By Katherine Berjikian

While walking through the streets of Yerevan, you will hear a lot of news these days about the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Some accurate, some inaccurate, but it is a topic that almost everyone is talking or thinking about.

For example, I recently ran into a friend while on my lunch break. The conversation went from casual banter to the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in a matter of a couple sentences. The day before, a bus full of Armenian soldiers was attacked by an Azerbaijani drone. Her friend was one of those soldiers.

After a couple sentences, I found out that her friend had been a volunteer on his way to Nagorno-Karabakh, and that he had been lucky. While he was injured in the attack, he was still alive and currently in Yerevan.

After that we quickly said our goodbyes and went on our separate ways. I recently learned that my friend’s story is merely one of thousands. In a country with a population of just under three million people, it’s easy to find people who are personally affected by the escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh. And if you are lucky enough to not know someone who has volunteered to fight, or someone who has a loved one doing the same thing, you are probably glued to the news, desperate for information when very little is available.

Exaggerated stories about casualty counts and destruction is being played on a loop. And with a conflict that started so fast, it is hard to step back and see the bigger picture.

And while this is a fact when you are in Armenia, a close neighbor and ally to Nagorno-Karabakh, living with the fear of a conflict that might become a war any minute, it is surprising how much more apparent this lack of information is when you look at foreign news sources.

For the past couple days I have been devouring English language news about Nagorno-Karabakh, and I noticed a very startling trend in the reporting. While I wouldn’t say most of the reporting have been inaccurate, what is shockingis the broad brush these news sources have used to describe the conflict. Generalizations and lack of information have caused foreign news to use racist and dangerous generalized statements when writing about this escalation of violence.

And stories like the bus that was recently bombed hasn’t been mentioned, while the Associated Press wrote a whole article about how the Formula Onegames in Baku are still going to happen as planned.

This article is not about the escalation of violence, or the recent ceasefire, but on how western media is reporting it. This means that I will focus on European and American news about these recent events, and the trends that exist in their coverage of it.

The news sources that I have looked at for this story are the following: Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, the Guardian, and the BBC. 

A Century Long Conflict

How do you describe Nagorno-Karabakhto an outside audience who probably don’t know where Azerbaijan and Armenia are on the map?

This seems like a question that a lot of reporters are asking themselves when writing about the recent escalation of violence.

The answer is really easy. You just make the conflict about Islam vs. Christianity.

The associated press is one of the best examples of this. Since the beginning of the escalation, the associated press has written six stories about Nagorno-Karabakh.

In almost every article, the Associated Press has used a variation of the following quote to describe the current conflict.

“Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since a war ended in 1994 with no resolution of the area's status. The conflict is fueled by long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azerbaijanis.” 

This quote was taken from an article published by the associated press entitled Azerbaijan says separatist clashes no threat to Formula Oneby Aida Sultanova.

Out of the six articles by the Associated Press I saw published about the current escalation of violence, one was a quick news brief summarizing the escalation and is barely three hundred words, and the other was the above stated article about how the Formula One games that was planned to be held in Baku are still going to happen.

To start, I would like to state that the above quote is one: racist, and two: a-historical. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh is not a ‘long-simmering tension between Christians Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris.’

To boil down this conflict to those simple factors is doing a disservice to the parties who are actually involved in the current conflict, on both sides.

It is also a-historic and doesn’t take into account the many factors that are currently affecting the Caucuses and the greater Middle East.

There are many factors that could have, and probably did, contribute to the current escalation of violence. For example, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline that runs several miles outside of Nagorno-Karabakh, the increase in military spending in Azerbaijanto roughly the size of Armenia’s entire national budget, the statement that President Erdoğan made in the United States saying that Armenia was a large threat to the stability in the region because of Russia’s military bases in the country, and a recent economic crisis in Azerbaijan that has been caused by the global decrease in oil costs.

The BBC and Al Jazeera are other great examples of this.

In an article entitled ‘Nagorno-Karabakh profile,’ the BBC wrote, “The conflict has roots dating back well over a century into competition between Christian Armenian and Muslim Turkic and Persian influences.”

And in an Al Jazeera article called Inside Story- What triggered the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Marcus Papadopoulos, Editor of Politics First magazine,“We need to understand the nature of the caucuses. The north caucuses, which is in Russia, the south caucuses which is of course comprised of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Extremely volatile regains.  A mosaic of different peoples, different religions, and different cultures. Indeed, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin once wrote a poem in which he said, ‘I know how to fight, I know how to use a dagger, I was born in the caucuses.’

