 Okay, second trial, sound is working. We're talking about Nagorno-Karabakh between war and peace. It's the mountainous black garden, it's what it's often called in the Caucasian region, and we have a conflict that escalated between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as many of you may have heard of, but the conflict goes back way farther. And Larissa will be giving you a talk about the background in the next 20 minutes. The talk is in German and there is interpretation into English, which you have already successfully found if you're listening to me. Thank you. I'll try and share my screen, so it doesn't seem to be working with sharing a screen. Are you seeing the presentation? Yeah, we are. Just put it on full screen, if you can. Everything's good. Okay, you're all good. Okay, can I start? Yeah. Cool. Okay, cool. Thank you for listening to me and thank you for the introduction. Today I want to talk to you about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. As you said, it's a region that isn't very present on international agendas and hadn't been well known up until this year. It's in the southern Caucasian mountain region and it's between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which are the main conflicting parties in this whole thing. And they are fighting about which region or which country the region belongs to. There are different spellings of Nagorno-Karabakh. So why is there a conflict? For both parties, the region has a high meaning for culture and identity. But there's also a very prominent ethical level to that conflict. Well, when Nagorno-Karabakh appears in the media, it's more about a fight about the region rather than a fight in the region. You may have heard that in September to November there had been military incidents that escalated towards a war, which took about 5,000 lives. But you have to be careful with the numbers. I would like to bring some visibility and some transparency into that conflict and the last 26 years. In recent years, the risk of conflict has heightened because of increasing militarization and the EU has a partnership treaty with Armenia and connections to Azerbaijan because of energy supply. If you haven't heard of it, I think it could have been more present in the media for myself because the media representation only touches the surface, which is of course because the conflict is very complex. I split my presentation into three parts. At the beginning we will look at the players that are involved, the stakeholders in the conflict. We'll talk about the positions of both parties, but also how Nagorno-Karabakh is positioned as a defective state. I'll come back to that later. And of course we'll talk about the international stakeholders such as Russia and Turkey as well and international organizations who are involved. In the second part, I would like to present the economic facets of both parties and the capacities in terms of economy and military and how they impact the conflict. And the last part will be about the peace negotiations in the night from the 9th to the 10th of November. This year a peace treaty was signed, but we're still very far away from peace. So what are the obstacles? We're going to look at the obstacles towards peace. Here I often talk about a frozen conflict here and how the region is split between the two countries fighting over it. I brought you a map. What you're seeing here is southern Caucasus, which includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh of course, and Russia is also close. In 1991 when the USSR collapsed international structures were affected as well and of course Nagorno-Karabakh was affected as well because new states were created, new borders were drawn. Not only Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent but also other former USSR countries. So the yellow region, which you see on the left side, that is the region that was given to Armenia back then and the white territory was given to Azerbaijan, that includes the yellow-white striped region and the region bolded in blue. So that was all Azerbaijan at that point. So that was what we started with. That was before the war started. This war lasted for three years until 1997. Of course the fights were about Nagorno-Karabakh but also other regions. The map is a little older but nothing has changed since then. Armenia took some of the regions, those striped ones and Nagorno-Karabakh was also held by the military. And we had about 20,000 to 30,000 casualties, which is of course a very vague number. But you have to be careful with numbers and still historical evaluation has to be done before we know the exact numbers and also people were displaced from the Azerbaijani perspective. Nagorno-Karabakh still is an Azerbaijani region and there were ceasefire agreements in 1994 that also attributed the region to Azerbaijan. Then we also have the ceasefire line, which is very important because what was agreed on in the ceasefire agreements hasn't changed much. The positions haven't changed and also the interests haven't changed. So this is all still applicable to today's conflict. So de facto the region has declared independence but it is under Armenian regulation and is part of the Armenian economy. So we haven't really elaborated on why the conflict has arisen once again. You could say that the conflict just hasn't been resolved because no solution that both sides would be satisfied with have been found. And of course Armenia and Azerbaijan are still fighting about the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The presidents, well the two states are often confused but they are very, very different politically but also institutionally and culturally. On the left