing with three nuclear powers.  That might be a reason for Turkey to shy away from intervening to aid the Tatars; on the other hand, it might embolden them to intervene with impunity: it would be suicidally for Russia to retaliate against Turkey itself.  Still, Crimean Tatars were heartened by the visit to Simferopol, the Crimean capital, on February 28th (reported on at the time in this blog) by Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu.  After the meeting, Dzhemilev described the meeting to reporters, saying, “If a problem arises, Turkey will immediately get involved.”  The speaker of Turkey’s parliament, Cemil Çiçek, spoke in solidarity with Crimean Tatars on March 5th, saying, “Crimea is in our hearts and is a part of our spirit. Our brothers there have suffered more than anyone else in the past century. Our hearts are with our Crimean brothers.”  And Davutoğlu himself has said, “Don’t let it cross your mind that our prime minister and president will be indifferent to any issue affecting our kin in Crimea or anywhere in the world.  Wherever we have brothers in pain we are the first ones to go to help and do whatever we can do.”  Turkey’s 300,000-strong diaspora population of Crimean Tatars have also come out strongly in favor of intervention by Ankara.

A friend in need?  The Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev meeting in Crimea
with Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu.

Armenia and Azerbaijan
The current conflict is also playing into the cold war between two other former republics of the Soviet Union: the predominantly-Christian Republic of Armenia and the predominantly-Muslim Republic of Azerbaijan.  Armenia invaded Azerbaijan after Communism fell and set up the southwestern one-fifth of its territory as an Armenian-populated puppet state called the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), as part of a rivalry with its Turkic-speaking neighbors (including Azeris) dating back to the Anatolian Turks’ anti-Armenian genocide a hundred years ago.  Some Armenian nationalists are hoping that Russia’s new boldness on the Crimean question means Russia might step forward and formally recognize the N.K.R. as an independent state, the way it has done with its own puppet states within the Republic of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Russian irregulars (and possibly regulars as well) fought on the Armenian side in the Nagorno-Karabakh War, and Armenia is strongly considering joining Putin’s Eurasian Union—his Eastern version of the European Union (E.U.)—the one which Putin tried and failed to bully Ukraine into joining, which is how the whole Crimea conflict began last month.  Azerbaijan, by contrast, is a strong ally of the U.S., which sees it as a crucial staging area for its own cold war against Iran, a Russian ally.  As with Crimea and Russia, the ultimate goal for Armenian nationalists is not so much recognition of N.K.R. sovereignty but annexation to Armenia.

The Azerbaijani government, for its part, is keeping a very low profile during the Crimea crisis, to an extent that has worried and terrified Crimean Tatars.  Dzhemilev appealed to the Azeri leadership last week, saying, “Do not leave your Crimean brothers and sisters at this difficult time.”  But two senior members of Azerbaijan’s opposition party Müsavat (“Equality”) were intercepted by Russian authorities in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia’s adjacent Republic of Dagestan, on March 9th and turned back.  They had been en route to Kiev (Kyiv), the Ukrainian capital, to offer solidarity.

Dzhemilev has also tried in vain to reach out to Kazakhstan as well.  Kazakhs, who are Muslim Turkic-speakers as well, are in a slightly different situation: they are already slated to join Putin’s Eurasian Union.

Where Turkic languages are spoken.  Crimea is in blue.
It’s a big family, but will they be there when needed?

Moldova
Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, many in the Republic of Moldova (formerly the Moldavian S.S.R.), which is dominated by ethnic Romanians, are worried that what is happening in Ukraine may happen next in their country.  They, too, have an ethnic-Russian enclave, Transnistria, a sliver of land along the Ukrainian border, which declared itself independent of Moldova in 1991 and has functioned since then as a de facto independent Russian puppet state outside Moldovan control.  This unresolved territorial dispute has blocked Moldova’s aspirations to reunify with Romania and to join the E.U. and NATO.  If success in Crimea emboldens Putin to occupy, annex, or otherwise stir up trouble in ethnic-Russian parts of the Ukrainian mainland (as speculated upon in detail recently in this blog), then that would include Odessa oblast, to Crimea’s west, which borders Transnistria.  Ideally, Putin would like to link Transnistria by land with Russian territory.  And Moldova is currently gearing up to sign a cooperation agreement with the E.U. similar to the one that was at the root of the current Ukrainian crisis.

