Turkey - NATO'S ambassador in Nagorno Karabakh?

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Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

N. Mamishova, PhD Student Taras

Abstract

It was in full swing of the 2020 newly-blown Nagorno Karabakh war when during an online press conference following the meetings of NATO Defense Ministers its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg openly denoted Turkey as the one expected to "use its considerable influence in the region to calm tensions".

The escalation of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020 was the largest since at least 2016.

It emerged, on the one hand, amid constant military and political provocations from Armenia and the unrecognized (including by Yerevan itself) "Nagorno Karabakh Republic" against the illegally occupied Azerbaijani territories. On the other hand, the full-scale warfare was the product of fair disillusion with the impotent peace process, not to mention the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.

The last straw was gross violation of the initial 1994 ceasefire - the shelling of civilian population in Azerbaijan's frontline zone on September 27, 2020. After the years of international efforts to find negotiated solutions, it was six weeks of deadly fighting over the disputed enclave until a peace deal was signed on November 10^th by Russian President Putin, Azerbaijani President Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Pashynian.

The agreement provided for the deployment of mainly Russian and also Turkish (reportedly) peacekeeping forces in Nagorno Karabakh. On December 1^st, Moscow and Ankara agreed to set up a joint centre to monitor the newly-established ceasefire.

Clearly, while both Azerbaijan and Armenia are NATO's partners, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been reluctant to undertake a more determined stance in this long-lasting conflict. Kind of a "mantra", NATO's high officials used to reiterate over again that the bloc is "not part of the conflict in and around Nagorno Karabakh" and supports the efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group and its cochairs to find a political solution.

It was Turkish Foreign Minister, ironically, who raised the absence of any viable suggestions for decades on the occupied Karabakh territory from the Minsk Process [1].

The cessation of large- scale military hostilities took place under the aegis of both Russia's and Turkey's peace efforts. This is how not frozen anymore, but even very hot after the 2020 explosion and the occasional fightings (i.e. in November 2021), the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh has revigorated inter alia the geopolitical stake of Turkey in the region.

Literature review. As the Nagorno Karabakh conflict in the very heart of the South Caucasus has been long protracted, the geopolitical developments around the enclave have lacked particular academic interest in recent decades. A fortiori the role of NATO in the conflict settlement and of Turkey specifically has been practically overlooked by scholars, but merely addressed pointwise in regional and global studies. It was back in 2000 that Gareth Winrow provided an overview of Turkey's relations with its Caucasian neighbours and analyzed the geopolitical significance of Turkey as of a regional power and NATO member state [2]. Two years earlier the U. S. Institute of Peace published its roundtable report titled "Nagorno Karabakh: Searching for a Solution" to discuss inter alia the international dimension of the conflict resolution and the respective contribution of Turkey [3]. In 2002, Stephen Blank, William Johnsen and Stephen Pelletiere voiced the strategic position of Ankara at the crossroads of world affairs and the factor of the continuing Nagorno Karabakh war in its regional policy goals and relations with Russia and NATO allies [4].

Stephen Larrabee addressed the FP specifics of T urkey as of U.S. security partner with a particular focus on potential points of tension and divergences between U.S. and Turkish interests, including in NATO [5]. Burcu Punsmann referred to the role of Ankara as of a stakeholder in the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and serious limitations Turkey's actions have faced in the South Caucasus [6]. Finally, Philip Gordon and Цmer Taspinar in their "Winning Turkey: How America, Europe, and Turkey Can Revive a Fading Partnership" discussed converging political and strategic factors in Turkey's dialogue with Washington and other allies and only tangentially the component of Turkish-Armenian restraint in this configuration [7].

Most recently, Turkey's involvement into the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement was implicitly addressed in the "Political Handbook of the World" by Tom Lansford [8] and the Armed Conflict Survey of the International Institute for Strategic Studies [9] along with another issue of Insight Turkey entitled "New Geopolitics in the Eastern Mediterranean" [10]. In this way, while the developments in and around the renewed fighting in Nagorno Karabakh in late September 2020 have been widely covered in media, the research on its geopolitical framework has remained underdeveloped. To address this gap, this research examines the newly-blown conflict from the NATO's perspective and the role Turkey has played in its settlement that is still to come.

