Pepe Escobar: What`s At Stake In Armenia (Excerpts via Saker)
(WorldNews Turkey)

What`s at stake in the Armenia-Azerbaijan chessboard Few geopolitical hot spots across the planet may rival the Caucasus: that intractable, tribal Tower of Babel, throughout History a contentious crossroads of empires from the Levant and nomads from the Eurasian steppes. And it gets even messier when one adds the fog of war. At the collapse of the USSR , Nagorno-Karabakh had a mixed population of Azeri Shi`ites and Armenian Christians . Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million wounded. The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that...