Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

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Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

laser rangefinder DKRM-1

[Vrej1915]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Իրաքն Ադրբեջանից հետ է պահանջում 80-ականներին Բաքու ուղարկված ռազմական օդանավերը

Օգոստոս 11, 2011 | 00:53
2010 թ. վերջից սկսած Իրաքի իշխանությունները սկսել են լրջորեն հետաքրքրվել վերանորոգման նպատակով 80-ականներին Բաքու ուղարկված ռազմական օդանավերի ճակատագրով, հաղորդում է ադրբեջական «Մուսավաթ» լրատվականը:

Աղբյուրը հայտնում է, որ ադրբեջանցի պաշտոնյաների հետ հանդիպման ժամանակ իրաքյան կողմը հայտնել է, որ իրենք ցանկանում են հետ վերադարձնել Սադամ Հուսեյնի կառավարման ընթացքում Սերբիա, Իտալիա, Ռուսաստան, Ուկրաինա եւ Չինաստան ուղարկված ռազմական օդանավերը, նավերը, զրահատանկային տեխնիկան: Իր հերթին ադրբեջանական կողմը հայտնել է, որ անտեղյակ է խորհրդային շրջանում ուղարկված օանավերի ճակատագրից, ուստի դրանց համար պատասխանատու է ԽՍՀՄ իրավահաջորդ Ռուսաստանը:

Բացի այդ, հավելել են, որ օդանավերի մի մասը 1992 թ. Իրաքի նախագահ Սադամ Հուսեյնի «ջենտլմենյան համաձայնությամբ» ադրբեջանական կողմը վերանորոգելուց հետո կիրառել է ղարաբաղյան պատերազմի ընթացքում, սակայն, տարածքները լքելու ժամանակ, դրանք, ամենայն հավանականությամբ, անցել են հայկական կողմի վերահսկողության տակ, հաղորդում է «Մուսավաթ»-ը:

Նշենք, որ դեռ խորհրդային շրջանից Ադրբեջանի եւ Իրաքի միջեւ համաձայնություն էր ձեռք բերվել մոդեռնիզացման եւ վերանորգման համար Բաքու բերվող օդանավերի վերաբերյալ: Իրաքն այժմ պահանջում է հետ վերադարձնել 22 տարի առաջ` 1989 թ., ԽՍՀՄ ռազմաօդային ուժերի Նասոսնի (ներկայիս` Հաջը Զեյնալաբդին Թաղիեւ) ավանում տեղակայված Ավիացիայի վերանորագման գործարան ուղարկված օդանավերը: ԽՍՀՄ գոյության վերջին շրջանում վերոնշյալ գործարանի վերանորոգմանն են հանձնվել Իրաքին պատկանող «MiQ-21» եւ «MiQ-23» մակնիշի մի շարք օդանավեր:

[Vrej1915]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Gazeta Wyborcza. C-400 հրթիռները, որոնցով Ռուսաստանը վախեցնում է Լեհաստանին, չկան





Օգոստոս 10, 2011 | 22:25
C-400 հրթիռները, որոնցով Ռուսաստանը վախեցնում է Լեհաստանին, իրականում գոյություն չունեն: Այդ մասին գրում է լեհական Gazeta Wyborcza թերթը, մեջբերելով «Մոսկովսկի կոմսոմոլեց» թերթի հոդվածը ռուսաստանյան առանցքային պաշտպանական գործարաններից մեկի անմխիթար վիճակի մասին:

«C-400 հրթիռները, որոնցով Ռուսաստանը ահաբեկում է Լեհաստանին եւ պատրաստվում է տեղակայել Կալինինգրադի մարզում, գոյություն չունեն»,- գրում է լեհական թերթը:

