Russian Foreign Ministry/Reuters

Russian officials hold talks to defuse tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in Moscow, May 19, 2023. A peace deal between the two Caucasian nations, backed by both Russia and Western powers, could be signed as soon as June 1.

A peace deal to end the bitter, three-decade-long conflict over the fate of the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan appears almost within reach.

Perhaps most remarkably, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been brought to the brink of accord by Western and Russian diplomacy – working in parallel, if not in sync.

The agreement comes as an exhausted and disillusioned Armenia, decisively defeated in a 2020 war, concedes to most of Azerbaijan’s demands in hopes of being able to chart a new course without the albatross of endless war hanging around its neck. The deal may be reached as early as June 1, as Armenian and Azeri leaders attend the European Political Community (EPC), an intergovernmental forum on Europe’s future, in Chisinau, Moldova.

But while the agreement may leave Armenians dissatisfied, it does hint at still-existent areas of common ground between Russia and the West, even if the two are at odds over Ukraine. Over the past several months, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev have shuttled between Washington, European capitals, and Moscow, in each receiving a similar message about the necessary shape of a durable settlement. A week ago, President Vladimir Putin told the two Caucasus leaders that, despite a few technical details, a deal that Russia supports is nearly ready.

“You couldn’t say that Russia and the West were working together on this. Rather say that they were on the same page,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “Their interests coincided in this case, even if that sounds a bit unusual in the present context.”

“Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity”

The conflict has been raging since the Soviet twilight years, when Armenia and Azerbaijan engaged in mutual rounds of brutal ethnic cleansing. That was followed by a bloody war that subsided in the early 1990s with a victorious Armenia in control of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as a huge part of Azerbaijan proper.

Tens of thousands of Azeris were displaced by Armenian occupation, and a vengeful President Aliyev, interviewed by the Monitor many years ago, vowed to use Azerbaijan’s oil wealth to build a military machine capable of recovering those lost lands. In 2020, he succeeded in ejecting Armenia from most occupied territory. But Russia, the traditional power broker in the region, stepped in to impose an armistice that injected Russian peacekeeping forces to protect the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But Russia’s influence was already waning in the region, while Turkey’s sponsorship of victorious Azerbaijan was a new balance-tipping factor. Following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s grip weakened further. Western powers saw an opening to pry Armenia, with its pro-Western leader, Mr. Pashinyan, out of Moscow’s orbit.

Over the past year, Mr. Aliyev has become much more assertive in seeking an end to the conflict that leaves Nagorno-Karabakh, with its 120,000 Armenian inhabitants, inside Azerbaijan. He has recently dropped earlier offers of autonomy and insisted that since Nagorno-Karabakh is part of sovereign Azerbaijan under international law, the territory must be ruled from Baku, the Azeri capital, and its people must accept the terms of Azeri citizenship or leave.

Until recently, that has been impossible for Armenia to stomach. But after several rounds of shuttle diplomacy to the United States, Europe, and Russia, Mr. Pashinyan finally offered the icebreaking concession on May 22. For three decades, Russian and Western diplomacy have agreed that Nagorno-Karabakh is legally part of Azerbaijan, and for the first time, an Armenian leader has, however reluctantly, acknowledged that.

“Armenia recognizes Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity of 86,600 square kilometers, assuming that Azerbaijan recognizes Armenia’s territorial integrity as 29,800 square kilometers,” Mr. Pashinyan said. “Those 86,600 square kilometers also include Nagorno-Karabakh.”

The future of Nagorno-Karabakh

The remaining sticking point is how to deal with the now-stranded population of the tiny, mountainous, self-declared independent statelet, which Armenians call Artsakh.

“Once the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan is established, then the population of Nagorno-Karabakh becomes an internal concern,” says Ilgar Velizade, an independent political expert in Baku. “This is a serious hitch, but I am sure it will be solved. This is the foundation upon which good neighborly relations can be built.”

Atom Mkhitaryan, co-chair of the Armenian Association of Political Scientists, says Mr. Pashinyan’s concession was made on condition that the “rights and security of Armenians who have lived on their native land [Karabakh] for thousands of years are respected. But not a word is heard about what those rights are or how their security will be ensured. ... It remains unclear how Russia or the West will use their levers and means to guarantee and monitor the implementation of the agreements.”

It has been a basic assumption for three decades that no Armenian government could abandon the Armenians of Karabakh and survive politically, says Mr. Lukyanov. But Mr. Pashinyan appears ready to do just that.

“It looks as though the suggestion that Pashinyan wants to rid himself of the burden of Karabakh might have been right,” Mr. Lukyanov says. “But the mystery is, why is Armenian society so passive about it? Agreement is possible now, after Azerbaijan reshaped the balance, because Armenia now finds this outcome acceptable. If Armenians are fine with it, why shouldn’t everyone else be?”