Both of these quotes imply that there is something inherit about violence in this region, and ignores a century’s long history of imperialism that has greatly affected it. 

Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh Seen as Separatists

Who’s fighting who? If you look at The Guardian, or most other western news sources, that answer is simple, Armenian separatists in an area of Azerbaijan are fighting the Azerbaijani military.

For example, Azerbaijan and Armenian separatists agree ceasefire over disputed territory is the tittle of an article about the recent ceasefire between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan. 

In the article, you can find lines like this one, “Armenian-backed separatists seized control of the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh region, a majority ethnic Armenian area in Azerbaijan, in an early 1990s war that claimed about 30,000 lives.”

Unlike the pervious comment about Muslims and Turks, there is a realm of logic in this statement. The UN officially recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan. And Nagorno-Karabakh is an overwhelmingly majority Armenian area neighboring a country that is almost entirely Turkish. To a western audience, it does seem as if the area is an ‘Armenian enclave’ that is trying to separate from Azerbaijan.

However, if you dive deeper into this issue, you find that this is not entirely true.

Before I start, I would like to acknowledge that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is a controversial topic. Like most wars, this independence brought the deaths of thousands, and the displacement of even more people, some that are still considered refugees in Azerbaijan. And to this day, there is constant fighting at the border that results in the deaths of countless people on both sides.

For those of you who do not know, the area of Nagorno-Karabakh is an area that boarders Armenia andAzerbaijan. It is an area that is almost completely Armenian. However, before a war that spanned between 1989 and 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh was officially part of Azerbaijan.

When the Soviet Union started to collapse, Nagorno-Karabakh voted to succeed from Azerbaijan and become part of Armenia. This caused a war that ended with a ceasefire that was never really upheld. However, Nagorno-Karabakh has declared themselves as an official republic, even though it is only recognized by three non-UN states.

While the UN officially still sees this area as part of Azerbaijan and calls for the return of the land to Azerbaijan, it has been independent from Azerbaijan for more than twenty years. It has its own military, government, and any civic help it does get, it gets from Armenia.

Therefore, it is not an area inside of Azerbaijan that is trying to succeed, but an area that already succeeded a generation ago and is now trying to maintain that independence.

While you may disagree with that succession, or might be adamantly pro it, it does not change the fact that UN recognition aside, Nagorno-Karabakh has been independent from Azerbaijan for a very long time.

It Might be a Proxy War

After the disaster that still is the Syrian civil war and the Iraq war, the western world is terrified of another war near this region that can further destabilize the area. This fear colors almost all of the reporting on Nagorno-Karabakh.

The fear is that Russia and Turkey might use this conflict to start a proxy war.

After the escalation of fighting began, the president of Turkey, Erdoğan stated that Turkey would back Azerbaijan if the fighting continued. Russia, in its turn, has two military bases in Armenia, and Armenia is one of their most important strategic point in the region. Russia has also signed a security treaty with Armenia.

In Al Jazeera’s Inside Story- What triggered the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Marcus Papadopoulos, Editor of Politics First magazine, stated the following “Well, I think it is also no coincidence that in the last week or so a number of lobby groups in Washington have taken …on Turkey as a client. And of course Turkey is heavily lobbying American government arguing that Russia, through Armenia, poses a direct threat Turkey...In my mind, in my estimation, I believe it is very likely that the hand of Ankara has played a part in what we have seen over the last 48 hours in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

However, while Marcus Papadopoulos might not be wrong, it is too early to actually know if any fighting between the region of Nagorno-Karabakhand Azerbaijan could actually be called a proxy war.

While Turkey has made statements of support for Azerbaijan, Russia has made no such statement stating their support of Armenia over Azerbaijan, and instead has called an end to the fighting all together.

In fact, Russia sells weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Turkey on the other hand has had a history of supporting Azerbaijan. When Azerbaijan placed a blockade on Armenia after the Nagorno-Karabakhwar of the late 80s and early 90s, Turkey placed a similar blockade in solidarity.

Therefore, Erdoğan’s statement of support isn’t new, its holds with a twenty year history of Turkey’s support of Azerbaijan.

So while the escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh might be a convenient ploy for Russia and Turkey to go to war without really going to war, it is way too early to make statements like this with only speculation. 

(Katherine Berjikian is a Birthright Armenia volunteer from the U.S. now working at Hetq)