Baku

Summary While the American mainstream media was busy discussing the fly on Mike Pence’s head during Vice Presidential Debate, the Armenian-Turkish conflict entered the second week of violence across the entire line of contact (LoC) between the Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, and many regional and extra-regional powers took a neutral to stand and watch attentively from the sidelines. An attempt by Azerbaijani-Turkish and ISIS-linked formations to encircle Artsakh by taking over its strategic communication highways with the Republic of Armenia while carrying out devastating blows against Artsakh’s Defense Army in a new and enhanced blitzkrieg strategy has failed dramatically....

YEREVAN, ARMENIA We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now. Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership. In this global and so contracted century of ours, where resources and rights often compete for precedence, domestic demeanor and foreign affairs form part of one and the same policy agenda....

EVENT: Senior presidential adviser Jirair (Gerard) Libaridian resigned. SIGNIFICANCE: Libaridian’s departure comes at a time when Armenia has been mounting a relatively successful effort to build its international ties. ANALYSIS: On September 15, Jirair Libaridian announced that President Levon Ter-Petrosian had accepted his resignation as a senior foreign policy advisor, on purely personal grounds. Libaridian has been a key architect of Armenian foreign policy since independence, playing a central role in negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh and in warming relations with Turkey....

Almost every day now media outlets report on the continuous multinational effort to forge out a final peace settlement in the nine year-old conflict between the government of Azerbaijan and the people of the de- facto independent Nagorno Karabakh Republic-Artsakh. Their reports generally contain a brief on a recent round of talks, where parties would once again reiterate their incompatible positions, with mediators privately promising a diplomatic breakthrough soon. Over the years such reports have become enveloped in the usual repetition of grim statistics: tallies numbering the dead and refugees, and areas occupied....