Reinventing the Caucasus

Thomas de Waal is Caucasus editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. His book, Black Garden, on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, will be published by New York University Press later this year.

In the winter of 1919 and the spring of 1920, the British journalist C. E. Bechhofer traveled

around southern Russia and the southern Caucasus. His In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920 is a classic and terrifying account of a region imploding. The White armies' resistance to the Bolsheviks was crumbling and the newly independent states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were falling apart. Bechhofer witnessed floods of refugees, famine, typhus epidemics, and terrible massacres by all sides.

Bechhofer, a fellow freelancer, was an inspiration and guide for me as I spent much of 2000 and 2001 traveling through the south Caucasus and doing research for a book on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Experiencing independence anew in the 1990s, the three Caucasian countries went through a depressingly similar descent into chaos and self-destructive nationalism. Ten years into their second round of independence, it frequently felt as though I was studying the sequel of the same conflicts Bechhofer had observed 80 years before. At the same time, I shared his love and excitement for a region that can be dangerous but is never dull. As he assures us in his foreword: "[L]est the reader should come to these pages in too gloomy a spirit, I venture to assure him that many of the incidents of Caucasian life during the past three years belong as much to the world of opera bouffe as to history." 1

The pervasive theme of Bechhofer's tour of the Caucasus is highly relevant today. These mountains are capable of generating a lot of international chaos--and it is not necessarily all their fault. As in 1919, so in 2002, the economic and demographic importance of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas is small. By no calculation could Georgia, Armenia, or Azerbaijan be called strong states: currently their combined population is about 15 million people, and their combined GDP, at around $10 billion, is minuscule in international terms (compare it with British Petroleum's turnover for the year 2000 of $148 billion). Yet by an accident of geography, which has situated them between Russia and the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia, these countries are fated to be the meeting place and a crossroads for the "great powers." These big power encounters have generally been more battlefield than bazaar. In 1915-20 and 1991-94, Turkey's support for Azerbaijan and Russia's for Armenia--both explicable in terms of their narrow strategic priorities--helped fuel war and destruction. In the mid to late 1990s, Moscow and Washington polarized Caucasian politics by their competition for energy resources and pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea. So the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Iran care less about the Caucasus itself than about each other in the Caucasus.

This year, the relative importance of this region is growing again. In part, this is because it lies on the margins of what is now the most turbulent area of the world: the crescent of land running from Central Asia through Afghanistan and Iran to the Mediterranean. Another factor is that the Caspian Sea oil boom, first hyped and then ridiculed, finally seems about to become a reality.

Contrary to some of the wilder predictions of the mid-1990s, the Caspian will never remotely challenge the primacy of the Middle East as an oil-producing region. Current estimates suggest that the upper limit of its capacity might be 5 percent of world output by 2020. But a regular supply of oil, flowing through friendly countries and arriving in Turkey by 2006, could become an extremely welcome alternative energy source for the West. In the words of energy analyst Lucian Pugliaresi: "[A] final component of U.S. energy security strategy is the diversification of supplies to regions outside the Persian Gulf, such as the Caspian Region. Even a modest reduction in world oil prices offers large-scale benefits to a major oil-importing country like the United States, which is likely to be importing 15 million barrels per day in 2020." 2

The other reason why the Caucasus cannot be ignored is the ticking time bomb of its unresolved conflicts, particularly the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. Karabakh could be called an example of "geopolitical chaos theory." This tiny mountainous region in western Azerbaijan, with a mostly Armenian population of only 180,000 inhabitants, generated a conflict in 1988 that caused havoc in the lives of millions. The Armenian majority of the province wanted to secede from Soviet Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia. Both sides held passionate convictions that Karabakh was an inalienable part of their homeland. The dispute successively antagonized the whole of Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan, split the Politburo, helped destroy the Soviet Union, and caused a regional war. Although the conflict was halted in 1994, it continues to exert its dread influence over the wider region in the form of poisoned politics, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, closed borders, and crippled economies.

