The Price of Peace Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

Arman Petrosyan could not count the many police cars that lined the roads as he drove from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to the border with Azerbaijan. Petrosyan and his fellow members of the Combat Brotherhood, a militia of mostly veterans from previous wars with Azerbaijan, were on their way to instruct villagers in the region of Tavush on how to shoot. They had taken it upon themselves to prepare the citizens of the tiny hamlets close to the border to fight because the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had promised to turn over land in four Tavush villages to Azerbaijan. This is a part of the border demarcation process, which is central to ongoing peace negotiations between the two states. The Combat Brotherhood is against this.

To avoid police confrontation en route, Petrosyan drove on back roads. When he made it to the village, 10 police officers arrested him. He didn’t care, this was the second time he was being arrested that spring. Petrosyan and 49 other Combat Brotherhood members were arrested just a month earlier. This time, however, Petrosyan was charged with hooliganism and detained for a month. Now, he’s on house arrest. He lifted his leg above the table to show us the ankle monitor concealed beneath his sock when we spoke to him in the Combat Brotherhood's Yerevan office. Petrosyan said he killed at least 27 Azerbaijani soldiers in previous wars and is eager to fight again. The Combat Brotherhood is just waiting for war to start again. If the government doesn’t want to fight, then “we have to change the government,” he said. While waiting for his trial, he reads Agatha Christie novels and watches the news.

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Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in conflict for more than 30 years, with all-out war breaking out periodically. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, war erupted over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region between the two states. The Soviet Union had allotted the land, where Armenians and Azerbaijanis both lived, though with an Armenian majority, to Azerbaijan. As independence movements ripped through former Soviet republics, the majority Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh did not want to be a part of Azerbaijan. This resulted in violence as neither group was willing to concede the region. Now, after Azerbaijan’s most recent offensive in September 2023, following months of blockading the region, Nagorno-Karabakh is fully under Azerbaijani control. Some 100,000 ethnic Armenians who lived there for generations, almost the whole population, were forced to flee for Armenia proper. It is under these conditions that the nations seek to conclude the conflict, cementing that Armenia has lost Nagorno-Karabakh.

In Kirants, one of the border villages that has conceded land as a part of the border demarcation process, residents drink coffee on their balconies in the morning with a view of military outposts. The Armenian flag and Azerbaijani flag stand facing each other on opposing hilltops. It’s a standoff across a narrow valley. There is a church in the center of town where villagers sometimes congregate. Mothers take their children to play in the small playground that sits behind it. By the church’s entrance, there is a memorial for Armenian soldiers who died in previous wars with Azerbaijan. The youngest are 8 years old. 

When you drive towards the village from the south, the road lurches to the left as you are about to arrive. It didn't always turn left there. Only a few months ago there was a bridge that took drivers straight into the village. Now, the small peninsula of land that the bridge ran over has been conceded to Azerbaijan, so the road must swerve around it. Kirants is delicately placed on the fault line between two historic enemies. The fault line is literal, an imposing concrete border wall that slices the road unnaturally as it curves past a market. In the market, patrons and workers decline to speak to us, weary of journalists. They say they have spoken to countless reporters, who have all gotten their story wrong. 

Julia Ghardashyan, 23, grew up in Kirants. We met with her in an Armenian church diocese where she works as a resident artist and ceramicist. Ghardashyan’s family has lived in Kirants for generations. They farmed small plots of land just outside the village, growing beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. “It’s like heaven,” she said, “did you notice?”

Ghardashyan was 19 when the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War began in 2020. The main road of the village was under Azerbaijani surveillance. She got used to surveillance drones buzzing and hovering overhead as they took laps from Azerbaijani military bases. Her parents sent her and her younger sister to stay with their grandparents when the fighting increased. 

One of Ghardashyan’s classmates is etched onto the memorial outside of the church. He was the only boy in her grade school class of six and died in the 2020 war. He was only 20 when he was killed and is depicted on the memorial wearing an army helmet that looks too large for him. That loss was transformative for Ghardashyan. “There is a hatred that grew in me,” she said. 

