Last week, a statement by Ararat Mirzoyan, the speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia, went virtually unnoticed. He said that Azerbaijan’s real motives were not only to take Nagorno-Karabakh, but to “wipe Armenia off the political map”. He immediately added: “If we abandon Artsakh [Haut-Karabakh, NDLR], we will abandon Meghri, and then Yerevan. “Why does this close friend of Prime Minister Nikol Pachinian – who played a decisive role in the Armenian” revolution “of 2018 – cites the small town of Meghri (less than 5,000 inhabitants), in the extreme south of Armenia, on the borders of Iran?
It is because Azerbaijan has never made a secret of its desire to monopolize the “Meghri Passage”, a strip of ten kilometers wide, which would allow it to link its territory to Nakhitchevan, a small autonomous republic of 400,000. inhabitants, as large as a French department and populated by Azeris. To try to better understand the conflict between Baku and Yerevan, we must first unfold a geography map. Historically, Nakhitchevan is linked to Armenia (according to biblical references, Noah after the flood would have gone there). The territory was annexed by Russia in 1828. But in 1921, the Communists attached it to Azerbaijan, while nearly half of the population was Armenian. In the name of the eternal saying: divide and reign better.
No territorial continuity with Azerbaijan
Since then, the entire Armenian population has been expelled from the Autonomous Republic of Nakhichevan. The Azeris are accused of wanting to eliminate all traces of the Armenian past, attacking in particular the khachkars, the sculpted Armenian tombstones. The main problem is that geographically Nakhichevan has borders only with Turkey, Armenia and Iran. On the other hand, it does not have territorial continuity with the rest of Azerbaijan. To get to Baku, its inhabitants must take the plane or take the road … through Iranian territory. Only here, the relations are not necessarily very harmonious between Azerbaijan and Iran. The guards of the Islamic Revolution have also just sent special units and military equipment to “protect the borders” and “preserve territorial integrity”.
“We must not forget that in December 1989, during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azeris took the opportunity to destroy border installations between Armenia and Iran, demanding the free movement in the far south of Armenia, ”recalls a member of the Armenian security services. At the time of the interview, a little south of Goris, in Khndzoresk, along the border, the sound of bombardments in Nagorno-Karabakh reaches us intermittently. To support his remarks concerning the possible danger of an Azeri military intervention in the extreme south of Armenia, our interlocutor sends us a photo of a drone that fell on a car in the Meghri region. Luckily for the driver, a religious, the machine did not explode.
The Latchine corridor versus the Meghri corridor
The national security service is undergoing restructuring. The chief of staff of the border guard troops and the head of the counterintelligence department were brutally relieved of their duties. Are they criticized for not having anticipated the possible consequences of the conflict sufficiently in advance? However, according to a Western diplomat stationed in Yerevan, Baku, in a position of strength, should inevitably return, in future peace negotiations, to the Meghri corridor, likely to open up Nakhitchevan. Especially since this question is particularly close to the heart of Ilham Aliev, the Azeri president. His father, former President Heydar Aliev, was born in 1923 in Nakhichevan, the capital.
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In 2000, in Davos, the Americans proposed to Armenia and Azerbaijan to exchange territories. Baku ceding the Lachine Corridor, the umbilical cord that connects Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. In compensation, the Armenians would have let go of the Meghri corridor. The Azeris would not have said no to this compromise. On the other hand, the Armenians categorically refused, considering that they could not “exchange an Armenian territory for another Armenian territory”. “This is why Prime Minister Nikol Pachinian urgently asked for help from Russia. He eventually understood that his southern border is weakened, and he fears that the fighting will move to Armenia ”, underlines the Western diplomat.
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