So long as a peaceful solution is not found, there is a continuing risk that the next leader in Azerbaijan after Heidar Aliev may be tempted to play the patriotic card and try to retake Nagorno-Karabakh from the Armenians by force. No one can say how this would end. None of the military experts I have spoken to believe Azerbaijan could win a military victory; the only assured result is more chaos, misery, and disruption. The nightmare scenario is that next time Russia and NATO-member Turkey, who have both formalized their military obligations to Armenia and Azerbaijan over the past five years, would get sucked into the fighting.

The fractious Caucasus could also give birth to other conflicts that would destabilize the wider region. Both Armenia and Georgia have defused tensions in the Armenian-populated province of Javakheti in Georgia, but socio-economic discontent there will rise if Georgia enters a new period of chaos. More worrying still would be any spillover of tension caused by a power struggle for the presidency of Azerbaijan to the 20 million or so Azerbaijanis of northern Iran. These are two scenarios in which instability in Georgia and Azerbaijan could suddenly be felt in the wider world.

The issues of oil and unresolved conflict are related. A renewed war over Karabakh could badly hurt Caspian Sea energy development: either indirectly because foreign investors might pull out of Azerbaijan, or directly because Karabakh Armenian forces might attack the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, which, at its nearest point, will run only 30 kilometers to the north of Nagorno-Karabakh. All this is an extra incentive for the West to use its leverage to seek a negotiated settlement over Karabakh in the next few years. As one Western oil analyst said to me, "Who wants to sink $12 billion into a potential war zone?"

What follows are some ideas about reassessing Western policy in the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. A fresh approach should recognize that the region's three big neighbors--Iran, Russia, and Turkey--will always have a more sustained and serious interest in the region than will any Western power, and that there is a need for more sensitive rapprochement with Russia in particular. But chiefly, it means that outside policymakers must start to conceptualize the south Caucasus as a whole region: all too often, they have treated it as a jumbled collection of policy fragments.

The View in 2002

The outlook for the south Caucasus in 2002 is a gloomy one. For the past nine years, the two colossal figures of the presidents of Georgia and Azerbaijan, Eduard Shevardnadze and Heidar Aliev, have dominated the region. These two experienced Politburo veterans imposed much needed stability by suppressing the warlords who had made Georgia and Azerbaijan ungovernable in the early 1990s. But now the grip of both men is slackening and their very political bulk is beginning to become a liability. Their main legacy may be not so much political stability as corrosive socio-economic decline.

Georgia is in a slow-burning crisis. At the end of 2001, the first mass street protests for many years took place in Tbilisi. The trigger for the demonstrations was a move to close the independent television station Rustavi-2, but their deeper cause was widespread anger at electricity shortages and corruption, and the belief that President Shevardnadze had inflated turnout figures in the 2000 presidential election in order to have himself reelected. Around the same time, there was renewed violence in the breakaway region of Abkhazia.

Part of Georgia's problem is that Vladimir Putin's Russia has grown more hostile--in words at least. In 2000, Moscow punished Tbilisi by requiring Georgians to obtain visas to travel to Russia, creating problems for the more than half million Georgians working there. Russia accuses Georgia of harboring Chechen fighters in its territory and uses its continued troop presence in the semi-independent areas of Abkhazia, Ajaria, and Javakheti as a lever of pressure on the government in Tbilisi.

Yet while Russia talks tough with Georgia, its actions are far more considered than they were a few years ago. On some issues Moscow is even being more constructive. Last November, for example, Russia finally gave its consent to a new United Nations framework document that draws up the ground rules for negotiations over Abkhazia. Moscow seems to have turned away from the kind of covert military destabilization it practiced in the early 1990s. If, as is seems likely, Russia wants to bring the Shevardnadze regime into line, it is trying to bring that about by diplomatic and economic pressure, not open intervention.

Ultimately, most of the blame for the parlous state of Georgia must be laid at the door of its own leaders. Although it was one of the most prosperous Soviet republics in the 1980s, independent Georgia has been blighted by chronic corruption and bad government. Around $1 billion in U.S. aid has made much less of a difference than it should have. So far, as in the other two Caucasian republics, public indifference and cynicism toward politicians has acted as a safety valve against mass street protests, but that is hardly a recipe for long-term stability. In response to the crisis at the end of last year, Shevardnadze sacked his government, but he failed to address the central issue in Georgian politics, namely, his own declining legitimacy and lack of a clear successor.

