Zohrab Center Presents New Book on Russian Press Coverage of Karabakh Conflict

“If there was no meaningful international pressure on Armenia to cede territories, Azerbaijan was willing to take matters into its own hands, by fair means or foul,” Tonoyan stated, adding, “cross-border clashes were becoming increasingly frequent, deadly and ominous, a harbinger of things to come.”

With Pashinyan coming to power in 2018 with a fervent promise to reform Armenia’s politics, and sagging economy, “the result left much to be desired,” Tonoyan surmised. “Reform often meant a badly concocted mix of popular sloganeering, some democratic initiatives (and some clearly undemocratic ones), and made-for-TV arrests of long-feared politicians and oligarchs, and emboldened by this new confidence and a mandate from the people, Pashinyan set out to tackle the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh with Azerbaijan.”

In addition, Pashinyan insisted that any negotiated deal “must be equally acceptable to both Armenians and Azerbaijanis, something that previous Armenian governments were loath to voice publicly.” Making the “biggest unforced diplomatic error as prime minister, and providing Azerbaijan and its allies with fresh grounds for a renewed diplomatic onslaught,” “with characteristic bombast, he declared at the opening of the 2019 Pan-Armenian Games in Stepanakert, “Artsakh is Armenia, period!” The reaction in Baku was furious and “unforgiving,” Tonoyan said.

Bloody cross-border clashes followed in July 2020, including mass demonstrations in Baku with protesters demanding all-out war against Armenia. The 2020 invasion of Artsakh by Azerbaijan with the assistance of Turkey was inevitable, Tonoyan declared.

The South Caucasus, and especially Armenia and Artsakh, “are not and have not been in the attention of the Western media.” If and when the area is covered very infrequently, it involves either the subjects of tourism, or war such as the case of Georgia and South Ossetia in 2008. “People do not know (or perhaps do not care) about the region until and unless something of note takes place,” Tonoyan said.

“Western journalistic interests probably match the general or even the precise contours of Western geopolitical interests in the region,” Tonoyan noted.

And as far as Russia is concerned, he stated that “Moscow’s knowledge of the region is as strong as it is permanent, dictated mainly by geopolitical interests, and depending on the political — and increasingly geopolitical — winds blowing in the region. Moscow has at times favored Yerevan, and at other times Baku. But in all circumstances, it has favored Moscow,” he said.

Laurence Broers, co-editor in chief of the Caucasus Surveys has commented that “despite its devastating human consequences on the global stage, the Karabakh conflict unfortunately remains obscure. Not so in the Russian-language press, including Pravda, Izvestia, Nezavisimaya gazeta and other papers by Russian and Soviet journalists.”

Broers writes that Black Garden Aflame is an “indispensable resource that brings to an English-speaking readership the shock and fury of the conflict’s outbreak in 1988, the inability of the broken Soviet system to contain it, the descent into war, the protracted ceasefire that followed, the multiple geopolitical interests in play and a catastrophic new war in 2020.”

A native of Gyumri, Armenia, Tonoyan received his PhD from Baylor University in Texas. A sociologist and a research associate at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has researched the sociology of religion, and politics in the South Caucasus, and religion and nationalism in post-Soviet Russia, and has authored many articles. He has also been a frequent guest on the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, and other media.