«ՄԿ»-ի հոդվածում նշվում է, որ Մոսկվայի «Ավանգարդ» գործարանում անցել է պետական պաշտպանական պատվերի ժամկետը: «Անցած տարվա պատվերը ժամկետից շուտ են կատարել, հոկտեմբերի 31-ին: Նոյեմբեր-դեկտեմբերին արդեն կարող էին սկսել այս տարվա ծրագիրը, բայց առ այսօր կանգնած են, պաշտպանության նախարարության հետ պայմանագրերը կնքված չեն: Ապրանքի արտադրության տեխնոլոգիական ժամկետը 9 ամիս է, այնպես որ 2011-ի պատվերը արդեն ձախողվել է»,- նշում են «Ավանգարդի» աշխատակիցները: Այս ընթացքում գործարանը աշխատանքից մոտ 100 մարդ է ազատել:

2003-ին «Ավանգարդին» պատվերներ էին տրվել Չինաստանից, այժմ էլ չինացիները սպասում են C-400-ին, որ արագ պատճենեն: «Անընդհատ ուզում են գալ, ասում են` ցույց տվեք ձեր տեխնիկան: Թույլ չենք տալիս, թե գաղտնիք է: Իրականում ամոթ է: Կծիծաղեն, որ տեսնեն, թե ինչի վրա ենք աշխատում. հաստոցների 90 տոկոսը 40 տարվա վաղեմության է»,- ասել է գործարանի աշխատողներից մեկը:

http://news.am/arm/news/70620.html

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Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Lol & lol

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Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Medical Service of the Armenian Army:

[Vrej1915]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

20 years after Soviet fall, peace elusive in Karabakh

By Will Englund, Published: August 11

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh — This is where the first war set off by the Soviet collapse took place. And it may be where the next one breaks out.

Twenty years ago, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, unleashed from Soviet control, fought a bitter struggle for this mountainous region in the South Caucasus. A cease-fire was reached in 1994, after about 30,000 people had been killed, leaving Nagorno-Karabakh outside Azerbaijan’s control, as an unrecognized, de facto republic in the hands of ethnic Armenians.

Since then, no one on either side has had the will to hammer out a settlement. Tension has been put to use by those in power — in Azerbaijan, in Armenia proper and here in separatist Nagorno-Karabakh. Democracy, human rights, an unfettered press, a genuine opposition: These are the sort of things that get put aside in times of crisis. And here, the crisis has been going on for two decades and shows little sign of letting up.

“The development of democracy has fallen hostage to the conflict,” said Masis Mayilian, Nagorno-Karabakh’s former foreign minister and a onetime candidate for president. “This is very handy for totalitarian regimes.”

An actual renewal of the war, unless it were very quick, would be a disaster for all concerned. On this they agree. The two sides are much more heavily armed than they were in 1991, especially Azerbaijan. It might be very difficult for Iran, Turkey and Russia to remain uninvolved, and impossible to confine the fighting to Nagorno-Karabakh itself. A major supply route used by the United States to provision troops in Afghanistan would be disrupted.

But resistance to a peace settlement along the lines of a proposal sponsored by the United States, France and Russia has been stiff. “We share the wish that there be no war,” said Robert Bradtke, the U.S. diplomat involved in the talks. “But do the parties have the political will?”

So far, they don’t. Azerbaijan and Armenia, which negotiates on behalf of Nagorno-Karabakh, both say they support the international effort to find a way toward settling the first post-Soviet conflict. “It is high time to do it,” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mamedyarov said recently in Moscow after meeting with his counterpart from Russia, which is especially intent on getting an agreement.

But Azerbaijan also says it will never formally surrender territory. And the people of Nagorno-Karabakh say they’ll never give up the right of self-determination. For two decades, both sides have kept passions inflamed, which turns out to be good politics for those at the top.

But with snipers shooting at each other every day, and occasionally causing casualties, the chances of stumbling into a war of miscalculation, or a war of hotheadedness, are considerable.

Tevan Poghosyan, who in the 1990s represented Karabakh in the United States, and now runs a think tank in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, said war is inevitable. It will take another round of fighting, he said, to “steam” the poison out.

‘We had nothing’

In the Soviet era, boundaries were often drawn with little regard for the huge mix of nationalities that populated the country. Some ethnic groups were split; others were paired with traditionally hostile neighbors. Much of this was done intentionally, as a way of assuring Moscow’s control. As the U.S.S.R. was falling apart, people were quick to take up arms against one another. Difficulties and ill will linger: between Georgians and Abkhazians, between Georgians and Ossetians (who fought a brief renewed war in 2008), between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, who clashed violently a year ago.

The war here was the largest such conflict. Both sides put forward intricate historical claims to the region. Azerbaijan says a million Azerbaijanis fled their homes in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. As many as 500,000 Armenians reportedly fled from Azerbaijan. Neither side has fully tried to integrate those people into society, and the subject remains, from the politicians’ point of view, a useful sore point.

Nagorno-Karabakh has a population that has been estimated at between 90,000 and 145,000. Seventeen years into its life as a de facto state, it harbors a prickly and zealous society.

“We had nothing, and out of nothing we created something,” said Galya Arstamyan, whose son Grigory left the Soviet army so he could come back home to fight, and was killed. Today she runs a museum dedicated to those who died. “We will live and prove to the world that Karabakh is the heart of the Armenian nation and the spirit of the Armenian nation. The land on which we live has become sacred from the blood of our martyrs. We are not recognized, but we are still here. We ask nothing from the world.”

Poghosyan has sponsored focus groups in Karabakh, Azerbaijan and Armenia. He said Azerbaijanis define “security” as the restoration of Azerbaijan’s lawful rule over Karabakh. In Armenia proper, people believe security will come from an international settlement of the dispute, followed by diplomatic recognition of Karabakh. In Karabakh itself, he said, the attitude is: “Unrecognized? So what? My son is my best peacekeeper. What’s mine is mine.”

Karabakh is “holy for all Armenians,” Poghosyan said. “For the first time in our long history, we feel pride. We got rid of this image of victim.”

It’s a rallying point for the large Armenian diaspora, which supports schools, runs summer camps for children, owns hotels and banks here. An annual worldwide telethon raises money for Karabakh. The unresolved status of the conflict keeps Karabakh front and center. Haytoug Chamlian, a lawyer from Montreal who comes every summer to the town known to Armenians as Shushi, where he sponsors a camp, says there can be no peace deal along the lines proposed by the big powers.

“That will never happen,” he said. “It’s unimaginable. Even a handful of soil cannot be returned.”

The Armenian kingdom was the first to adopt Christianity, in 301, and Azerbaijanis are Muslims, though both sides like to downplay the religious divide. (Iran favors Armenia, for one thing.) Yet Armenians marked their tanks with white crosses. And at the mountaintop Gandzasar Monastery, where the St. John the Baptist Cathedral was consecrated in 1240, there is a regular liturgy for the “martyrs” killed in the war.

“The strongest thing that keeps us here is our faith,” said Prime Minister Ara Harutyunan. Then, using the Armenian name for Karabakh — Artsakh — he invoked a prophet who is a major figure in both Christianity and Islam. “In Artsakh, we have 70,000 Abrahams. We fully realize our children can become sacrifices any day. But we still live here, still give birth to children. And we think this is the main guarantee of our security.”

Today’s teenagers, in fact, unlike their parents, never lived in the Soviet Union and have never lived among Azerbaijanis, whom they have been taught to see as two-dimensional villains. For the past few years, a handful of young people from both sides have gotten together for several days in neutral Georgia, in a program run by David Melkomyan of the YMCA here. It’s a shock, he said, for them to discover how much they have in common.

“But nobody wants to work with us,” Melkomyan said. “Not one donor.”

The ‘third rail’

Among older Karabakhis, who remember things the way they once were, the picture can be more complicated. Ashot Harutyumyan saw who benefited from the first war. He’s a farmworker, in the fertile valley that leads northward from Stepanakert. He fought in the 1990s — points out a ridge that his partisan band held, just to the east — because he figured it was a question then of fighting or dying. Today he has a job on a privatized farm, with an absentee owner, that he said pays him about $8 a day. It’s not enough to support a family.

“We’re simple people. We leave politics to the politicians. If there’s another war, the poor people of course will fight. The rich will fly away,” he said.

He thinks back to 1987, and life in the Soviet Union, when Moscow still kept a tight grip and none of this conflict and upheaval had broken out. “Everyone had a job. There was enough money to survive. Of course it was better then.”

There’s more weariness in Yerevan, a few hours’ drive to the west. Armenia supplies somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of Karabakh’s budget, and a hoped-for reopening of relations with Turkey fell through because of the Karabakh issue. The 2008 financial collapse wasn’t easy on Armenia, and people tended to blame Karabakh for their troubles.

Yet Karabakh remains the “third rail” of Armenian politics, said Richard Giragosyan, a former U.S. Senate staffer who now runs the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan. Careers have been wrecked when politicians weren’t sufficiently fervent about Karabakh. In fact, Karabakhis have taken over Armenian politics: The past two Armenian presidents were previously Karabakh officials. During their years in office, corruption has flourished. The past election in Armenia was seriously flawed, though the opposition has been making gains recently. That’s more than Azerbaijan can say.

Potential for escalation

Here in Stepanakert, officials say they are confident they have the military strength to keep Azerbaijan from attacking, and that that’s a better way to keep the peace than by making concessions toward a settlement.

Yet this is a peace where the two sides have no communication with each other across the cease-fire line, where at one location they are entrenched within 30 yards of each other, and where they regularly take casualties. A blunder could escalate.

And at the same time there’s a growing suspicion among some Armenians that a “military solution” might, after all, be possible, Giragosyan said.

“It may take another war to settle this, for both sides to exhaust this, and that’s scary,” Giragosyan said.

Armenia’s foreign minister, Eduard Nalbandian, called the idea of going back to war “very dangerous.” He said it will “bring no solution, but new casualties and devastations.”

Farmworkers and their children are in fact still being killed and maimed — by land mines and cluster bombs left over from the first war. A nonprofit group called the Halo Trust has been at work for years clearing them out, but there’s still more to be done. Every time the price of wheat goes up, casualties spike, as farmers venture into fallow fields to try to plant more crops, said Nick Smart, the program manager. More than 300 people have been wounded or killed since 1995.

Most of the money for the mine clearance comes from the U.S. government, with a $1 million contribution planned for 2012. The Karabakh government doesn’t help because it has other priorities, said Georgy Petrosyan, the foreign minister. The mines and bombs were mostly left by Armenian forces, but Smart said that getting in touch with Armenian officers for help in mapping the minefields has been frustratingly difficult.

The other problem, he said, is that no one wants to spend money on the program if the whole area is about to go back to war.


This article was developed in cooperation with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20-years-after-soviet-fall-peace-elusive-in-karabakh/2011/07/20/gIQA8SFE8I_story_2.html

[Vrej1915]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Armenians urged to settle in border lands

Will Englund/The Washington Post - Saro Saroyan, who fled Azerbaijan, loves the history of his adopted town, known to Armenians as Shushi, but doesn’t feel that he will ever be fully integrated into local society.
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By Will Englund, Published: July 15

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh — A former foreign minister of this unrecognized republic in the South Caucasus wants to distribute land in border areas to Armenians who fled Azerbaijan two decades ago when war broke out. Arman Meliqyan says this would be compensation for the property they lost when they fled — and it would also, intentionally, help to wreck the proposed peace deal that is on the table.

Azerbaijan, which still claims Nagorno-Karabakh, would be certain to see such a move as an enormous provocation. It says that, as the result of wide-scale ethnic cleansing, a million Azerbaijanis fled the territory now held by Karabakh forces, and that they want to return to their homes.

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Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan stopped fighting in 1994, but have never come to terms. Both sides still shoot sporadically at each other across the so-called line of contact. Growing tension has already heightened fears that war could break out again — and that this time there’s a threat of drawing neighboring Russia, Iran and Turkey into the conflict. War would also probably disrupt a key supply route used by the United States to get equipment and other goods to its soldiers in Afghanistan.

Meliqyan’s idea is to move settlers into territories adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh itself that were seized by Armenian and Karabakh fighters during the war and have been held ever since. Those territories are now nearly empty of people, and most of the villages within them have been left in ruins. A framework peace agreement that Russia, France and the United States — together called the Minsk Group — have been trying to sponsor envisions the return of most of these lands to Azerbaijan.

If they were to be populated by ethnic Armenian settlers, that would become considerably more difficult. This is precisely what Meliqyan, who is completely opposed to the Minsk Group formula, hopes to achieve.

His plan inevitably raises the question of what compensation would be available for the Azerbaijanis who also fled — out of Karabakh — during the war. But he thinks that’s Azerbaijan’s problem.

Under Karabakh law, Armenians who fled Azerbaijan are entitled to land in the territories as compensation. But the program has never gotten underway, though a few settlers have trickled in on their own over the years. Meliqyan, who now heads an advocacy group in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, says his organization has submitted 35,000 applications for land and gotten no response.

“They’re not saying yes, and they’re not saying no,” he said of Karabakh’s leaders. “Sooner or later it will become a real question for them.”

Karabakh’s president, Bako Sahakyan, said the problem is that the territories are in such bad physical shape that it would take a major investment in roads and utilities just to make them habitable. He also made it clear he doesn’t want to undermine the peace talks. Another problem, said Karabakh’s prime minister, Ara Harutyunyan, is that most of those who left Azerbaijan were living in cities there, are used to an urban way of life and would be lost trying to set up farms.

It’s a half-good idea, said Saro Saroyan, a civil defense instructor who has become one of the most outspoken advocates for these dispersed people. (What to call them is a point of contention: Armenians use the word “refugee,” which is commonly reserved for people who have had to cross an international border. Azerbaijanis, who don’t recognize Karabakh’s independence, use the phrase “internally displaced persons,” arguing that they’re still in Azerbaijan. Some people here contend that those who fled Azerbaijan should be called “deportees.”)

The problem, as Saroyan sees it, is that a few acres of farmland would hardly compensate someone who had to give up an apartment in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, especially considering the oil wealth and rise in property values that Baku has enjoyed since the war ended.

Saroyan left Baku in 1988, when the first stirrings of the Karabakh independence movement were felt. He went first to Stepanakert but eventually wound up in Shushi — known as Shusha to the Azerbaijanis — where both his grandfathers served time in a Soviet prison in the 1930s: one for being a rich peasant, the other for being the driver of a car in an accident that killed an important communist official. He loves showing visitors around the old quarters of the town, which was Karabakh’s most important city when it was under Persian and later czarist Russian rule.

But being a modern-day homesteader doesn’t have much appeal for him. He misses Baku, where his driver grandfather is buried, and he said that, like others, he’s never felt entirely at home in Karabakh.

“We’re integrated in society, but we can’t be integrated 100 percent,” he said.


This article was developed in cooperation with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/armenians-urged-to-settle-in-border-lands/2011/07/11/gIQAPPKeGI_story.html

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Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

http://www.artsakh.tv/am/12_08_2011_4.html

[Eddo211]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Know your enemy




Azeri graduate from Turkey throwing the Greywolf sign.

[Armanen]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

http://www.armenialiberty.org/content/article/24295400.html

Artsakh continues adding more weaponry to its arsenal and more is on the way for the Armenian military.