Peace talks should be a positive development for Ghardashyan and her family, but the way the border demarcation has been done, they feel they have conceded too much. The new road that had to be constructed after the loss of the bridge cut right through the family fields on which they grow their crops. This destroyed an important part of their livelihood. The government offered them some compensation for their losses, which they refused to accept. They couldn’t swallow the situation.

Driving through Kirants, the process of border demarcation becomes confusing. The little peninsula of land conceded to Azerbaijan, which the bridge used to cross over, is just a mess of gravel. The purpose and significance of that land is unclear to an observer. To the villagers, it seems pointless. Three houses were conceded as a part of this, and the villagers were relocated to the other side of the village. The strategic importance, the cultural significance, or material value of the land given to Azerbaijan is opaque. Ghardashyan felt like the land was demanded just to inconvenience them.

Given the length of the conflict, a generation of people have grown up with an enemy. The risk of full-scale war with Azerbaijan has been a constant for their whole lives. Military service is mandatory for men, and there is likely no confusion about who they are training to fight. The opposition is defined and engrained. 

Aspram Krpeyan, a member of parliament in Armenia, is one such young person who grew up with the conflict. She is 34 and was born amidst the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1990. Her father, Tatul Krpeyan, was a key military leader in the first Karabakh War and is considered a national hero. He died in combat when she was one year old. 

Krpeyan finds the concept of peace negotiations to be largely a fantasy because, to her, it is impossible to negotiate peace with an enemy that is regularly “degrading your existence.” She is referring to the rhetoric of Azerbaijani officials and media for years. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said outright, “Armenia was never present in this region before. Present-day Armenia is our land.” In speeches over the years he has referenced Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan,” and said Yerevan is a historical Azerbaijani city, calling it Irevan. From the perspective of Azerbaijani officials, Nagorno-Karabakh simply is Azerbaijan, and thus they were entitled to reclaim it. Referring to Armenia as Western Azerbaijan seems to be setting up the same justification for further military action, according to Krpeyan. 

In Baku, there is the “Spoils of War Park,” featuring weapons, armor, and military vehicles seized from Armenian forces, as well as wax figures of Armenian soldiers. The creators of the figures stated that they had “tried to create the most freakish depictions” of Armenians possible. Recently, Azerbaijani officials took visiting NATO leadership on a tour of the park. This all works to undermine Azerbaijan’s claim of desiring peace, Krpeyan said. She sees enduring hostility.

The country of Armenia is, to Krpeyan and many others, a triumph against attempted cultural erasure. To her, it is “the physical existence of your identity, the one that was gifted to you by the huge sacrifice of thousands who were able to change the direction of this genocidal wheel.” She said the “entire Karabakh movement was the victory of the Armenian people against genocidal trauma.” With the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, and the continued land concessions in Tavush, she fears that the genocidal wheel has turned back the other direction.

Krpeyan, a member of the opposition party, blames Prime Minister Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party for these losses. She is not alone in placing the blame on them. The border demarcation process around the villages in Tavush led to mass protests and political upheaval across the country, the largest since 2018. Ostensibly, the political backlash is about the material sacrifices in villages like Kirants, but it is also about the prospect of ending an endemic conflict. Peace means that all the loss of land and life have led to this final conclusion. The Combat Brotherhood are prepared to fight despite detainments and arrests because they refuse to accept that all the sacrifices that soldiers made defending Nagorno-Karabakh came to this. Peace is an anticlimax to them—it is not victory.

The Combat Brotherhood represents the more extreme side of the political backlash, but more mainstream opposition movements have sprung up as well. One such movement is led by Bagrat Galstanyan, an Archbishop of the Armenian Apostolic church. As an Archbishop, he presides over Tavush and is an important figure in the community. He led the protests that formed in the villages over the planned border demarcation. These protests later morphed into a march to Yerevan, in a movement referred to as the “Holy Struggle.” Galstanyan publicly demanded Prime Minister Pashinyan and his government resign. On June 12, during protests in Yerevan, the movement was met with police brutality. Law enforcement used stun grenades to disperse demonstrators who were protesting the border demarcation deal. Amnesty International called the events “deeply worrying,” and reported that at least 101 demonstrators were injured, and 98 people were detained.