On the surface, Azerbaijan seems much more fortunate. After gloomy times in 1998-2000, the country's energy prospects now seem much brighter. Construction of the Main Export Pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast, which looked in doubt for a long time, finally appears set to start this year. Even Russian oil companies have expressed interest in it. If oil begins to flow through Baku-Ceyhan on schedule in 2006, this could provide instant revenues of around $500 million a year for Azerbaijan, rising even higher than that over the following five years.

Yet Azerbaijan is also a deeply troubled state. Outside the oil sector, there is almost no economy to speak of. As in the rest of the region, hundreds of thousands of young men have gone to Russia or Turkey to find work. Azerbaijan's corruption is perhaps the worst in the entire former Soviet Union. Popular discontent is growing--and there is a real danger that an influx of oil wealth could sharpen social tensions rather than ease them.

President Aliev continues to make almost every political decision in Azerbaijan, big or small, and this dominance is now a growing liability. After "l'etat c'est moi," it is a small step to "apres moi le deluge." The president is now 78 and in poor health, his second term expires in 2003, and it is anyone's guess what will happen then. The heir apparent, Aliev's son Ilham, who is deputy chairman of the state oil firm SOCAR, lacks the experience and the ruthlessness required to run Azerbaijan. When the elder Aliev goes, there is likely to be a power struggle to succeed him, just as socio-economic problems rise to the surface. The situation in Azerbaijan could deteriorate very fast.

The third Caucasian country, Armenia, is in just as miserable a state as its two neighbors. The price of victory in the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has been the closure of its two longest borders, with Azerbaijan and Turkey. Years of socioeconomic stagnation have led to catastrophic rates of emigration, as the best-educated Armenians have left to find work in Russia and the United States. A population of 3.8 million in 1989 may have sunk to as low as 2.4 million (a much delayed census recently gave a figure of 3 million, but this includes many "dead souls" who are registered in the country but have actually emigrated). President Robert Kocharian, a Karabakh Armenian, has seen most of his public support among the Armenian population erode since his election in 1998. He remains strong by default, because of the lack of a credible opposition.

It is too early to say what the long-term effects of the September 11 attacks in the United States will be in the south Caucasus, but Georgia has already found itself uncomfortably close to the action as the war against terror lurches onward. In March, the United States said it was sending military advisers to train Georgian security forces to tackle suspected Al Qaeda fighters taking refuge in the turbulent Pankisi Gorge region, near the border with Chechnya. Russia's angry reaction to the promised American military deployment cast the first big chill over the post-September 11 friendship between Washington and Moscow. Suddenly, the Georgians, incapable of imposing order on a lawless region in their own territory, found they were in the middle of a great-power spat, which had little to do with their own long-term strategic interests. By contrast, Azerbaijan has seized a chance to assert itself as a responsible pro-Western Islamic state on the borders of an unfriendly region. The Armenians, who have spent ten years juggling their alliances with both Russia and the United States, are delighted to see them beginning to bury their differences.

September 11 has speeded up the much overlooked warming in relations between Russia and Azerbaijan. The start of the quiet flirtation between the two countries, which were bitter rivals in the early 1990s, can be dated to 1996, but it has only become a public affair since Putin came to power. Many Russian officials have concluded that their aggressive anti-Azerbaijan policies of the early 1990s only succeeded in alienating the most strategically important of the three Caucasian states. The Putin regime needs Baku's cooperation in monitoring and detaining Islamic fighters from Chechnya and Dagestan, while Aliev wants Russian support to ensure a smooth succession in his country. The personal factor should not be overlooked. Many of Putin's new KGB-educated elite in Moscow loathe Shevardnadze, whom they see as a Gorbachev-era relic who traded away the Soviet Union's superpower status (exactly the same reason many in Washington harbor an overly romantic attachment to him). In contrast, the Russians perceive Aliev, whose strained relations with Yeltsin dated to their days in the Politburo, as someone they can do business with. When Putin traveled to Baku in January 2001, he presented President Aliev with a copy of his graduation diploma from the Leningrad KGB academy. The message was not exactly subtle. "You and I, Heidar Alievich, are from the same school," Putin was saying. Aliev paid a friendly return visit to Moscow in January 2002.

