BORDER BUSTING BAKU BONEHEADS
Friday, August 8th, 2014
BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
With pup-Turk (Azeri) corpses piling up, the boneheads in Baku are
probably scratching their heads as to what might be their next steps.
It seems the ten day span over which small bands of Azerbaijan's
armed forces have briefly breached Armenian lines (both republics'
borders) is the culmination of the ever increasing number of sniper
and other attacks initiated by Baku. Add to this a new minister of
defense occupying the office who seems to want to strut his stuff. Of
course, we can't forget the many years' worth of military buildup,
including drones. Interestingly, two of those drones seem to have
been downed by Artzakh's forces in recent weeks.
But all this is for naught. By most accounts, a serious escalation
in hostilities is not anticipated by analysts. The Armenian side
is attributing this senseless loss of life on both sides to Baku's
standard operating procedures-- create tension ahead of upcoming
meetings to abort any hope of meaningful progress in negotiations.
But there are some interesting observations to be made.
The normally bland Edward Nalbandian, Foreign Minister of the Republic
of Armenia, actually seems to have developed some energy. The U.S.
Department of State issues a typical, bloodless, statement, along with
the OSCE and UN. I suggest they read "A Picture Worth a Thousand Words"
which appeared in Asbarez. A 15-year old living in the border village
of Baganis, Armenia sketched his dream of amity between Armenians and
Azeris. It profoundly moved this teenager's camp counselors. Perhaps
it will knock some sense into the "diplomats" who regularly call on
BOTH sides to desist from escalation and hostilities, despite ONE
side being the consistent and persistent aggressor.
But the Azeri assaults are not limited to the battlefield. A few
days ago, an Azeri news source ran an item that stated an Armenian
reporter who is "close to" the military had written that Armenians
lost dozens of soldiers in these last rounds of fighting and that
the Armenian side was suppressing this news. It turned out to be a
complete fabrication, nothing of the sort had been written. Then, we
have another attribution, to Ara Manoogian, who has been critical of
various community efforts. Some hack by the name of Lev Maas, writing
in Russian on the Azeri site haqqin.az has concocted a bogus "letter"
that Ara allegedly sent to this site. Nowhere is the letter reproduced
in its entirety. We're just treated to "excerpts" from it, along with
real quotes from Ara's website, all woven into a fantastic fairy tale.
Then, we also have Timoth Garton Ash speaking up on this issue. You
might recall this is the British political writer and (conservative)
Hoover Institution associate who was a strong voice against the
French Genocide denial laws that failed to pass. It may be that some
of the money that Baku is spending on public relations may actually
be paying off in the form of getting their fantasies served up to a
broader worldwide audience.
Map of Armenia and Artsakh and the surrounding region
Perhaps it's time to simplify life for both our republics by creating a
third Armenian republic. Please see the accompanying map from Artzakh's
Washington, D.C. office's website. I have drawn a blue line (perhaps
hard to distinguish in the print edition of the paper) that runs
the shortest distance from the Mingechaur (Mingachevir) reservoir's
(a body of water created in the 1950s by the damming of the Kura
River) southerly side to the current border of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic. I suggest driving the Azeri's back to that line.
It would reduce (by about seven times, by way of a very rough visual
estimate) the length of the borders that Armenians would have to
defend against Azeri incursions. Not only that, It would give Armenians
control over a stretch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, garnering
handsome transit fees, perhaps taken in kind as oil. It would also
put one of the three rail-routes from Azerbaijan to the north under
Armenian control. Plus, this would give our side even more leverage
over Baku from a water supply/flood control/electricity production
perspective. The newly liberated territories could be constituted
as the Armenian Republic of Cantsag (Gandsak) [currently referred
to in the Turkified name Gyanja). Such a development might make the
boneheads in Baku cool off for another twenty years.
Of course this doesn't address the problem of increased (likely Turkish
assisted) Azeri military activity from Nakhichevan. But that's an
issue for another article.
What do you think? Should we initiate a campaign to convince the
authorities in Stepanakert and Yerevan to teach the pup-Turks this
particular border-busting lesson?
http://asbarez.com/1...baku-boneheads/