Thomas de Waal, writing about Nagorno-Karabakh,

Twenty years ago this week, the ghosts of history stirred in Europe and a conflict that no one had paid attention to since the Treaty of Versailles re-erupted in the depths of the Soviet Union. The Nagorny Karabakh dispute between Armenians and Azerbaijanis was the first bonfire in a series of ethno-territorial conflicts that burned through the Caucasus and the Balkans. European Union enthusiasts had thought that the only conflicts left on the Continent were about sheep and cod quotas – but they were dead wrong.

In the week when Kosovo embarks on a path of EU-guided independence and Serbia and Russia voice angry resistance, it’s worth asking whether the nationalist gunmen or the European dreamers will win the argument.

The dispute that kicked it off in the southern Caucasus is still unresolved. On February 20, 1988, the local Armenian soviet in the tiny territory of Nagorny Karabakh decided to take Lenin’s dictum of “all power to the soviets” literally and vote for secession from Soviet Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia. The Armenians said that Karabakh was an historic Armenian homeland that had been unjustly incorporated into Azerbaijan by Stalin, the Azerbaijanis that an Armenian fifth column was breaking up their republic and stealing their territory. The region was so obscure that even most people in Moscow knew nothing about it. Mikhail Gorbachev wisely chose not to use violent repression to solve the dispute but found he had no other instruments that worked.
….
Kosovo is further thawing conflicts that have been mistakenly called “frozen”. The peace processes are already all but dead. Around Nagorny Karabakh, now under Armenian control, snipers exchange deadly fire across a 200 kilometre ceasefire line. Shooting incidents and kidnappings set nerves jangling in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In truth, neither side here will get what they want. Full independence for these territories is highly implausible, especially when large minority populations remain in exile and are not consulted; but integration of these territories into Azerbaijan or Georgia, places they have had nothing in common with since Soviet times and fought wars against is also fantasy. The only way “reintegration” can be achieved is through another catastrophic war. Everyone knows that some kind of shared sovereignty must be the eventual outcome. But how to arrive at it?
….
That calculation may need to change, as the Georgian and Armenian-Azerbaijani conflicts begin to unfreeze and Western politicians notice, for example, that the Armenian-Azerbaijani cease-fire line runs just 15 kilometres from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that connects Caspian oil fields with European markets. Interests are at stake here, not just ordinary lives. The fighters of the nationalist wars have not disappeared; they just left their guns in the cellar, waiting to see what the future brings.

de Waal is the author of Black Garden, probably the English-language book to read on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. (Another good one to read is Azerbaijan Diary, by Thomas Goltz.)