Russia and Azerbaijan still have reasons to distrust one another. But Russia conspicuously maintained its visa-free agreement with Azerbaijan when it introduced visas for Georgians. More importantly, there is now very little that divides Washington and Moscow over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. In the mid-1990s, the Russian and American mediators on Karabakh often seemed to be working as much against each other as for an agreement. Over the past two years the Americans and Russians have been working in close harmony on the issue.

If there was no breakthrough on Nagorno-Karabakh in 2001, it was not for want of trying. Presidents Bush and Putin, and France's president Jacques Chirac, all took a personal interest in the peace talks that took place last year in Paris and Key West, Florida. They ultimately failed because the internal resistance to striking a peace deal, especially in Azerbaijan, proved stronger than the external pressures for one. In 2002, as Aliev's regime wanes, the idea of compromise with Armenia slips further off the agenda in Azerbaijan. Antagonism toward the Armenian "aggressor" is an essential badge of honor for all Azerbaijani politicians--and is likely to remain so until at least the presidential elections late next year.

The most troubling feature of the southern Caucasus remains the wide gulf between the distant and unpopular rulers and their embittered citizens. The argument that Russian (or Turkish) "imperialism" is the cause of domestic problems has worn increasingly thin. In 1920, Bechhofer, a lover of Georgian culture, believed the Georgians had squandered their independence. He wrote scathingly: "That [the Georgians'] new status had brought duties and responsibilities with it was the last thing that entered their heads; the propagandists who had babbled to them of selfish `foreign imperialism' had done their work too well. They aped what they imagined to be the characteristic features of the Great Powers, with the result that they soon had all the airs and none of the graces of their models." 3 The 1990s have been better than that--but not much. The contrast between the progress made by the Caucasian states and the three Baltic states since 1991 is depressing. The Baltics, too, have had historical problems and poor diplomatic relations with Russia--but, focusing their energies on economic liberalization, they have made great strides toward prosperity and the West. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia make for a sorry comparison. How should Western policymakers respond?

Cool Calculations

A prerequisite to a fresh policy for the Caucasus region is a cool assessment of its strategic importance. This requires a reckoning with Russia-in-the-Caucasus, for the two assessments are closely linked. Over the last ten years, the lurches and inconsistencies in Western policy have left many people in the Caucasus bewildered and disillusioned with the West.

In the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the West's priority was firmly on Russia ahead of the smaller post-Soviet states. The Clinton administration's--never clearly articulated--"Russia First" policy meant that Moscow's primacy of interest in the Caucasus was respected. Some policymakers still subscribe to the Russia First doctrine--and September 11 will have given it a new allure. Why interfere in Russia's backyard, the argument goes, when bilateral relations with Moscow on a range of strategic issues are far more important?

The official Western stance began to shift in 1995-96, partly as a result of the first war in Chechnya and partly as a result of the signing of the so-called Contract of the Century between Azerbaijan and a group of Western oil companies. Suddenly, many Westerners "discovered" the southern Caucasus. The Clinton administration began to promote the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project, seeing it not only as an energy route but as a strategic bond tying Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey and the West. The political agenda behind the scheme made it not so much Baku-Ceyhan as Not-Russia-Not-Iran. This exasperated both oilmen and regional politicians. When the pipeline's commercial viability was in doubt in February 2000, Kazakstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev said sardonically, "You could get the impression that what is to be built is not a purely civilian structure but something that constitutes the dividing line between good and evil." 4 At the same time, Georgian and Azerbaijani politicians were welcomed with open arms in Washington by Americans whose Cold War memories and traditional antagonism toward Russia led them to make bold claims about the international importance of the new independent states of the Caucasus.