The future of the Karabakh Armenians will probably be settled by evacuation to Armenia, most experts warn. Neither the West nor Russia seems prepared to press Baku on establishing autonomy for that beleaguered population, whose always-doubtful viability as an independent state has totally collapsed since Armenia’s defeat three years ago.

The agreement that may soon be reached would open the region to economic development, including long-blockaded transport corridors, pipelines, and tourism. Russia and the West, though de facto partners in securing accord, will quickly revert to overt rivalry, says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, an independent political think tank in Moscow.

“Russia and the West weren’t cooperating, just competing over who could get the two sides to sit down and sign an agreement,” he says. “Russia will want to maintain its traditional role in the region, with its peacekeeping mission continuing. The West will want to reduce Russia’s role and make its peacekeeping force leave after an agreement is signed. Interests may have briefly coincided, but competition will be lasting.”

After nearly a year of gridlocked negotiations on the future of the stressed Colorado River, Arizona, California, and Nevada reached a breakthrough last week, uniting behind a voluntary proposal to further curtail their water use.

Some observers call the proposal “historic.” But how significant is it? Since the news broke, others have described the Lower Basin agreement as overhyped. It’s still just a proposal, and only a short-term one for managing critically low reservoirs, which threaten hydropower and water supplies for millions of people.

While some see the proposal as “the best thing since sliced bread,” others see it as a “Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” says Nevada negotiator John Entsminger. “Neither of those things is true,” says the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

A more “balanced” approach, he explains, would be to say: “It’s a really good thing that the states reached an agreement, so that they have the space in the next 3 1/2 years to work on these longer-term, more durable issues.”

Below, the Monitor looks at the benefits and limits of the agreement among the Lower Basin states.

What’s the proposal?

Negotiators from the three Lower Basin states announced on May 22 a plan to voluntarily conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of water by the end of 2026 for $1.2 billion in federal compensation. The water savings amount is beyond their current obligations to conserve.

The available federal funds helped spur talks – and so did some relief from an especially wet winter. At the same time, the government had warned that it can impose unilateral cuts if stakeholders fail to agree on conservation plans.

Matt York/AP/File

Water from the Colorado River diverted through the Central Arizona Project fills an irrigation canal, Aug. 18, 2022, in Maricopa, Arizona.

Though the amounts aren’t finalized, California, the largest user by far, would conserve 1.6 million acre-feet. Nevada would save 285,000, leaving around 1.1 million in water cutbacks for Arizona to absorb. An acre-foot of water is roughly the size of an American football field covered 1 foot deep. 

Under the plan, the federal funds would come from the Inflation Reduction Act and would help tribes, cities, and farmers offset conservation costs for most of the cuts. Those funds could, for instance, pay for more short-term fallowing of farmland and expand current water-saving programs.

The largest share of river water is claimed by California’s Imperial Irrigation District, which serves farms in the Imperial Valley. It could be a major contributor of usage cuts. The water district is pleased by the “plan that is based on voluntary, achievable conservation volumes,” said Henry Martinez, general manager, in a statement.

SOURCE:

United States Bureau of Reclamation's Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Nevada would continue rolling out its conservation plans, such as banning the use of Colorado River water for ornamental lawns, dubbed “nonfunctional turf.” The state, though, isn’t asking for a slice of funds. It would “bank” its share in the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, through 2026, with the possibility to recoup that water later. 

How does it point to progress?

The history of water negotiations is a long and difficult saga, and merely reaching an agreement among Lower Basin users is a significant achievement, say experts. The proposal presents something of a breakthrough for Arizona and California, which have long argued over river use (even the Supreme Court has intervened).

“It was clear that we could end up in a place where forced, mandatory cuts by the federal government on the three Lower Basin states was not a necessity,” says Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Department of Water Resources director.

Negotiators got a wake-up call last June, when the commissioner for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation told Congress that an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of conservation were needed “just to protect critical levels in 2023.” The river, stressed by mega-drought and demand, was in a near crisis.

Federal officials analyzing the new Lower Basin proposal applaud the signs of cooperation.

SOURCE:

United States Bureau of Reclamation

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

What are its limits?

The deal isn’t final, and a public comment period follows. Even if the proposal is enacted, it would run only through 2026. That’s when current rules expire, requiring more negotiations about the river’s future.

Some experts say that the proposed 3 million acre-feet is insufficient given the stresses on the river. They also question the amount of federal moneys for short-term conservation. “We need to address this issue on a much more long-term basis,” says Mark Squillace, professor at the University of Colorado Law School.  

For example, “we could use a lot of that money to permanently change the way we do irrigated agriculture in the western United States,” he says. Agriculture is by far the river’s biggest consumer.

Also, leaders of the Upper Basin, which includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, want more details about the plan. The seven states, along with 30 tribes and Mexico, are yoked together by a complex, century-old legal framework that shapes the river’s use.

In April, the federal government published draft plans for potential changes to the operation of dams that manage reservoirs on the river. The plans spell out options for more mandated cuts to water users, which aren’t off the table.