you see President Aliyev from Azerbaijan, who's been president since 2003. And on the right you see the Armenian Prime Minister Pachinian, who has been prime minister since 2008. Comparing the two political systems, they are both presidential systems. And we've had four changes of power in Armenia since 1994. We had corruption conflicts when looking at Azerbaijan in contrast. Azerbaijan is very authoritarian and presidential. The power of this, the most power lies within the hands of the president. The parliament doesn't really have much power and influence. In 2020 we had a new opposition candidate in the parliament, which resulted in not just a very strong presidential system but also aspects of dynasties. So in 2017 this family rule was increased when Meriban Aliyeva, in a very deepest referendum which he said, became the vice president. So this goes back a long time to 1969 and in that respect Azerbaijan is different. Armenia has progressed much more. Also domestic problems in Azerbaijan are media freedom of the judiciary, lots to be wished for. So reporters with their borders have placed Azerbaijan on rank 168 or 180 states in terms of press freedom. So that's not very good and Armenia in comparison is on rank 60. So a large percentage of the media are state owned and in foreign policy Armenia is trying to gain recognition from Europe and other areas. They have joined the Eurasian Economic Union. But still Armenia is very much interested in close trade relations with the European Union and a partnership agreement was signed agreeing on economic cooperation and strengthening that. On the basis of what I've already told you, a foreign policy that appeals to democratic rights would regard Azerbaijan more as a problem. And Azerbaijan is not really responding to criticism on any problems it has such as human rights, journalists' rights. And they say we don't have to be criticized. We are an important economic factor in this region, which is true. And domestically what is done is that criticisms are associated in a very autocratic in a way that is very typical of autocratic regimes. Criticism is associated with other problems such as territorial conflict, the unsolved one that we are talking about. Or they are just blaming on the Armenian diaspora abroad causing frictions. So let's look back on the map and Western media like to talk about Nagorno-Karabakh as in a region of Azerbaijan, which is occupied by Armenia. And that is all quite a grey area and in terms of international law, it's true it is a part of Azerbaijan but in the last 20 years a lot has changed. It's true that Armenia occupied these areas in contravention of international law. The region of Nagorno-Karabakh even then through its referendum made very clear that they didn't want to be part of Azerbaijan anymore. So we have two principles here that are kind of in conflict. On the one hand there is the principle of territorial integrity and on the other there is self-determination which is the right of every people. So for them to be able to say we will no longer be part of Azerbaijan, that is a right. So these are the problems that are in conflict here and de facto you could say that Nagorno-Karabakh is a de facto state. They had an independence referendum but realistically this region is financed through subsidies from Armenia and the Armenian diaspora and they have made huge steps in the last few years in terms of their economic and political development. But by law if you look at international law that is not the case. So the question of course is what is Nagorno-Karabakh really and this unresolved status which is very hard to understand and I hope I haven't been talking too widely, that doesn't only lead to a very precarious security situation along the contact line, the ceasefire line which is a very militarized area. You have snipers there or we used to have them there facing each other from both sides and that of course makes it harder for international actors and for, it makes it harder to organize help internationally. For both states this is an undivisible region, indivisible and it's very hard to find any kind of compromise but it would take a compromise from both sides. And of course the issue of instability on both sides is there too. So any kind of peace process has very little chance of surviving politically which is what we see at the moment. The outcome of the war has created a political crisis in Armenia. The opposition is demanding the resignation of the government and new elections. So this is a very difficult situation and if you think that this isn't complicated enough let's go back one step because what I've just explained is the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan about the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. What we haven't looked at yet is the involvement of international actors so a level higher if you want. So Russia has established itself as an independent broker or negotiator and therefore we should look at Russia's role for a moment. During the first war they were a negotiator in the OSCE context although we should say that Russia would have preferred to be the only negotiator. The relationship to both these days is very complex. On the one hand they have strategic relationships with Armenia and traditionally they have been allies and Russia has two military bases in Armenia and on the other hand they have been selling arms to Azerbaijan with the reasoning that they want to keep up military stability in the region. But they do support Armenia militarily as well and they're not exerting any pressure on Armenia to withdraw from the regions they've occupied. So on the one hand Russia is strengthening the Armenian position