A further complication is Moldova’s own Turkic-speaking minority, the Gagauz, who have an autonomous region within Moldova.  Gagauzia’s parliament said last year (as reported at the time in this blog) that they would secede and form an independent state if Moldova made moves toward Romanian reunification.  And in that same February 2014 referendum, 98.4% of Gagauz said they would rather join Putin’s Eurasian Union than the E.U. Maybe they will feel differently if Russia actually invaded Moldova.  Romanians and Moldovans are hoping not to find out.

Does “Welcome to Gagauzia” go for Cossacks too?

Chechens
Probably no Muslim people in the Russian sphere of influence has suffered as much persecution in modern times as the Chechens.  They were on the front lines of Czarist southern expansion in the mid 19th century, their homeland in the Caucasus mountains was a battleground in the Second World War, and after the war Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of them as punishment for supposed collaboration with Nazi Germany.  Perhaps as much as a third of the Chechen nation perished in that wave of executions and deportations.  Caucasus peoples were second-class citizens in the Soviet Union, and after Communism collapsed in 1991 they declared independence.  As many as 50,000 Chechen civilians were killed and their capital leveled in the horrific asymmetrical wars that followed.  Boris Yeltsin and later Putin’s pitiless Chechen bombing campaigns constituted the most brutal in Europe since 1945.

Therefore, the Crimean Tatar people can rely on Chechen support in resisting the Russian invasion, right?  Wrong!  It is one of the oddities of recent Caucasus history that, after Chechnya’s “pacification” and reintegration in the 2000s, Putin appointed Ramzan Kadyrov as president of the Chechen Republic.  Though the son of the Chechen rebel leader and separatist president, Akhmed Kadyrov, who was assassinated in 2004, the younger Kadyrov had switched sides in the Second Chechen War and become a puppet of Putin.  While the larger Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus has shifted to other republics (see below), Chechnya has become Putin’s loyal fief, where he allows to Kadyrov to run an Islamic-style state without much interference, in exchange for utter loyalty.  In the 2012 presidential elections, Putin won 99.89% of the vote in Chechnya—the highest numbers he got anywhere other than the equally corrupt Caucasus republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (nominally independent but populated mostly by Russian citizens).  If the numbers are true, it is the ugliest manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome ever recorded.  If they are not, it shows how corrupt and loyal Kadyrov is.  The truth is probably a mixture.

Ramzan Kadyrov (center), current president of the Chechen Republic,
 is not on the side of his fellow Muslims in Crimea.

On February 26th, when Russians in Crimea were just beginning their agitation, Kadyrov announced that his people would be ready to come to the aid of the peninsula’s ethnic Russians.  “Ukraine and Russia are fraternal peoples,” Kadyrov said.  “I have many Ukrainian friends and like them all and regret what has recently been happening there.  The majority of people living today in Crimea are Russians, Cossacks.  We are always with them and if necessary are ready to come to the rescue.  We will stand up for Russians, Cossacks, and Chechens no matter where they live.”  Chechens, he said, were “part of multiethnic and multi-religious Russia” and “are called upon to protect our peoples.  If necessary, we are ready to go, to be observers.  If necessary, we are ready to be peacekeepers and soldiers and protect the people.”

The Chechen capital, Grozny, after Yeltsin and Putin got through with it.
And yet they seem to love Putin there.

Not satisfied with merely cozying to the Tatars’ enemies, Kadyrov threw Tatars under the bus even more explicitly, entreating Tatar deportees and their descendants in Crimea not to “heat up tensions” or “profit from the moment, gather in groups and shout various slogans.”

Ramzan Kadyrov

After the invasion, Kadyrov went further, offering to go there himself.  “If need be,” he said, “I can travel to Ukraine with volunteers who are ready to protect its population.  He added, “I spoke to Tatars, Russians, Cossacks, and Ukrainians, and all of them are saying that there are quite a few people walking in the streets of the Crimean cities, carrying black flags and acting aggressively.  A similar situation sparked the recent events in Kyiv when nationalists started gradually dictating their conditions.   This is why I think all of us need to unite and support Russian President Vladimir Putin in this uneasy situation.”  One wonders if Kadyrov really believes the Russian-media fairy tales of Ukrainian “neo-Nazi” oppression of Crimea’s Russians and Tatars, or whether he is just reading from a script prepared in the Kremlin.

