As the Crisis Deepens in the Middle East, Peace is on the Horizon in the Caucasus

The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th is nearing its one-year anniversary. The ensuing war has thrown the region into turmoil and resulted in over 40,000 deaths so far, mostly Palestinians. Now Israel has turned its focus north. Following the explosion of electronic devices among Hezbollah members and Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, the region is on the brink of a wider war.

The deepening crisis in the Middle East is in stark contrast to the peace negotiations taking place less than 1,000 miles away between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The two countries had been at war over Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding provinces for nearly three decades. But the ground has shifted immeasurably in just a few years. Following the six-week Second Karabakh War in autumn 2020 and a lightning offensive on September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan liberated all its territory that had been occupied by Armenia.[i] In one stroke, Azerbaijan upended the status quo that lasted over three decades.

After neither Russia nor the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) came to Armenia’s aid during the recent conflict, Armenia has lost patience with its long-time ally Russia[ii], effectively broke from the CSTO, and is now cultivating its relations with the West. In the meantime, Armenia is maintaining on its territory Russia’s 102nd military base in the north-western town of Gumri, which is under the command of the Southern Military District of the Russian Armed Forces.

Due to the above landmark changes, peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia is closer than it has ever been. Negotiations are almost complete for a bilateral draft peace agreement that would normalise relations between the two countries after thirty years of conflict and confrontation.

On August 30th, both sides announced that the terms of reference of a joint border commission to demarcate and delimit their shared frontier had been signed.[iii] The first positive indication of progress had come in December 2023, when Armenian detainees were released in return for Armenia dropping a veto on Azerbaijan hosting the COP-29 climate summit in Baku at the end of 2024.[iv] In May this year, both sides began negotiations in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to reach a lasting resolution. The talks were notable because, for once, there was no Russian, American or European involvement and discussions took place in a direct bilateral format. Since the meeting in Almaty, Armenia returned to Azerbaijan four villages along the border[v] that had remained uninhabited but occupied by Yerevan since the fighting in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, there are still some major issues that need to be resolved. The first and foremost is the territorial claim by Armenia to Azerbaijan contained in the reference in Armenia’s constitution to “reunification” with Karabakh, the Azerbaijani territory that Armenia had occupied for three decades.

The preamble of the current Armenian constitution refers to the “pan-national aspirations” of ethnic Armenians as well as a 1990 declaration of independence[vi] – when Armenia was still part of the Soviet Union – that stipulates the unification of Armenia and what was then the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, part of Soviet Azerbaijan.

That clause “clearly poses a territorial threat to Azerbaijan,” President Aliyev said at a July 20 press conference.[vii] “So, [while] this paragraph is there, a peace agreement is not possible.”[viii] Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has indicated that he is willing to update the constitution and has tasked a new Constitutional Reform Council to draw up changes to be put to the Armenian people in a referendum. No progress, however, has been made in this regard up until now.

There is some criticism within Armenia that if the government is seen to be making concessions under Azerbaijani pressure, voters may reject the changes to the constitution. But in Azerbaijan, this is seen as a necessary step to achieve durable peace between their countries.

“It’s not about doing it under pressure from Azerbaijan, but it’s about you answering one question: Do you want peace or do you want a possibility for a new confrontation with Azerbaijan?”[ix] Elchin Amirbayov, Azerbaijan’s Representative to the President for Special Assignments, told RFE/RL. “If they put it that way, I think a majority of Armenian people who would participate in that plebiscite or referendum, I’m sure that they would support peace. Peace between the two countries must be sustainable, credible and irreversible, and it should exclude even hypothetical chance for Armenia to bring back once again territorial claims against Azerbaijan.”[x]

In a press conference on 31^st August, the Armenian Prime Minister announced that his government has made a formal offer to Azerbaijan to sign a peace treaty[xi], after judging that sufficient progress has been made on key issues in bilateral talks in recent months. “We have 17 articles in the latest draft of the peace treaty. Thirteen of them, including the preamble, are fully agreed on,”[xii] Pashinyan said. He proposed signing the peace treaty based on the agreed articles and continuing to negotiate the remaining issues.

