Armenia-Azerbaijan war: line of contact

The frontline of Europe's oldest ongoing conflict, a few hours by plane from France or Germany, looks like a scene from World War I.

The Armenians have dug trenches along the 200-km line of contact.

Tin cans hang on barbed wire beside the dugouts as an alarm system against infiltrators.

The soldiers sleep on bunks in pits that stink of sweat, feet, and tobacco. Their toilet is a hole in the ground. They play backgammon and drink coffee to pass the time.

Azerbaijani snipers, mortars, and artillery shoot at them almost every day, they say.

In the last incident, on Thursday (23 February), Azerbaijan fired 52 mortar shells and 10 artillery rounds, the Defence Army of the Republic of Artsakh, formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh, said.

The Armenians returned fire, killing one Azerbaijani soldier, it said, but despite the danger, morale is high.

"Frontline coffee is the best coffee in the world", Marat Babayan, an Armenian lieutenant, told EUobserver on a visit to his post, a short drive from the town of Askeran, on Tuesday.

When asked if he had all the equipment that he needed, he said: "Yes. Everything".

Asked if he would like to see international peacekeepers sent to the area, he said: "What for? We've got all we need to defend ourselves."

Asked how often his men shot at the Azerbaijanis, he said they only fired if Azerbaijan fired first and only if they got an order from central command.

Forgotten war

The conflict dates back to 1988 when people in the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the then Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, tried to join Armenia.

Three decades later it risks sudden escalation, destabilising the South Caucasus and aggravating the EU refugee crisis.

In the worst case scenario, it could also drag in Russia, Nato member Turkey, and Iran into a regional war.

But despite the high stakes, few people know what goes on here.

The only international monitors are six people from the OSCE, a European multilateral club, who are based in Georgia and who seldom come.

Journalists and European politicians also visit rarely.

Those who do are unlikely to see the situation from the other side because Azerbaijan tends to put them on a visa blacklist.

Azerbaijan gives little information on casualties, who are classified as a state secret.

Dubious figures

The Armenian side also side gives information, but some of it is open to question.

Hrayr Tevosyan, an Artsakh colonel, told EUobserver on Tuesday that when Azerbaijan launched a four-day assault last April the Azerbaijani side suffered "between 500 and 600" casualties.

He later said that Azerbaijan lost 1,000 lives. Later again, he said that it was "more than 1,000." He said 87 Armenians died.

An Artsakh government source contradicted him, saying that 350 people died in total on both sides, however.

The source said his information came from signal intercepts of Azerbaijani military communications and from social media chatter about funerals.

The figure of 87 Armenian casualties is also open to question.

A contact from one EU country, who asked not to be named and who recently visited the front line, said he saw memorials for 21 Armenian civilians in a single location.

"If 21 people were killed in one village, then the total figure of Armenian casualties was probably higher," the contact said.

Rosy picture?

Tevosyan, the Armenian colonel, painted a positive picture of the situation.

Details on what kind of weapons, such as sniper rifles, his side had were confidential, but he also said Artsakh had all it needed to repel Azerbaijan.

"We have everything we need to fulfil our tasks," he told EUobserver.

"We don't need them [international peacekeepers] because we can maintain security by ourselves," he added.

He said he had "never" had to discipline one of his soldiers for firing a stray bullet first.

"We only respond when the other side fires because we observe the terms of the 1994 ceasefire agreement," he said.

He added that his men were superior fighters because they had the moral high ground.

"The most important thing is that our soldiers know why they're fighting - to defend their homeland. The Azerbaijani soldiers don't know the meaning of their service," he said.

Moment of truth

The real picture might be more challenging, however.

In 2015, Azerbaijan, an oil-rich dictatorship, spent €2.8 billion on its military, while Armenia, Artsakh's principal sponsor, spent €420 million.

The trenches might look like World War I, but Azerbaijan's arsenal includes high-tech Israeli drones, one of which killed seven Armenian soldiers in April.

The Artsakh foreign ministry says, in brochures with Romantic images of cliff-top churches, that its army is on a "sacred mission".

But some European monitors who recently came to observe a referendum in the unrecognised republic heard that military officers were selling food rations for profit.

One monitor, who asked not to be named, added that young people were increasingly leaving Artsakh for jobs in Armenia despite their patriotism in what amounted to a "brain-drain."

Tevosyan, the Artsakh colonel, said Azerbaijan's objective in April was "to occupy all of Nagorno-Karabakh by force, the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh, but they didn't succeed."

The real objective was, according to experts such as the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO, to seize strategic territory on the front line and to test Artsakh's defences.

One day soon, the moment of truth might come.

This story is the third in a series of features by EUobserver that examines the issues and looks at the lives of ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The first part was about a referendum to create a 'Republic of Artsakh' in Nagorno-Karabakh. The second story looked at origins of the conflict.