We first saw Galstanyan at St. Anna’s Church in Yerevan on a hot July day. A helicopter carrying an Armenian flag was whirring in the sky. Its noise was cut by the sound of a group of men chanting. Purple scarves were draped around their necks, a symbol of support for the movement.

Galstanyan greeted almost everyone in the church courtyard as he made his way to the stage. An Armenian song to the tune of “The Hanging Tree” from The Hunger Games soundtrack played in the background. The crowd was diverse in age and appearance, with formally dressed young men, and elderly women clearly on their way home from running errands, holding bags full of groceries. What united the crowd was their dismay at the current government’s handling of the peace talks with Azerbaijan.

We met with Galstanyan at his rental home in Yerevan, which he was using for his movement’s headquarters. One of his supporters at the house told us that he was previously staying at a hotel but they suspected police were staying in the room below and spying on him so they moved to this house. It was in a neighborhood that was an expansive field of construction. His is one of the few houses standing. The only things that could spy on them there were the birds that perched on inactive cranes.

Galstanyan felt an intrinsic motivation to lead the movement. His outrage accumulated as Armenia's losses mounted. “First, what happened to Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said, “I saw there was no resistance.” Then, the process of border demarcation, which he saw proceed “without any guarantors, any mediators, just [Armenia] conceding everything that Azerbaijan asks for.” 

These are not the conditions for peace to Galstanyan. “There is a saying,” he said, “if you want peace, you have to be ready for war.” He sees Armenia today as recently defeated, rolling over to the will of the stronger nation, and creating victims in the process. Villagers in Tavush and refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh are the people who are expected to pay the price for the nation’s peace. Galstanyan argues that it is too costly for a peace that is unassured and unconvincing. “It’s a total surrender,” he said.

After speaking with those involved in Armenia’s several opposition movements, we realized a gulf exists between forced peace and dignified peace. The difference is in the feeling of the populus, the people for whom peace matters most. In the realm of governance, at meetings in Brussels or any other political capital, peace can be reached and people in suits can shake hands. In Kirants, in the shadow of the Azerbaijan flag that the villagers grew up resenting, it is hard to feel that things are settled. Peace “is not something that you write down on a piece of paper,” Krpeyan said. Trauma, hate, and resentment doesn’t dissipate with a prime minister’s signature.

In Berkaber, a village next to Kirants likewise affected by the border demarcation process, there is a reservoir. Across the reservoir is land that, according to Google Maps, is technically Armenia, but has been controlled by Azerbaijan. We stood on the bank of the reservoir and could see the Azerbaijani military base and Azerbaijani cars using the road behind it. On the Armenian side of the reservoir, there was a beach that was in full use. Kids in floaties smacked beach balls and splashed their parents as they played in the water. It was summer joy in full view of the military. A man there told us that they previously were not able to go to the beach because the Azerbaijani military would fire on them if they were visible. Now, it’s just a beach with a view of beautiful mountains. If you didn’t know, as we did, that the building on the far side was a foreign military outpost, it would have been picturesque. 

In Soviet times, the Joghaz reservoir in Berkaber was used to irrigate farmlands in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Since the Nagorno-Karabakh War, the reservoir has not been used by either party to irrigate their lands. As a result, much of the villagers’ farmlands have dried out, becoming unusable and unprofitable. Tigran Harutyunyan, Berkaber’s mayor, told us that the reservoir is “vital” to the livelihood of residents. “Seventy percent of the arable land has not been used for 30 years,” he said. Harutyunyan hopes that through the peace negotiations and border demarcation, Armenians will be able to travel safely to their farm land, and build the pumps necessary for irrigation.

Two men who regularly swim in the reservoir told us that a few years back, two Russian tourists swam to the other side. Azerbaijani soldiers captured them but soon let them go when they realized they were not Armenian. On the day we were there, a man drifted out into the reservoir on an inflatable raft. We wondered how far across the reservoir he would dare drift. He was 20 or 30 yards from the beach, maybe a fifth of the way across. If he fell asleep, he could wake up with a gun in his face. But he seemed undeterred and floated unbothered.