but on the other hand they are supplying arms to Azerbaijan so it's a very ambivalent role that they're playing and on the rhetorical level they are supporting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan which means that the support to Nagorno-Parakarabakh the opinion that it is part of Armenian sovereignty is not really there. Russia would presumably support any peace deal at the moment whether it's on their own initiative or whether the conflicting parties would reach one as long as the stationing of Russian peace troops in the region would be involved. They don't want to lose influence on the region completely. They're not really getting involved in not replying any pressure. There hasn't been a peace agreement in these 26 years. That is a long time. It's not that there haven't been any suggestions or proposals and various communications have been tried. All these have then kind of stopped being used and broken off in time. And Russia doesn't want to spoil its relationship with Azerbaijan completely. So on the one hand they have the aspiration to be a dominant force in the region but they don't want to get involved too much. So we weren't able to guarantee any more than the continuation of the ceasefire agreement so far. So we have no war situation. We haven't had any full blown war in the last few years but no real peace either. There have always been conflicts on the ceasefire line that have escalated and now it gets even more complicated because since 2016 we have to deal with the involvement of Turkey as well. The ceasefire line, let's go back to the earlier map, the conflict didn't cause so much attention earlier but in 2016 that changed. Next to any smaller clashes nothing much happened. But in 2016 military clashes happened, fire was exchanged, what was called the Four Days War happened and you could say that Azerbaijan troops did act strategically although Azerbaijan kept saying that they were not going to take back the occupied regions by force. But that brought the conflict back onto the international agenda for the first time. And I think it's the number of casualties that rose which brought it back onto the agenda. What also was completely new is that Turkey's involvement caused a very new geopolitical situation. So Turkey wants to get involved in the region which is connected to Azerbaijan's new foreign policy. They want to establish ties with Turkey with Erdogan. And what does this cooperation look like? In what sense does Turkey get involved and how do they support Azerbaijan? Well, they supply arms, they are conducting military exercises on Azerbaijani territory and through Turkish support of course there is an enormous change in the position of Azerbaijan. In 2018 and 2019 things were relatively quiet. The issues could be resolved. OSCE called for more cooperation and peace negotiations. The ceasefire was back in place. But now we get to the year 2020 and things, the tide is turning again. With the clashes from the 12th to the 16th of July, with an artillery bombardment, 17 people died and the political repercussions were strong. There were demonstrations in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, and calling for war. And both sides blamed each other for starting the conflict. And Azerbaijan was strengthened through rising world market prices on fuel or falling prices. Got them into a crisis and then the pandemic of course came as well. So within one week Azerbaijan troops invaded about 20 kilometers behind the line and they reached Nagorno-Karabakh and approached the Armenian border which was kind of shocking but not really surprising because the relations between the two states never really improved. So Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia were kind of without protection against the advancing troops and within the first week a lot of damage was done. And the 11th of August, the 8th of November was a turning point when a historically important place was taken and the bloody clashes went on for six weeks now but that was actually the point when, well perhaps not Armenia that much but Nagorno-Karabakh at least noticed that no, within the next few days there will be no ceasefire agreement because Stepanakert the capital will be occupied within a few days. And finally on the 9th to the 10th of November an agreement was negotiated and signed with involvement by Putin and at the time I handed in my concept paper that ceasefire was adhered to but it was then later broken when Azerbaijan soldiers who went into regions that were settled by Armenian people what was the reaction on the international side? Not much. There were calls for peace negotiations or ceasefire negotiations and Turkey politically and militarily was involved and the fact that a new war broke out and how the states were equipped so this is a map of the region after the war but I'll show you that again later it's pretty much now, well we're getting ahead to closing time let's look at the economic performance of the two states when looking at the war and how it went, how did economic influences affect the development it is very clear when looking at statistics that the economic development of Armenia this is the gross domestic product went up in both states there was a crisis and of course the crisis in 2008 had an impact and in 2014 there was a great slump because of energy price levels and energy exports and imports had an impact so because both states are exporting resources from the Caspian Sea let's overlay both curves and you can see that the dimensions are very diverse Armenia is much more dependent on Russia, they don't have as much resources as Azerbaijan so they are very much dependent, Azerbaijan has pipelines for example the southern gas corridor which the EU is trying to use as a new energy supply and this also fuels Europe's stake in the conflict so let's look at the military expenses in comparison to the gross domestic products relatively when looking at the GDP they have very high relative military costs Armenia is even ahead of Azerbaijan there in 2019 when looking at the NATO conflict the member states can't agree on 2% and here we have like 5% or 4% or 6% still militarily they are not very well equipped why? because there are exports Russia is exporting weapons to both states but in 2014 Azerbaijan tried to diversify their sources they negotiated with Israel and was equipped by Israel whereas Armenia has become more and more dependent on Russia so there is an imbalance in favor of Azerbaijan because international stakeholders such as Turkey, Israel and other states but also European states are supporting Azerbaijan so that has increased the safety conflicts and troubles so I tried to do an intermediary conclusion when looking at economic developments Azerbaijan is likely to recover faster and better from the war I haven't considered the pandemics and the military costs so I think that they will both be very much impacted but the authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan is also causing different effects looking at war crimes Armenia and Azerbaijan are accusing each other of breaching international law in international law you can't do everything in war so for example you can't bomb civilian institutions or infrastructure there are regulations on how to treat prisoners of war international organizations and NGOs have difficulty reaching the region both countries are making it difficult for them to help because it's just been one and a half months so also because of the pandemic international help is only very slowly reaching the region so it's relatively certain that Azerbaijan has used a type of land mines, cluster bombs and also the exchange of prisoners of war you are seeing very shocking pictures on the web at the moment of prisoners being abused and of course the states, the countries are accusing each other of abusing and torturing prisoners of war there are reports of beheadings so a lot is still uncertain and hasn't been recapitulated it's also uncertain how many people are currently prisoners of war Armenian authorities are talking about a few dozen and other organizations are talking about several hundred prisoners so you have to be careful with the numbers finally I would like to look at what is coming what's it going to look like in the future and well the agreement in November let's look at the map in November a ceasefire treaty was accepted and Azerbaijan was to keep the occupied territory and also more territory was attributed to Azerbaijan so of course Armenia doesn't like that and there was also an agreement on exchange of prisoners of war Russia deployed peace troops to the region in the Lachin corridor which you see in the middle which connects the red and the black part which is being controlled by Azerbaijan at the moment and that is a huge point of pressure because when Russia deploys peace troops maybe that will bring more stability to the region so far Armenian troops have controlled the region what has changed of course what do the reactions of the stakeholders look like after there was protests during the signing of the agreements opposition forces stormed the prime minister's office it caused a lot of damage there and they also in Armenia the prime minister demanded that he step back and Armenia did sign the ceasefire treaty which does hurt them in a way people have to leave their houses in the regions attributed to Azerbaijan so there are bad pictures on the web there are pillages and houses are being burned while Armenians are burning their houses so that the Azerbaijanis can't use them Azerbaijan on the other hand has called for a celebration and a national holiday and they view themselves as the victors Armenia said that historically this was a very important war and the celebrations in Azerbaijan are typical for authoritarian regimes so let's come to our conclusion I hope that I haven't lost too many spectators I'll be quick so I'll just quickly sum it up it's a complicated conflict what are the problems that are resulting from that and why am I even talking about it for me the conflict shows how foreign policies are being negotiated and the stakeholders having their own interests Russia did a very half-ass job it was somewhere between stabilization and control of the region whereas Turkey is more acting like a conqueror or selling themselves as a conqueror and all of the conflicting parties weren't exactly sensitive about political sensitivities Russia hasn't been very active although personally I believe they would have had the potential but they at least managed not to create any further conflicts with the parties involved I'm pretty sure that Russia will not accept Turkey's influence or is annoyed about Turkey's influence because Turkey is still trying to gain influence and they claim that they had deployed peace troops whereas while Russian peace troops are deployed at the same time Putin wouldn't accept that so with the political instabilities we've talked about still it's very important and it's difficult to gain influence and also it's very difficult to see what is even happening because the stakes are pretty complicated and diverse the statistics are also an important facet it shows how strong the economic power is and the success and prosperity of the country because the statistics do not really tell you who is actually benefiting from any economic growth I've seen a statistic recently that poverty