Armenia and Azerbaijan

Recently, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region has continued, with fierce fighting between the two forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, and the number of casualties has further increased. At present, both Azerbaijan and Armenia have declared a state of war, and the news of armed conflict between the two countries has also become a global hot news. Then, why can't Azerbaijan and Armenia, both in Transcaucasia, get along?

Armenia, located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, is a landlocked country with Azerbaijan in the east and Yerevan in the capital. Between Armenia and Azerbaijan, there is a place called Karabakh (hereinafter referred to as Naka). Karabakh is located in the South Caucasus, mostly mountainous and forested, with an area of about 4,400 square kilometers and a population of about 65,438+800,000 (in 2020), of which 76% are ethnic Armenians.

Historically, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been fighting for national jurisdiction. As early as the19th century, Karabakh was ruled by Russia, where Christian Armenians and Islamic Azerbaijanis lived together. Tsarist Russia carried out the national geopolitical strategy here and changed the local ethnic structure through large-scale immigration, thus laying the foundation for future conflicts.

With the support of Russia, Armenians moved here in large numbers, and the ethnic composition of this Naka region was reversed. Armenians gradually replaced Azerbaijanis, and Armenians became the main ethnic group in the region.

19 17 after the Russian revolution, Azerbaijan and Armenia were founded one after another. 1922, Armenia and Azerbaijan joined the Soviet Union as * * * countries. 1923, the Soviet Union divided Nagorno-Karabakh into Azerbaijan for the sake of geopolitical balance and became an autonomous prefecture of "Azerbaijan Soviet Republic". Armenia has always been very dissatisfied with this and asked the Central Committee of the Union to "correct" it whenever it had the opportunity.

Due to the tight control of the Soviet Union, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict disappeared for decades, but the problem was never really solved. Since 1987, the nationalist movement in Karabakh has intensified, demanding that the autonomous prefecture be returned to Armenian jurisdiction in different ways.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union fell into economic crisis. The dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has reappeared. Because Nagorno-Karabakh is located in Azerbaijan, out of dissatisfaction with the local economic and living conditions, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh have been seeking to incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia, demanding that this area be under Armenian jurisdiction, but Azerbaijan firmly rejects any request to change its territory.

1In June 1989, Naka declared its independence, and conflicts broke out in Asia and Afghanistan. Shortly after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan and Armenia competed for the ownership of Nagorny Karabakh. 30,000 people were killed in the conflict, and Armenia occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding parts, which originally belonged to Azerbaijan. It was not until 1994 that Azerbaijan and Armenia reached a ceasefire agreement, but the hostility between the two sides did not disappear, and armed conflicts around Nagorno-Karabakh occurred from time to time.

Up to now, although the two countries have held a series of negotiations on the status of Karabakh, and the international community has also participated in mediating conflicts and put forward various plans, the Nagorno-Karabakh issue has not made any progress so far. At present, Nagorno-Karabakh is actually independent, but it is generally recognized internationally as a part of Azerbaijan, although Azerbaijan has been unable to exercise any substantive jurisdiction over the region.