Seven Mile Bridge, the longest on the Overseas Highway, Key West © PandoTrip
Eurasianet last week published a piece on what we anyway knew were long-standing disagreements over the construction of a new highway that would connect Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan via Armenia as dictated by the November 2020 trilateral ceasefire statement. It also quoted an anonymous government official as saying that Baku expected a dedicated road in much the same way that the Lachin Corridor passes through Azerbaijan.
None of which is new, of course, but it did remind me of what was reportedly discussed at the meeting of then Armenian and Azerbaijan Presidents Heydar Aliyev and Robert Kocharyan in Key West, United States, in 2001. After seeing the Seven Mile Bridge, itself part of the 181-km Overseas Highway, both leaders appeared to have considered how technical solutions could resolve otherwise unassailable political problems.
“Key West is at the end of a very long bridge connecting it to the rest of Florida,” said Carey Cavanaugh, the former US co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group also at the meeting, in an interview held several years ago. “It’s somewhat reminiscent, and President Aliyev remarked on this on his arrival, of the question of how do you connect Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia and the question of corridors?”
Kocharyan also considered allowing similar for linking Baku with its exclave – a 40 km overpass from Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan. It is worth noting that in a podcast held in October 2021, Richard Giragosian, Director of the Regional Studies Center (RSC) also hinted at something similar. “[…] the link from Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan may be a roadway and railway from point to point with no exit in Armenia proper,” he told me.
That was then and this is now, of course, but the issue of how to prevent Armenia from being cut off from its own border with Iran remains a sensitive one, though there are clearly solutions. In the end, Kocharyan had considered an entire bridge to be too costly to construct at the time, but the idea of a combination of bridges, roads, and even tunnels, were considered as options instead.
Veteran journalist Tatul Hakobyan posted a piece on this in May 2021.
“In the case of encountering settlements in the Meghri region, it would become an overpass before descending to the ground again,” Hakobyan wrote. “This minimised the possibility of contact between the Azerbaijanis traveling between Nakhichevan and Azerbaijan with the Armenians of Meghri who were moving in the opposite direction. […] The construction of overpasses […] solved another problem – the land connection between Armenia and Iran.”
Given this recent history, such solutions are worth contemplating at least, and even though few seriously think it is actually this concern that is holding up progress on the ‘Zangezur Corridor,’ itself now arguably responsible for the current impasse on the Lachin Corridor. Concerns about extraterritoriality also seem doubtful given that it has been constantly stressed that sovereignty will remain with those countries through which the corridors pass.
The issue could more be the stipulation in the November 2020 ceasefire statement that border guards of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) would oversee it.
Nonetheless, whatever the reasons for the delay, the talks between Aliyev and Kocharyan at Key West did at least demonstrate that there were technical and engineering solutions available even over two decades ago. There are also, incidentally, technical solutions to allow for free or unimpeded transit, especially in this age of electronic scanning, as a September 2022 interview with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk detailed.
But, to end, back to Key West. In 1982, when the United States Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on the Overseas Highway leading to the island city, its mayor symbolically declared independence as the Conch Republic, even going as far to, albeit tongue-in-cheek, ‘declare war’ on the United States. The mayor, who appointed himself ‘Prime Minister,’ soon ‘surrendered ‘ and no further checkpoints were ever reportedly established.
