¶ While things are going well for Turkey at the moment — a booming economy (and Turkey had a lot of room to boom in) has eased many of the nation’s chronic social tensions — a clamor for war is getting louder  in Azerbaijan. The difference, you might say, is that Azerbaijan, whose population is primarily Turkic, still has an Armenian problem, while Turkey has only the memory of one. A look at most maps (although not those in Wikipedia’s entry) will show why: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, autonomous since a 1994 cease-fire agreement, displaced tens of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees, many of them still awaiting the restoration of something like their old lives (while many others are children who have grown up on venom). If it were just a question of Azerbaijan versus Armenia, the enclave would be reclaimed by Azerbaijan in a trice. But Russia would certainly come to Armenia’s aid. It does make one rather wish that the Ottoman Empire were still with us, except that the sultans were far better at conquering than they were at governing — and Azerbaijan wasn’t part of the empire, anyway.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 10:30 am.