The most revealing part of President Ilham Aliyev’s 2020 Al Jazeera interview was not what the Azerbaijani leader said about the war that had just begun. It was the chronology behind his argument. For President Aliyev, the events of September 2020 did not begin on 27 September.
They began almost three decades earlier, when the conflict over formerly occupied Karabakh turned into a war that left Azerbaijan with large areas of its internationally recognised territory outside its control. By 1993, the UN Security Council had adopted four resolutions calling for the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territory and urging a negotiated settlement. Those resolutions were unanimous, though their implementation remained elusive.
That gap between legal language and political reality became the central grievance in the Azerbaijani President’s argument. The problem, he said, was not the absence of international law but the absence of consequences for failing to implement it. Besides, there is a difficult truth behind that frustration, as events in the past portrayed quite a different picture.
For example, the OSCE Minsk Group spent decades trying to mediate the conflict, while the status quo survived. For Azerbaijan, every year of unsuccessful diplomacy was not simply another year without peace. It was another year in which hundreds of thousands of displaced people remained unable to return to their homes.
However, what happened in the past was not left unnoticed, and the turning point came gradually. The April 2016 fighting demonstrated that the old ceasefire was fragile and that talks and promises at the negotiation table yileded results in favour of only one side - Armenia - the party that was appetised with every single negligence by international organisations and mediators. Perhaps it was the first test of Armenia itself on the battleground since its first invasion of Azerbaijani territories and its old and dilapidated military arsenal that it inherited from the Soviet leftovers.
Then came the political upheaval in Armenia in 2018 and increasingly confrontational rhetoric. That was another major event in the history of Armenia where political collisions revealed real weakness in the transformation from an occupant to a self-declared so-called 'republic' mode. In July 2020, fighting erupted around Tovuz, far from the main Karabakh frontline, and President Aliyev presented this sequence as evidence that the existing diplomatic process was being hollowed out.
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