But this was rejected by Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada. “The call of the Armenian officials to sign the draft ‘peace agreement’ with the removal of non-agreed provisions, and attempts to postpone the solution of existing problems in bilateral relations to the next stage, are unacceptable,”[xiii] he said in a statement. Hajizada pointed out that Baku’s primary condition for signing the peace treaty is the removal of Armenia’s territorial claims against Azerbaijan in Armenia’s constitution.

The second issue that needs to be resolved is the demarcation of the border between the two neighbours, which their joint border commission should finalise. Multiple maps from different parts of the Soviet era give different interpretations of where the lines should be drawn, though similar treaties recognising Soviet boundaries as international boundaries were signed by other Soviet republics in the 1990s.

The border delineation process is also affected by the status of four remaining enclaves: the Armenian enclave of Artsvashen inside Azerbaijan, and the Azerbaijani enclaves of Barkhudarly, Yukhari Askipara, and Karki inside Armenia. These are all small parcels of land that were once inhabited by their respective ethnic groups but are now uninhabited and under the de facto control of the other side. Azerbaijani foreign policy chief Hikmet Hajiyev confirmed that there had been progress in bilateral talks, adding that the agreement on the border commission “should be seen as sufficient for the withdrawal of the EU contingent.”[xiv] Azerbaijan has consistently opposed an EU monitoring mission that was deployed in Armenia in 2022[xv] to observe the situation on the border, arguing that the EU mission increases the risk of conflict.

The third issue is what kind of international guarantees and dispute resolution mechanism there could be to make a bilateral agreement sustainable in the long-term.

Another contentious point is the reopening of the Zangezur Corridor[xvi], a long-closed corridor or transit route across 43 kilometres of Armenian territory connecting the main part of Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan, nestled between Iran, Armenia and Turkiye. This is an important matter for Azerbaijan, which aims to reconnect the two parts of its territory with a railway link and highway. Such a transport corridor would allow Baku to avoid using Iranian territory and airspace to reach Nakhchivan, thus finally putting an end to the latter’s decades-long blockade. Armenia, meanwhile, does not want “to cede sovereignty or security” over its southern border area while it recognises all the benefits of putting an end to its economic isolation in the region by opening its closed borders with Azerbaijan and Turkiye.

When it comes to ensuring security of the rail and road connection with Azerbaijan, Armenia committed itself right after the Second Karabakh war to delegate this role to Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) border guards. This agreement was sealed by a trilateral Armenian-Azerbaijani-Russian ceasefire statement of November 2020, in which Armenia ceded the role to the Russian side while pledging to “guarantee the security of transport connections”.

Thirty years on from the First Karabakh War in 1994, there is now a golden window of opportunity as both sides are ready to move forward.[xvii] This is a positive development that should be embraced by the West as it is confronted with two other wars on Europe’s eastern and southern flanks. But instead of being impartial, Europeans are seen to be increasingly siding with Prime Minister Pashinyan[xviii] because of his pro-European rhetoric. Such a stance has impacted the credibility of the European Union as an honest broker in Azerbaijan. And that is why the two-sided talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia are so important. A bilateral peace process without foreign mediators has the advantage that no foreign agendas or egos can get in the way of a deal. This approach has already yielded important positive results.

A peace agreement between the two countries, and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkiye that would likely follow, could have positive effects beyond the Caucasus.

For example, in recent years there has been an increase in relations between the Gulf Cooperation Council and Central Asia. Peace in the Caucasus, and new transit routes such as the Zangezur Corridor, could improve trade connections between the Gulf and Central Asia but also could constitute an alternative route for the so-called Middle Corridor connecting China with Western Europe.

Normalisation of relations between Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia would be a win-win to all involved in the Caucasus. It would likely unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment to the region. More importantly, it could serve as an example to the leaders in the strife-ridden Middle East that even after decades of conflict, peace can be achieved for the benefit of all people.