This sudden warmth did not of course reflect the real standing of Georgia and Azerbaijan in the larger world picture--but one cannot blame Georgians and Azerbaijanis for failing to appreciate that. Any statement by a Western politician about the southern Caucasus is picked up, reproduced, and magnified on the small canvas of the local media, far in excess of what its author could imagine possible. When the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Robert Hunter, visited Baku in 1997 and talked of Azerbaijan's "strategic importance," for example, Azerbaijani newspapers began to talk as though Azerbaijan had begun the accession process for NATO.

A grand view of Georgia and Azerbaijan as important strategic bulwarks against Russia is an untenable position--in the first place for the Georgians and Azerbaijanis themselves, who have to live with Russia as a neighbor, while Westerners do not. Russian policy under Putin toward what Moscow still calls the Near Abroad is much more coordinated and pragmatic than it was, and September 11 underlined that Russia can hardly be called a strategic threat to the West. The same, with more qualifications, can be said about Iran. To run a policy for the south Caucasus based on containment of those two countries is to remain stuck in a worldview of the 1980s, while raising unsustainable expectations among naive local politicians. After all, if a real crisis did break out, what NATO parliament would be prepared to send troops to the southern Caucasus? Russia's--and Turkey's and Iran's--strategic concerns in the region are far more immediate, and the only credible Western approach is to make the argument to these three big neighbors that security and stability in the Caucasus is best achieved as a common project.

Inventing a Region

But perhaps we have gotten ahead of ourselves. In an important sense, even to talk about a "Caucasus policy" is to put the cart before the horse. To have a policy, you first need a region. At the moment, there is a more fundamental problem, which is that, except on the map, the south Caucasus region does not actually exist as a region.

Put simply, the present-day Caucasus is such a tangle of closed borders, roadblocks, and dead ends that it is a region more in the mind than on the ground. In 2000-01, I spent days and thousands of miles simply getting from point A to point B. Most people simply do not bother. Armenia's two longest borders have been closed for ten years. Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhichevan has been cut off from the rest of the country for the same period. Even between regions not at war with each other contact is minimal. There are no direct flights between Tbilisi and Yerevan, and poor communications between Georgia and Azerbaijan. Customs charges and harassment by traffic policemen discourage drivers from crossing borders. If locals travel for business or pleasure, they are far more likely to go to Russia or Turkey.

This mutual isolation dates back to Soviet times. In the postwar period, the three Caucasian union republics became mini-states within the Soviet system, which competed with one another for Moscow's resources, rather than cooperating with one another. Independence and war have only deepened the alienation. Nowadays, to hear people in the three countries talk, it is often as though their neighbors do not exist. Armenians suggest that it is far more important to have relations with Los Angeles and Moscow than with Tbilisi or Yerevan, while many Georgians and Azerbaijanis talk of Armenia as some black hole, which does not belong to their region at all.

The ruling elites have good short-term reasons for avoiding regional cooperation. Increased trade would undermine the cartels and monopolies that they use to enrich themselves. The isolation of Armenia is Azerbaijan's main diplomatic weapon against the Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. The outside world has no such excuses--yet foreigners persist in treating the south Caucasus as a collection of unconnected bits, rather than as a whole.

In the 1990s, both Washington and Moscow in effect subcontracted out their policies toward the southern Caucasus. In Russia, the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Security Council in the Kremlin, and the oil companies were in continuous conflict with one another, each supporting their own friends and allies in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the cause of their intra-Moscow power struggles. In 1997, things came to such a pass that the businessman Boris Berezovsky, having had himself made deputy secretary of Russia's Secretary Council, jetted around the region, holding private talks with Shevardnadze and Aliev at which no diplomats were present. In effect, Berezovsky, who had substantial private oil interests, was privatizing part of Russia's foreign policy.

The United States was little better (while the European Union has been more conspicuous in the region by its absence). In Washington, it was as though Armenia, homeland to a million American voters, and Azerbaijan, a potential source of American energy, were not related at all. Congress strongly supported Armenia in its conflict with Azerbaijan and in 1992 passed Section 907a of the Freedom Support Act, barring U.S. government aid to Azerbaijan (finally waived in January 2002 as a reward for Baku's support after September 11). Other policymakers, with an interest in oil or with an anti-Russian bias, such as James Baker or Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged support for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and for Azerbaijan against Armenia.