An Orthodox priest demonstrating in Crimea

Caucasus Emirate
But although Chechnya is more or less pacified and under tight Kremlin control, the rest of the Russian-ruled North Caucasus is not.  The republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria especially have been roiled for years by a separatist insurgency called the Caucasus Emirate, which is fueled by a jihadist brand of Sunni Islam that took root in the region—historically home to a more gentle, tolerant Sufist form of Islam—as one of the radicalizing effects of the Chechen Wars.  The “Vilayat Dagestan” cell of the Emirate was behind last year’s deadly bus bombings in Volgograd, which were touted at the time as a preview of the violence to come in the upcoming Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi.  Places like Dagestan are subjected to near-daily violence in the form of assassinations, suicide bombings, and ambushes.  Russian forces just barely govern the area, and the Emirate’s tendrils are intertwined with those of village warlords, organized-crime cartels, and smuggling networks.  The Rightist Sector’s Dmitry Yarosh (see above) recently called on the Caucasus Emirate to join Ukrainian nationalists in the battle against Russia (as reported at the time in this blog).  Whether he really said that and, if he did, whether it was a rhetorical flourish deployed for shock value, one thing is clear: Rightist Sector and the Emirate have almost nothing in common except for hatred of Putin.  But any kind of attack on Tatar rights will be a boon to the recruitment and propaganda efforts of the Emirate and may just drive them to expand their reach into Crimea.  (Crimean Tatars, for the most part, are very moderate in their Islam, with home-grown radicalism almost nonexistent there.)

Does Dmitry Yarosh (left) really want to open Pandora’s Box
by inviting the Caucasus Emirate to Ukraine?

Tatarstan
What of other Muslim peoples in the Russian Federation?  A natural place for beleaguered Tatars to look for help is the Republic of Tatarstan itself, in central Russia near the borderlands of Siberia and Asia.  Tatarstan’s Tatars, sometimes called Volga Tatars, are not the same as Crimean Tatars.  In fact, Tatar has often been a catch-all term for any Turkic-speaking Muslims of the Steppes or Central Asia, and Crimean Tatars are not more necessarily more closely related to the distant Volga Tatars than they are to the closer-by Turkic-speakers in the Caucasus like the Meskhetian Turks or the Karachays and Balkars.  But the Volga Tatars share their Crimean cousins’ history of oppression at Russian hands.  In the Russian civil war that followed the Communist revolution of 1917, Tatars founded the Idel–Ural State, a multinational Menshevik quasi-state which defied the Russian Bolsheviks but ultimately lost.  The Idel–Ural State was not merely Muslim.  Turkic-speaking Tatars and Bashkirs were allied with Christians such as the Turkic-speaking Chuvash and the Finno-Ugrian-speaking Udmurt, Komi, and Mari peoples.  Along with Chechnya, Tatarstan was one of the Russian republics which refused initially to sign on with Boris Yeltsin’s Federation Treaty in 1992; they later capitulated and joined, in exchange for a promise of greater autonomy on which Yeltsin’s successor, Putin, later reneged.

So one might expect Volga Tatars to hold a grudge against Putin.  Volga Tatars might, but their Putin-appointed president, Rustam Minnikhanov, sure doesn’t.  An ethnic Tatar in a republic which is only 53% Tatar, Minnikhanov went to Crimea on March 12th, after the crisis began, to sign a “cooperation agreement” with (wait for it) the self-appointed pro-Kremlin “president” of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov (a former professional boxer with organized-crime links who goes by the nickname “Goblin”).  Minnikhanov also met with local Tatar leaders but spoke as if they were the ones who held the upper hand, lecturing them by saying that he was sure that “Crimean Tatars are smart people who will not let it all end in a bloodbath.”

Tatarstan’s president, Rustan Minnikhanov (right),
visits his kindred in Crimea—but not as an ally.

In recent years, the Caucasus Emirate movement has tried to spread its influence to Tatarstan in particular, even though there is far less home-grown Sunni radicalism there.  But a Putin-appointed president who openly sides against fellow Muslims in the Crimea might just tip the balance and make many Volga Tatars view radical Islam and the Emirate much more sympathetically.  That would be bad news for everyone.  I’m not sure Putin realizes what he’s fooling around with by alienating millions of Muslims living within the Russian Federation.

