Nagorno-Karabakh: Overture to the War on Terror (shame no one noticed)

(C) Rita Willaert

Last summer, huge media attention focused on the conflict in Georgia. News correspondents from around the world flooded into South Ossetia from all sides, each eager to get a big scoop (and hopefully some gory pictures of flying limbs and dismembered bodies to titilate the audiences of the rolling news channels) on the latest outbreak of violence in this troubled region. A little more than fifteen years ago, though, another Caucasian war broke out which would provide the world with an ominous precedent, if only it had paid more attention.

Nagorno-Karabakh sounds, to a native English speaker, like a spittle-inducing speech exercise: the kind of thing you might hear an actor pronouncing loudly and clearly before going on stage. It is actually a small, ethnic Armenian enclave inside south-western Azerbaijan. The enclave is overwhelmingly Christian; most people belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly Muslim.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the collision of theologies that has come to dominate the politics of the first decade of the twenty-first had yet to attain popular recognition on an international scale; certainly tensions between Christians and Muslims as well as between Muslims and Jews existed in certain troubled spots around the globe, but only in a few places was religion regularly and systematically used to fuel and justify ongoing armed conflict. The notion that religion could be used to ‘internationalise’ a conflict, superseding ideas of patriotism and nationhood was, apart from in Israel, still a little way off. Arguably, though, the violence that engulfed this small, little-known region of the eastern Caucasus was the point at which all that began to change.

As the fringe states that had constituted the Soviet Union began to secede, the jumble of races, cultures and religions that made up the ethnic patchwork of the Caucasus sparked off secessionist movements on a much smaller scale. As states separated from the USSR, ethnic and cultural enclaves within them saw their chance to secure their own independence and secessionist movements on a subnational level spread through the region.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, inter-ethnic violence had been occurring since 1988 when the enclave’s regional government had voted for unification with Armenia itself, much to the displeasure of the Azerbaijani authorities. It was not until 1992, though, that the fighting and the ethnic violence escalated into full-scale war. After the fall of the USSR, Azerbaijan had found itself with an abundance of ex-Soviet military hardware which gave it an important military edge over Armenia’s smaller military. Armenian troops, though, tended to be better trained. The ensuing conflict was predicatably brutal.

Initially, the Nagorno-Karabakh war had been a territorial dispute between two sovereign nations. Of course, there was an ethnic distinction fuelling it, which was itself underpinned by a fundamental religious difference between the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azerbaijanis. Although details are sketchy and much of what happened is now buried under a decade’s worth of fierce denials from Yerevan and Baku, massacres of civilians were certainly perpetrated by both sides. In Khojaly in 1992, Armenian troops killed as many as 500 civilians fleeing the town following its capture by Armenian forces; four years previously, the city of Sumgait had been ethnically cleansed of Armenians by Azerbaijani irregulars, during which as many as 50 civilians lost their lives. There is no such thing as a ‘clean’ war, and this was no exception. Nevertheless, the ethnic cleansing that was reported by both Armenian and Azerbaijani sources was not on the scale of that which was occurring in Bosnia at about the same time; the civilian massacres were not as brutal, regular or systematic as those which had occurred in the Lebanese civil war. In 1992, the conflict was still no more than a border dispute driven by cultural and ethnic issues, very much like the recent Ossetian conflict. It was not until a year into the war that a darker, altogether more sinister force began to hijack the conflict .

In 1994, as Russian forces poured into Chechnya – yet another Caucasian ethnic hot-spot – in an attempt to prevent the province from seceding, a fierce, brutal and religiously motivated resistance sprang up. The terminology of militant Islam – ‘jihad’, ‘mujahadeen’ and so on – was used in Chechnya to attract legions of foreign fighters (mostly Saudis, Afghans and Pakistanis) to the region to fight for a cause which, thanks to a newly-created network of underground connexions springing up throughout the Islamic world, suddenly gained a significance far beyond the secessionist issues that had sparked the conflict in the first place. Chechnya, although it is the best-known example, was by no means the first Caucasian conflict to be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists.