Yet it is quite obvious that if these three small countries have any kind of future to look forward to, it can only be through vastly increased regional cooperation. Their small populations and interlocking geography make regional trade and communication a prerequisite to any kind of economic growth, while also giving Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia the continuing capacity to destroy and destabilize one another, should they wish to.

As Russian policy toward the south Caucasus becomes more coordinated, it is time for Western policymakers to catch up. If pro-Armenian congressmen extended their schedules and traveled to Georgia or Azerbaijan, they might appreciate that Armenia does not exist in a vacuum and cannot ignore its neighbors forever. And if oilmen began to lobby the Azerbaijani leadership to make sensible compromises with Armenia, that would guarantee the stability of their long-term investments as well as promoting the cause of peace. In the 1990s, the U.S. government created the post of "Caspian coordinator" but had no such high-up official responsible for the Caucasus. It is time for someone to take on the role of "Caucasus coordinator."

Forming a fresh vision of the south Caucasus as a region would require some unconventional thinking. It means, for example, more contact with the kind of people Western officials prefer to ignore. Unfortunately for them, the Caucasian body politic contains three unrecognized separatist statelets, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, the first of which seceded de facto from Azerbaijan and the latter two from Georgia in 1992-94, and show no desire to return. These three statelets are extremely isolated; their officials have little contact with foreign governments and their citizens find it difficult to get visas to travel abroad. Yet this isolation has not weakened their resolve to be independent; if anything it has only strengthened their siege mentality. Dialogue with the three entities, development programs--anything short of granting them political recognition--is far more likely to give them a stake in returning to their own geographical region. 5

A unified policy for the Caucasus also means that Chechnya cannot be swept under the carpet--much as most Western officials would love to do so. Since September 2001, Putin's administration has broadcast more loudly the message that in Chechnya, Russia is also exercising its legitimate right to combat "international Islamic terrorism." Many in the West have been happy to take that message at face value. Yet anyone who has paid attention to Chechnya over the last few years knows that foreign Islamic fighters with links to Al Qaeda are just one--relatively recent--part of the problem. In other words, if all the foreign volunteers in Chechnya were eliminated tomorrow, that would not bring peace to that unhappy republic. Russia's own incompetence and brutality are an incomparably bigger factor in both the origins and the continuation of the conflict. Proper political negotiations with the rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov are not just the only possible way forward for Chechnya; they would help to neutralize Russia's tensions with Georgia and the problems of the south Caucasus as a whole.

If there is some small consolation in revisiting C. E. Bechhofer's apocalyptic tour of the south Caucasus in 1919-20, it is in the thought that, bad as things have been in the region in the 1990s, they were many degrees worse there 80 years ago. A fifth of the population of Armenia died in its first two years of independence; intercommunal pogroms in Baku claimed the lives of thousands, rather than dozens, of people; fighting raged in Georgia and Karabakh without attracting any international attention at all. Nowadays, if trouble begins again in Abkhazia or Karabakh, the international community at least has mechanisms for trying to deal with it. But if the restraints on conflict are greater today, so is the technology of war and the potential destruction it can wreak. This is now a region not just of horsemen and mountains, but of S-300 missiles and oil pipelines. The south Caucasus is never so much a region as in the capacity for conflict to spread across borders. The greatest priority for the latter-day great powers is to make sure that the next Caucasian war is not allowed to happen.

Notes

1. C. E. Bechhofer, In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920 (London: Collins, 1921, reprinted by Ayer, Salem, N.H., 1992), p. x.

2. Lucian Pugliaresi, Energy Security: How Valuable Is Caspian Oil? (Cambridge: Harvard University Caspian Studies Program, January 2001).

3. Bechhofer, In Denikin's Russia, p. 44.

4. Nazarbayev, interview in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 24, 2000, quoted in Radio Liberty's Caucasus Report.

5. For a stimulating discussion of the issues raised by the separatist statelets, see Dov Lynch, "Frozen Conflicts in Eurasian Security," The World Today (London), August/September 2001.

Map (Azerbaijan and Armenia)