Key research results

The Nagorno Karabakh conflict, the longest-running in post-Soviet Eurasia, exploded back in 1988 when ethnic Armenians living in Azerbaijan's Nagorno Karabakh demanded the transfer of what was then the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) to Armenia [11]. The outright war ceased in 1994 with Nagorno Karabakh and seven adjacent districts wholly or partially controlled by Armenian forces and more than a million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced people. The peak of the dramatic Caucasus tragedy, the brutal 1992 Khodjaly massacre, claimed the lives of 613 people [12, p. 229]. The official stance of the international community on the armed conflict has been matching: Nagorno Karabakh and seven neighboring areas are historically and officially recognized territories of Azerbaijan, which has been validated by four UN Security Council resolutions of 1993 demanding the withdrawal of all Armenian armed forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

On March 23, 1995 the Hungarian OSCE Chairmanship at the Budapest Summit issued a formal mandate for the co-chairs of the Minsk Process on Nagorno Karabakh [13]. Russia, France, and the United States - each represented by a specially appointed official - have been thereby entrusted to coordinate mediation and negotiation between Armenia and Azerbaijan aiming at a peaceful and comprehensive settlement of the conflict. Belarus (with its capital of Minsk as a forum for negotiations), Germany, Italy (which held presidency of the first peace conference on Nagorno Karabakh back in 1992), neutral and non- aligned Sweden and Finland, major regional player Turkey, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan have become the Group's permanent members along with the OSCE Troika on a rotating basis. Apparently, the "team list" of the OSCE Group co-chairs reflected the global and on-spot balance of power and interest amid the tense-war years in Nagorno Karabakh back in early 1990s.

This was France, another leader EU member, to embrace the role of the "authorized representative" of collective Europe in the OSCE Minsk Group cochairmanship. Though, official Paris has never been impartial participant of the peace process: the Armenian diaspora in France used to urge the country to do more to support Yerevan in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. The French Armenian community - some of the largest outside of the Armenian nation and most massive in Western Europe ranking in at around 300,000 - has had roots in France for several centuries and deeply integrated into the local society [14, p. 69]. Being largely an outcome of the disputed 1915 genocide, it has increasingly mobilized against so-called Turkish negationism since the 1960s and kept on boosting its lobbying power with the emergence of independent Armenia in 1991 [15, p. 26]. France formally recognized the World War One massacres against Armenians as a genocide in 2001. In February 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that April 24 - the day in 1915 that the killings and massive deportation of Armenians started - would be a "national day of commemoration" [16].

Russia has been long involved in the conflict resolution as an accustomed "arbiter" in the post-Soviet region's affairs. Its role, however, has been dubious considering the Soviet military attack on Baku in January 1990 and the Khojaly massacre against Azerbaijanis committed jointly by Russian and Armenian military units in February 1992. The Russian military support of Armenia - in return for political loyalty and de facto subordination - since the early 1990s eventually led to further defeats of the Azerbaijani army and even more Azerbaijani territories seized during the winter campaign of 1992-1993. Meanwhile, it was Russia in 1994 to have brokered a ceasefire between the newly independent nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan - the Bishkek Protocol, which brought no peace to the region though. While Nagorno Karabakh is small, the geopolitical stakes have been high also as it was a "bargaining chip" for Moscow against conflicting interests of the other powerful regional forces - NATO's Turkey, which has long supported Azerbaijan, and Iran, which borders both and has at times demonstrated ambitions to qualify for a regional hegemon in West Asia after 1979.