rates in Azerbaijan are supposed to be about 5% which I think is somewhat mysterious and the EU lastly has to be viewed very critically because as usual they claim to be following principles of the rule of law and Armenia in the course of this partnership of course has committed to get close to the European Union and was ready to do that but at the same time some member states are actually contributing to the militarization of that region arms exports are a huge problem and the worst in my view is the inactivity that we see the fact that nothing's been done although it has to be said that the EU doesn't really have any levers to pull in this region which tells you once again that the EU is not a really strong actor in foreign policy but there are other options other than just ignoring this conflict I'm not an expert myself but I believe that in particular the people on the ground would be grateful if this conflict would reach the political agenda or they are grateful that it has but at the end of the day if this only leads to autocratic regimes only expanding their sphere of influence and becoming more active as we've seen with Turkey and Syria and so on that is not desirable so that's it for me thank you for your attention and I'm looking forward to your questions okay, thank you Larissa we have a few questions from the audience there is much interest about your background and your motivation to get involved in this conflict well, that's a good question it was during my studies that I became very much aware of this, my bachelor thesis was about Kosovo which of course is another case of a de facto independent state with international recognition I think Kosovo has about 100 states that have diplomatically recognized them Nagorno-Karabakh isn't that lucky it's not as simple for them and well it's sad to see that much more could have been done to protect the people on the ground from such conflict and another question is about the drone program you've shown that the gross domestic product really broke down and the question was how does Azerbaijan finance its drone program if you have information on that at all which drone program are you talking about the purchase of military equipment yes, these are military drones aren't they orbiter is something that you read about true, well firstly I'm not an arms expert in any way but that's always a foreign policy issue what you purchase and what you do not purchase and if you are in a region that is quite unstable not just between Armenia and Azerbaijan but also in the south you have Iran and you have the Near East so the thinking is that a large part of your budget should be spent on defense that is a sensible thought to have and you don't know with such autocratic regimes I think it's difficult to say I don't specifically know where these drones came from but I believe that there was a lot of funds being diverted because the whole economic sector in Azerbaijan they have a certain civil servant, oligarchy and the state and the economy are working hand in hand really so the question really was about if during your research you saw any other financial sources being used because in your graphics it was quite explicit that the money is getting less so the question was where did the money for rather expensive arms come from and maybe you could have seen something yes of course but I would only have to speculate and could you find out from where these drones were controlled because Azerbaijan allegedly does not have the resources to actually carry out such operations that is a good question hmm no sorry I could only speculate I'm not going to start any false rumors I don't know yeah okay thank you up to that point and then there are several exclaves and one question is about the effects of the exclave of Nakhichevan do you know anything about that? how it looks in that region? is anything happening in these in that exclave how do the people in that region react, respond are there any tendencies to occupy these so I'm just asking very naively because I'm not informed that is the question and the other exclave a smaller one called Artavan or Artawas I don't know how it's pronounced again the question is how if you have any information about is it disputed what is going to happen in your view yeah from the Armenian side I do not see any tendency to continue operating militarily that is something I can definitely say regarding the exclave specifically I can't say I have no information I would have to look again okay thank you another question about Georgia do you know anything about their position in this conflict how they are acting yes Georgia I would have to get deep into that that would take us a bit too far alright I understand that so that is difficult at this point another question is about Turkey the supposed unreadiness to anger Turkey is that the factor is that a factor that is leading the responses from any other states no no no no I don't believe no I don't believe that the conflict part is not being willing all the international actors I don't think that anyone is trying to annoy Turkey on the country that could have acted much stronger in sanctioned Turkey for getting involved in this conflict I hope that answers the questions otherwise I haven't really understood it yes thank you we were talking about Nakhichiwan shortly and we have a further clarification on that question the accord has does it include a corridor to Nakhichiwan and are there any changes there or a previous accord does it include that which accord are you talking about I really haven't looked at the exclaves I don't know I've only taken a very broad look and the Lajin corridor is agreed on but I don't know any about any other corridors