Nagorno-Karabakh
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On the Day System of a Down release their first music for fifteen years (they have Armenian ancestry, so they are totally dedicated to one side in this conflict), I just ran across this peace from the progressive International, which, for leftists, instead of taking sides, makes some more sensible than average points about moving beyond nationalist borders:
https://progressive.international/wire/2020-11-06-against-war-in-nagorno-karabakh/en
“We dream of a post-nationalist, pluralist and sustainable cohabitation for the people of Caucasus within a life-oriented political ecology, through the creation of internationalist self-governed and autonomous communities in the region.”
Clearly, Azerbaijan is the aggressor here, but some sort of longer term solution to the regions people and resources needs to be found.
Rosa Luxemburg had this to say why “self determination for nations” was impossible in that part of the world. She pointed out that the only practical solution was administrative autonomy at the local level:
“Another outstanding example of the difficulties encountered by the problem of nationality autonomy in practice is to be found in the Caucasus. No corner of the earth presents such a picture of nationality intermixture in one territory as the Caucasus, the ancient historical trail of the great migrations of peoples between Asia and Europe, strewn with fragments and splinters of these peoples (…)
The territorial distribution of the largest nationalities involved is as follows: The Russians, who constitute the most numerous group in the whole Caucasus, are concentrated in the north, in the Kuban and Black Sea districts and in the northwest part of Tersk. Moving southward, in the western part of the Caucasus the Kartvelians are located; they occupy the Kutai and the south-eastern part of the Tiflis gubernias. Still further south, the central territory is occupied by the Armenians in the southern portion of the Tiflis, the eastern portion of the Kars and the northern portion of the Erivan gubernias, squeezed between the Georgians in the north, the Turks in the west and the Tatars in the east and south, in the Baku, Elizabetpol and Erivan gubernias. In the east and in the mountains are located mountain tribes, while other minor groups such as Jews and Germans live, intermingled with the autochthonous population, mainly in the cities. The complexity of the nationality problem appears particularly in the linguistic conditions because in the Caucasus there exist, besides Russian, Ossetian, and Armenian, about a half-dozen languages, four Lezgin dialects, several Chechen, several Circassian, Mingrel, Georgian, Sudanese, and a number of others. And these are by no means dialects, but mostly independent languages incomprehensible to the rest of the population. (…)
Thus, the drawing of a boundary between the main nationalities of the Caucasus is an insoluble task.(…)
[T]he only method of settling the nationality question in the Caucasus, in the democratic spirit, securing to all nationalities freedom of cultural existence without any among them dominating the remaining ones, and at the same time meeting the recognized need for modern development, is to disregard ethnographic boundaries, and to introduce broad local self-government – communal, urban, district, and provincial – without a definite nationality character, that is, giving no privileges to any nationality. Only such a self-government will make it possible to unite various nationalities to jointly take care of the local economic and social interests, and on the other hand, to take into consideration in a natural way the different proportions of the nationalities in each county and each commune.
Communal, district, provincial self-government will make it possible for each nationality, by means of a majority decision in the organs of local administration, to establish its schools and cultural institutions in those districts or communes where it possesses numerical preponderance.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54862180
The BBC seems very even handed over who started this war: it does seem to me to be very much Azerbaijan who have started the latest round of the war. They seem to be doing quite well, obviously going to plan…
Isn’t Turkey involved in all this? Articles like this one use words like “oil-rich”, “pipelines” and “geopolitical influence”:
Seems it’s all over. For now:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54882564
It looks like it was mostly for domestic Azerbaijani consumption, since it just involves taking back some towns lost in ’94.
Protestors have stormed the Armenian parliament.
The problem is, without massive ethnic cleansing, those Armenians are not going away, and will not be governed as second class citizens of Azerbaijan.
This seems to be the terms of the peace deal:
https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1325922863149445123
Russian peacekeepers: seems like someone is expanding back into their old sphere of influence (Russian troops in Azerbaijan and Syria gives them good boots on the ground in ME.
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