The United States, a world-recognized "opinion maker", has been covertly interested in confronting Russian interests and extending Western influence to the region, but even more in lucrative oil and gas projects in resource- rich Azerbaijan. In 1994, the historic Contract of the Century was signed between Azerbaijan and the international consortium to develop the rich Azeri - Chirag - Guneshli deep-water oil fields. It brought a strategic Euro- Atlantic interest to the small Caucasian country and provided the foundation for the Azerbaijan-West relationship, which is relevant at the present day [17, p. 129]. The deal was inter alia considered as a policy success for the United States. The problem of how to export the Contract of the Century oil westward was solved with the 1999 agreement between Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey on the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline - the longest one in the former Soviet Union after the Druzhba pipeline. Meanwhile, in 1995 the United States encouraged the reconstruction of a low-capacity oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Georgian Black Sea Port of Supsa as part of a strategy to ensure that Russia would not monopolize East-West export pipelines. The "commercial" interest of Washington, which overweighed the nobly-humanitarian one, has remained in the region for the years to come.

This is how the feasible resolution of the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, has been virtually put on hold, as Azerbaijan has gone alone through the grave violation of its territorial integrity. De jure the international negotiation and mediation effort has been launched in the face of the OSCE Minsk Group represented by a bunch of "decision-makers" - Russia, France, and the United States. However, de facto distant and indifferent Washington, Armenia-leaning Paris, and both allegedly and openly involved Moscow (at that time clearly favouring Armenia) promised little in securing a fair conflict- resolution process. It might have been Germany to offer some sort of neutrality to this configuration, however, back in 1995 the nation celebrated the fifth anniversary of its reunification with the legacy of the Berlin Wall still popping up in the political memory. It might have been Turkey to somehow counterbalance the pro-Armenian sentiments within the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship, yet in the early 1990s Turkey was mired in an increasingly bitter war with insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, in the southeast.

The role of personality of incumbent Turkish President in the recent progress toward the Nagorno Karabakh conflict resolution is difficult to overestimate. Back in the early 1990s, Recep Tayyip Erdogan served as a mayor of Istanbul, with mandate being certainly far from the events in neighborly Azerbaijan and Armenia. Even more, today one of the most influential Turkish leaders in memory, in 1998, he was sentenced to ten months in jail, while the Constitutional Court banned his Welfare Party on grounds that it was "threatening the Kemalist nature of Turkey, especially [its] secularity" [18]. It was only in 2001 when Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) subsequently bringing him to power in 2014. Meanwhile, then Turkish President Suleyman Gundogdu Demirel, who was in office from 1993 to 2000, pretty similar to his successors, only nominally participated in the real-life conflict resolution. Nevertheless, as for the function of Turkey, it has been long acknowledged by its NATO fellows. In one of the telephone conversations between then American President George H. W. Bush and then Prime Minister Demirel of Turkey in March 1992 [19] amid the escalating crisis between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Washington pledged to join "Turkey, Russia, and other countries in calling for an immediate cease-fire... to put a peaceful end to the growing tragedy".

In the first years of its independence, Azerbaijan faced a painful defeat in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, which cast a shadow of the vulnerability on its national security. The newly-born country "inherited" a considerable portion of its territories occupied (1/5 in total) and also over one million refugees and internally displaced persons. In ways, Azerbaijan reckoned on Russian support in stopping the war in Nagorno Karabakh and fulfilling long-hoped-for economic promises. However, these expectations were confounded by a number of issues: the absence of a clear- cut strategy on the part of the Kremlin regarding the South Caucasus, the inactiveness of the Russian leadership in the summer and fall of 1993 in putting an end to the war, as well as continuing close relations between Moscow and Yerevan [20, p. 274]. It was apparent that in case of a full- scale war over Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan would find not only Armenia but also Russia on the other side. Alongside, any "single-handed" attempts to resolve the conflict by force would only undermine the trust of the international community toward Azerbaijan, which would be viewed as an aggressor [21, p. 201]. In ways, in the eyes of Azerbaijan, in the absence of any external support, the stabilization of the situation in Nagorno Karabakh was largely dependent on merely Moscow.

