Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war

The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh (click to enlarge). Wikimedia. Public domain.This year marks the 25th anniversary of a devastating, yet little-known war at the gates of Europe which to this day remains unresolved. In his book Black Garden, the analyst and Caucasus-expert Thomas De Waal retraces how a territorial dispute escalated into a full-scale war between the newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At the heart of the dispute lies Nagorno-Karabakh – a mountainous region barely twice as big as Luxembourg – that has politically been part of Azerbaijan since 1921 but that Armenians have laid claim to on historical and demographical grounds. Indeed, Nagorno-Karabakh houses several ancient Armenian sites and was mostly populated by ethnic Armenians before the war broke out.

However, the region has been a crossroad of cultures throughout its history and to Azerbaijanis, their cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh is equally as important. Whereas Karabakh's Armenians have justified their entitlement on the basis of the principle of self-determination, Azerbaijan has insisted on the right to territorial integrity. Karabakh is in fact situated within the internationally accepted borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan.