Exclave Issue in Armenia and Azerbaijan Seen Heating Up Again after June Vote in Armenia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 18 – The four Azerbaijani exclaves in Armenia and the three Armenian ones in Azerbaijan, marked on Soviet maps but largely depopulated and destroyed during the Karabakh war and seldom mentioned since, are likely to heat up after the June elections in Armenia, according to Russian Aleksey Baliyev.

            That is because in resolving the Karabakh dispute, he says, the two countries agreed to go back to the borders as established in Soviet times and thus must address the exclave issue as the two work to delimit and then demarcate the exact border between them and the likelihood that one or both sides will have to make concessions at odds with the feelings of their populations (vpoanalytics.com/konflikty/armeniya-azerbaydzhan-budet-li-obmen-anklavami/).

            (Some 50 such exclaves existed at the end of Soviet times, but most have disappeared as residents have left or been pushed out by the governments of the territories on which they are located (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/10/borders-and-enclaves-set-up-in-soviet.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/08/ethnic-exclaves-other-than-qarabagh-add.html).)

            Though small and in most cases either completely depopulated or with only a few remaining residents, all of these exclaves are symbolically important to both the country that wants to maintain them and the one that wants them to be abolished; but several of them are strategically important.

            The most significant of these, Baliyev suggests, one which lies just north of the border of Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan, and a second through which land transport between Yerevan and Armenia’s Syunik Region, which not only lies between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan but across a route Russia has long hoped to use as part of its north-south corridor to Iran.

            The fate of these villages thus continues to agitate national pride, especially in Armenia, because any concessions or even some exchange with Azerbaijan would further reduce the size of the Republic of Armenia, an especially sensitive issue given Yerevan’s loss of Karabakh and the way that still agitates refugees from there and Armenians more generally (e.g., windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/12/yerevan-seeking-to-resettle-refugees.html and  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/04/only-1437-of-more-than-100000-ethnic.html).