Azerbaijan was weakened through not only the warfare with Armenia, but also internal political and economic instability. Meanwhile, through the years of independence, Azerbaijan, endowed with the vast hydrocarbon resources (the country ranks 19^th in the world for proven oil reserves with 7 billion barrels of oil), has made striking attempts to upgrade its own military, to revive national defense capabilities. The ambitious energy projects - the Baku- Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and the Baku-Supsa crude oil pipelines dubbed together as the "oil window to the West" [22] along with the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) gas pipeline system operational since late 2006 - have given massive revenue inflows to the country. This new reality accordingly became part of the overall Azerbaijan's agenda in the region and boosted its stake in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. According to the 2021 Military Strength Ranking [23], the defense budget of Azerbaijan amounts to USD 2265 million, while the one of Armenia - to USD 634 million. This largely determined Azerbaijan's resolve not to keep a close eye on another provocation from the Armenian military in the fall 2020, but to enter into a full-fledged liberation war over Nagorno Karabakh.

Meanwhile, in a more than 30-year-old conflict dating back to the Soviet era, Turkey's score was a game changer. New power dynamics has emerged, as Ankara repositioned itself to hold a prominent political role in the South Caucasus and far beyond. Even before, Turkey has extended generous political and military support, helping Azerbaijan develop formidable defense capabilities and supplying it with a steady stream of weapons, often for free or at greatly reduced cost. Turkey's defense cooperation with Azerbaijan, which has been growing, was on full display in the fighting over the disputed Nagorno Karabakh territory, when Ankara threw its full military support behind Baku. Turkey's military exports to Azerbaijan rose six-fold in 2020, with Azerbaijan jumping to the top of the list of Turkish arms buyers in September (it has become Azerbaijan's third-largest supplier of weapons after Israel and Russia). Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, F-16 fighter jets and Ankara-led military exercises, along with extensive "moral support" gave Azerbaijan an advantage in the conflict, which ended with Azerbaijan's capture of significant swathes of its territory back [24]. This is how Turkey's staunch assistance to brotherly Azerbaijan in this round of fighting has played a weighty role in what is the most serious flare-up in the South Caucasus since the 1990s.

Turkey's affiliation with NATO may be definitely regarded as one of the appealing geopolitical phenomena in a drastically changing world. In the eyes of NATO, Turkey is among the most important and valuable members. In the eyes of Turkey, on the surface relentlessly supporting the aims and goals of the Alliance, this membership helps Ankara become more fully inclusive and competitive in the international arena. However, basic Western values have been never shared by Ankara. After all, NATO has from the very beginning represented the unity of countries believing in liberal- democratic values. NATO's strength and resilience have long derived from the allies' shared commitment to the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law, as well as a commitment to develop "peaceful and friendly international relations". Yet today, these principles are unequally upheld across the bloc. Just as NATO faces a deteriorating external security environment, it is also confronting internal turbulence, starting with an erosion of democratic norms inside the Alliance. One may refer to Turkey as a member state number one on the list, with its vision of liberal-democratic values hardly qualifying for Western identity.

The decisive role, which Turkey has played after it fully joined the process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict resolution, kind of "sanctioned" by NATO, largely refers to this phenomenon. On May 28, 2021 NATO's allies released a two-paragraph statement condemning the forcing down of a Ryanair flight to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich, but did not include any punitive steps that Baltic allies and Poland had pressed for. The statement was also less strident than NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's public remarks. President Erdogan insisted that any mention of support for more Western sanctions on Belarus, and also calls for the release of political prisoners there would be left out of the text [25]. Language threatening a suspension of NATO's cooperation with Belarus was also removed. Somehow Ankara preferred to preserve ties with Moscow, the closest ally of Lukashenko, and maintain economic relations with Belarus via Turkish Airlines, which has daily flights to Minsk. Erdogan was also one of the first world leaders to congratulate Lukashenko in August 2020 on winning the disputed presidential election in Belarus, which the European Council declared "neither free nor fair" [26]. The spoiler role Erdogan plays within NATO again raised skepticism about Turkey within the transatlantic coalition.