On May 8^th, 1992 – 2 years before the Russian invasion of Chechnya – a relatively small Armenian force, numbering only a few hundred, assaulted the Azerbaijani town of Shusha. Amongst the Azerbaijani defenders were, according to the Azerbajani commander, Colonel Azer Rustamov, ‘hundreds of Chechen volunteers’. Their leader was Shamil Basayev. This rather unsavoury individual later achieved notoriety for his role in the Chechen conflict, not least on account of his responsibility for the Budyonnovsk hospital massacre. Basayev had arrived in Azerbaijan fresh from a recent excursion to Abkhazia, where he had been involved in the slaughter of as many as 15,000 ethnic Georgian civilians. In Abkhazia, though, Basayev did not deploy an organised, disciplined force of mujahadeen; here, what little evidence there is suggests that he operated as an opportunist militant caught up in an ethnic rather than an overwhelmingly religious conflict. Although the atrocities committed in Abkhazia certainly had a religious element, Orthodox Christian Russian forces collaborated with Muslim Circassians against the Orthodox Christian Georgians – religion was certainly not the driving force and Basyev’s own special brand of militant Islam was not used, in this case, to attract foreign fighters to the region en masse.

The defence of Shusha and the final stages of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict were a different matter altogether. Rumours about how many Chechens and other foreigners took part in this battle vary, but most reports put their numbers at battalion strength, at least. During this time, some of the earliest jihadi videos were made by Basayev and, while they did not involve the brutal beheadings and suicide-bombings that have since become regular features of such propaganda, they promoted a fundamentalist Islamic perspective on the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Suddenly, thanks to Basayev’s arrival and to his worldwide promotion of his cause, a territorial, ethnic conflict achieved a dangerous religious dimension.

In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, though, Basayev failed. Whether it was a lack of religious fervour on the part of the Azerbaijanis, or simply a high-level misunderstanding, Basayev pulled his mujahadeen out of Nagorno-Karabakh after Shusha, claiming that the war was more about nationalism than jihad. His attempts to inspire the Azerbaijanis with a sense of righteous anger fuelled by a warped perception of fundamentalist Islam had fallen on deaf ears, as had his desire to internationalise the conflict. The precedent, though, would have been an alarming one, if only somebody in the west had thought to notice it. The conflict received almost no coverage: it didn’t even feature on the agendas of European governments, let alone appear on Clinton’s radar in the Whitehouse. The Russians, for whom the conflict was a more immediate problem, were desparate to play down the problem. ‘Basayev was nothing more than a geek with a gun’ one Russian journalist told me. But, in reality, he was a lot more than that. While he may have achieved notoriety in Chechnya, Basayev had cut his teeth on the battlefield at Shusha. he was one of the first of a new breed of Islamic fighter, with whom we have be come all to familiar in more recent times.

Armenia eventually scored an important military victory in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, which ended in a peace settlement that didn’t really satisfy either side. Tensions are still evident in the area and attempts to find a more satisfactory and lasting peace continue. The implications of the conflict, however, reached far beyond this small, Caucasian enclave. The lessons that Basayev and the Caucasian jihadi movement in general had learned from Nagorno-Karabakh would prove vital in the years to come. As the first Chechen conflict heated up in the middle years of the 1990s, it was rapidly turned into a religious rather than a secessionist war: all the clichés of militant Islam, from the martyrdom videos to the suicide bombings were deployed in strength against the Russians as the conflict was publicised around the world as an attack on Islam rather than a secessionist dispute.  Today, an international Islamist movement sees a merry-go-round of fighters swapping between Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia; any conflict in or against a Muslim country is immediately portrayed by a highly-effective PR machine as an attack on Islam itself, regardless of what the real motivation might be. Basayev’s theories of internationalisation may have failed in Nagorno-Karabakh, and Basayev himself may have met his death in an explosion in 2006, but the legacy of this long-forgotten conflict and of this lesser-known exponent of militant Islam is one that we ignore at our peril.