Serbs
If the Kosovo War has become a subtheme in the diplomatic wrangling over Crimea—with the Kremlin pointing to NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign which paved the way for an independent Kosovo which Russia, a Serbian ally, still opposes—then players in that war have also become a factor.  Among those who have come to Crimea to “defend” the ethnic-Russian population are “Chetnik” mercenaries from Serbia.  These ultranationalist irregulars, named for monarchist radicals from the Second World War era, played a role in the Yugoslav Wars of Succession in the 1990s, battling Muslim Bosniaks in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Muslim Albanians in Kosovo.  Now they are in Crimea to do battle opposite the Muslim Tatars who want to stay in Ukraine.  The head of the Chetnik contingent in Crimea, Milutin Mališić, told a press conference in Simferopol, “We represent ‘Chetnik Movement’ organization, you can compare them with the Cossacks in Russia.  Our goal—to provide support on behalf of the Serbian people to the Russian people.  He added, “We came at the invitation of the Cossacks.  During the civil war in Yugoslavia, many Russian volunteers came to support the Serbian people.  We are a small nation and we can not send a large number of people, but we have a great love for the Russian people.”

The Serb militia commander Milutin Mališić holds a press conference in Simferopol.

The Chetnik units in Crimea call themselves “the Wolves.”  They belong to the Chetnik faction headed by Bratislav Živković, which is sometimes called the “Prince Lazar” squadron, named for the Eastern Orthodox saint who battled for Serbia in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and is a revered symbol of Serbian ultranationalism and Islamophobia.  It is not clear how many Chetniks are in Crimea, but Mališić is a veteran of the Kosovo conflict who was also accused in a plot to assassinate the Yugoslav (i.e., Serbian) president, Slobodan Milošević, in 2000.  They are certainly not sanctioned by the Serbian government, which is trying to ingratiate itself with the E.U. nowadays, but if Serbs are killed in Crimea it could complicate matters for Serbia both electorally and diplomatically.

Chetniks newly arrived in Crimea pose with the Chetnik and Serbian flags
and an icon of Prince Lazar.

And Cossacks, the legendary slayers of Muslim infidels in Russian frontier history, are in force in Crimea too—150 officers alone, and an unknown number of rank-and-file fighters.  As Nikolai Pervakov, first deputy commander of the Kuban host of Cossacks, told Time magazine, “Cossacks have no borders.  We are a united people, people of the same faith, traditions, customs.  Our lives are linked.  So we need to be like a clenched and monolithic fist.  Only then will we have victory.”

Cossacks guarding the parliament building in Crimea

But what about some kind of partition of Crimea itself?  If Crimea can secede from Ukraine, can’t a Tatar enclave secede from an independent or Russian Crimea?  The problem, here, is that Tatars live everywhere in the Crimean peninsula.  Plus, Tatars were forced out of their homeland in great numbers by Czarist forces in the 18th and 19th centuries, and deported by Stalin in the 20th.  They’ve been moved enough.  They won’t move again.  They are planning to stand their ground and fight.  What remains to be seen is whether they will have to do so alone.

Members of the Ukrainian feminist political collective Femen
were arrested in a demonstration in Simferopol, Crimea.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Related articles from this blog:
“Donetsk Putsch Nipped in Bud, but Could Odessa or Kharkiv Be Next as Russia Eyes Ukrainian Mainland?” (March 2014)

“Second Crimean War Update: Western Credibility, Russian Lies, and Putin’s Next Steps (Hint: ‘Donetsk Republic’)” (March 2014)

“Ukraine Loses Grip on Crimea, Prepares for Open War with Russia; Role of Far Right in New Kiev Regime Unclear” (Feb. 2014)

“Putin and Ukraine’s Ultranationalist Russians Light the Fuse: Second Crimean War Begins” (Feb. 2014)

“Games Begin! Ukrainian Hijacking, Putin Rounds Up Dissidents” (Feb. 2014)

“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

“Minuscule Gagauzia Votes 99% to Declare Independence If Moldova Attempts Romanian Reunification” (Feb. 2014)

“Partition Lines in Ukraine Sharpen as Crimean Russians Call for Separate ‘Malorossiya’” (Jan. 2014)

“Will Ukraine Crisis Become Second Crimean War? Tatars and Russian Nationalists Take Sides” (Jan. 2014)

“Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“‘Separatism’ Added to List of Things Russians Aren’t Allowed to Talk about” (Sept. 2013)

“Road Dispute Pushes Town near Moscow to Declare Independence from Russia—but with Dusted-Off Fascist Ukrainian Flags, Oddly Enough” (Oct. 2012)
“Gagauzia Threatens to Secede from Moldova If Nationalists Push Reunification with Romania” (Sept. 2012)
“That Creepy Underground Islamic Cult in Tatarstan? Turns Out It’s Just a Split-Level—and the Kids Were Fine” (Aug. 2012)
“The Armenian Genocide Debate: Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Politics of Memory” (April 2012)

“Transnistria’s Limbo to Continue Indefinitely” (Nov. 2011)