Turkey's decision to pursue the Russian S-400 missile defense systems has been controversial since first announced. In spite of all the U.S. appeals for Turkey not to procure S-400s, Turkey argued that the United States did not suggest any alternative (reportedly, Washington offered to sell its Patriot missile defense system to Turkey if Ankara promises not to operate a rival Russian one). Meanwhile, NATO allies also raised concerns about data security given Turkey's Defense Industries Undersecretariat planned to link the U.S. F-35 system to the Turkish Air Force network (HvBS). This would be necessary to actualize the full potential of the stealth fighter which operates in tandem with information and battlespace awareness networks that guide its cutting-edge software.

Other concern was that any F-35's operations in Turkey may be detected by its own S-400 radar capability, and that data could be used by Russia to improve detection and targeting of the F-35 stealth fighter [27]. When Turkey signed a missile deal with Russia in 2017, it became the first NATO ally to purchase big-ticket military hardware from Moscow [28]. Since then, Turkey also became the first NATO member state that the United States listed in its sanctions list under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. This Act targets significant transactions with the Russian defense or intelligence sectors.

Turkey has become a more difficult partner in recent years for individual NATO allies, particularly clashing with NATO's Greece and also EU's Cyprus over hydrocarbons in the Mediterranean. Turkey has pursued a quite aggressive gas exploration effort, with its research vessel heavily protected by warships of the Turkish Navy. In late summer of 2020, Greece and Turkey, NATO allies but historic rivals, inched toward a possible military confrontation that could end up engulfing the region [29]. Naval vessels from both countries made a show of force in the contested Eastern Mediterranean as a race for gas and oil reserves added a new point of friction to old disputes. There were encounters with rival Greek vessels and another NATO country, France, has become involved, siding with the Greeks [30]. Despite Greco-Turkish maritime disputes, couched in competing narratives of national sovereignty, are nothing new, what was happening appeared dangerous, complicated and threatened to exacerbate existing fault lines in the region.

Conclusion

In the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, the longest-running in the former USSR, NATO has stayed not aside, but behind the Minsk Process. With the three cochairs - something indifferent, something biased - the OSCE Minsk Group, however, failed to bring peace to the South Caucasus. Instead, a forty-four-day-long full-scale war, which claimed at least 6,500 lives, including around 150 civilians, confirmed a decisive military victory of Azerbaijan. The latter regained the seven districts around Nagorno Karabakh that it had lost in the first war and around one-third of Nagorno Karabakh itself, including the "sacred" town of Shusha. Not only the balance of power between Armenia and Azerbaijan has completely changed with this second war, but the geopolitical configuration in the region.

The 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war has also cemented the stakes of two international actors in the South Caucasus - Russia and Turkey. The November trilateral agreement between Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia has formally brought back Moscow to the region: a Russian peacekeeping mission of 1,960 men was deployed to both Karabakh and the Lachin corridor between Karabakh and Armenia for initially five years, with the possibility of renewal. Turkey's heavy political support for Baku and direct military assistance in the form of military trainers, drones, and other equipment has contributed to Azerbaijan's breakthrough [31]. Turkey accordingly has become part of the post-conflict configuration: along with the joint Russia-Turkey ceasefire monitoring centre established in the town of Aghdam, Moscow and Ankara have also initiated the launch of a "3+3" regional consultative mechanism on the South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Iran).

While a sustainable peace remains far from reach in Nagorno Karabakh, the conflict settlement might become a bargaining chip amid Turkey-NATO tensions. In the eyes of the bloc, Turkey's involvement into the peace process has been important to check Russian expansionism in the region. On the one hand, the political and military presence of Russia helped put an end to violence, to fighting in and around Nagorno Karabakh that was so welcomed by NATO allies. On the other one, this presence during and following the crisis has intensified the need for counterbalancing Kremlin's interests in the South Caucasus. Ankara, a strong bulwark on NATO's southeastern flank, would become now an even more valued ally as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has left and rented space to Russia, which deployed on-spot peacekeepers and sponsored political solutions to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. To avoid regional and global strategic and tactical consequences, France and the United States co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group together with Russia might now make concessions to Turkey calling for an overhaul of the Minsk Process, which would give Turkey a bigger role in negotiations.

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