When Mikhail Gorbachev announched his policy of glasnost, which allowed for enhanced freedom of speech and press, and perestroika, sought to decentralize economic decision making to improve efficiency, he didn’t expect that these reforms would fasten the break-up of the USSR. When various USSR countries abandoned the Soviet ideology and called for independence, he declined to intervene militarily like his predecessors. These changes in politics sparked the century old conflict between the Azerbaijani Turks and the Armenians. While the conflict happened from Baku to Yerevan, the main focus was in Karabakh. The conflict turned into a full scale war after the proclamation of independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and the Armenian representatives in the neighbouring Kalbajar District/Shahumyan Province in 1991.
The Karabakh Conflict is not only an ethnic conflict, but also a fight between “self-determination” vs “territorial integrity“
First Karabakh War
The conflict escalated in February 1988, after the fall of the Soviet Union, war got out of hand.
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