Artsakh Strong

While the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave is over for now, the prospect of breaking the generational cycle of violence between the two nations remains bleak.

For centuries a cycle of bloodshed and displacement has echoed through the hills and forests of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In modern history, Armenian and Azeri struggle for control over the region was quelled at the beginning on the 20th century by Bolshevik invasion and Karabakh’s subsequent incorporation into the USSR. Soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain however, Armenia took control of the land in a four-year war that killed tens of thousands and left more than a million Azeris homeless.

While the territory remained internationally recognised as belonging to Azerbaijan, Karabakh was under Armenian control for almost thirty years. Then in late 2020 Azerbaijan reignited the age-old dispute between the two mortal enemies.

The forty-four-day war that ensued simultaneously mirrored and juxtaposed the one that took place in the 1990's. The black and white print images of the fleeing Azeri hordes that covered the world's front pages were replaced by jpegs pinging across Twitter and Telegram of Armenians forced from the very same lands. Silver-haired soldiers who recounted their days of trekking through Karabakh's black forests to face their enemy down the barrel of a rifle were enlisted once again, but this time only to take cover from the deathly buzz of drones and whistles of shelling that came from overhead - most never fired shot for the whole war.

This time it was the Azeri throngs that erupted in jubilation through the streets of their capital, Baku, as the war was declared won by their smirking President. In Yerevan, Armenian Parliament and the Prime Minister's office were stormed by the seething wives, mothers and sons of the fallen, who felt betrayed by the capitulation of their Prime Minister who was no longer willing to fight a losing battle.

While the war is over for now, a sustainable peace is remote. The bitter rivalry and hatred between the two nations lives on in the Azeri soldiers who remember from childhood the days when they were routed from their homes by pitiless Armenian attack, and in the hearts of Armenian children who may now dream to one day avenge the same brutality that they have suffered some thirty years on.