The Lower Basin proposal adds another alternative. As the government reviews, it’s temporarily withdrawing its own draft. A final plan is expected later this year.

Women’s rights groups in Turkey, fearful that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s election victory will further threaten past legal victories, are rethinking their strategies as they lick their wounds.

Mr. Erdoğan narrowly defeated opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, 52% to 48%, in a runoff election vote, benefiting from strong support among the conservative, religious women who have long constituted his loyal base.

“Erdoğan made us feel accepted as women in headscarves,” said Aysa Kartal, a homemaker with three children, as she voted for the president in Istanbul on Sunday. “We are happy and satisfied with the way things are and we want to continue this way.

But what satisfies Ms. Kartal alarms more liberal women seeking to protect Turkey’s secular constitution from the influence of Islamist conservatives.

In his victory speech Sunday, Mr. Erdoğan promised to protect women from violence. “Violence against women is forbidden … and no one should dare to attempt it,” he said. But he also made clear his hostility to LGBTQ+ rights. “We consider the family sacred, and no one can insult it,” he declared to a cheering crowd.

This month’s elections sent the highest number of women to parliament in Turkey’s recent political history: They won 121 of 600 seats.

But the government “has a vision of women embedded in traditional values,” says Valeria Giannotta, scientific director of CeSPI Observatory on Türkiye, a Rome-based think tank. “It doesn’t mean that women are just housewives; women can work. But eventually they should become a wife and mother of three children.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A conservative Muslim couple looks at a cellphone while sitting in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

Rolling back reforms

Irem Birol, a 35-year-old translator, is single and child-free. She voted for the opposition and now fears a gradual decline in women’s freedoms, pointing to Mr. Erdoğan’s record over the past decade.

During Mr. Erdoğan’s first ten years in power, as prime minister, feminists pushed through seminal reforms that modernized the Turkish penal code to recognize women as equals in marriage and inheritance.

The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) passed laws protecting women against violence. That was partly prompted by Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union, which was demanding improvements in Turkey’s human rights. But Ankara has shelved its efforts to join the EU in favor of strengthening its regional influence. 

The tide began to turn in 2013, many political observers say, when police attacked protesters, including women’s rights activists. In 2021, Mr. Erdoğan withdrew Turkey from the 2011 Istanbul Convention, a European treaty that defends women and LGBTQ+ people from gender-based violence and discrimination. He said the convention violated Turkish family values.

Femicides and suspicious deaths of women have risen consistently in the last 10 years, reaching 579 in 2022, according to the volunteer group “We Will Stop Femicides Platform.” The group is facing charges in court for insulting the president, which Fidan Ataselim, the group’s secretary general, calls a political ploy to silence their activism.

In her eyes, the women’s cause lost the election, but Ms. Ataselim says she plans to organize in bigger numbers to fight back.

“After the elections, in only one day, nearly 1,000 women responded to our call to join our platform,” she says. “We will do our best to increase this hope.”

“Leave us alone”

Feminist activists say they are especially nervous about the influence that two radical Islamist parties will wield now that they have seats in parliament for the first time. The New Welfare party and the Kurdish Free Cause party, both allied with the AKP, won only eight seats between them, but they are expected to push hard for their key demands, and could galvanize the government into action.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Women pray in the women’s section of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

The two fringe parties have been seeking to repeal laws protecting women’s rights for years, advocating policies such as segregating genders in schools, lowering the legal marriage age for girls, weakening the law giving women the right to restraining orders against their abusers, and abolishing alimony. They also seek to criminalize adultery, repeal the statutory rape law, and ban abortion.

“The AKP will trade women’s rights for political gain,” with its allies, worries Şehnaz Kıymaz Bahçeci, a Berlin-based adviser to Turkish women’s rights groups.

The two parties “have a violent past and people do not feel safe at all,” adds Selime Büyükgöze, one of the organizers of the Feminist Night March on International Women’s Day who volunteers for a group providing shelters for abused women. “Now they will have more power.”

Ms. Bahçeci is frustrated that many women “voted for parties which made them invisible,” as she puts it, but she has not given up hope of winning over Erdoğan supporters. “We need to talk to women on the ground more, so they can understand who serves them best,” she says. 

Ms. Kartal, the homemaker, on the other hand, says she knows her rights and believes the ruling government won’t betray her. For her, feminism is an unwanted Western idea. “I want to tell Westerners ... to leave us alone,” she says. “We can fix our own problems with our Islamic ideals.”

Activists say dismissing feminism as Western is a common tactic to delegitimize basic women’s rights. Ms. Birol, the translator, is among them, and she says she is aware of her waning rights. But she is also tired of the divisions in Turkish society stoked by politicians.

Her relatives, Ms. Birol says, some secular, some religious, are capable of discussing their differences at family gatherings, but they have decided it is better to avoid politics altogether.  

“We chose peace together,” she explains. “So we can still have pleasant family dinners and can respect each other’s boundaries.”

In her book “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden,” Camille Dungy creates a plot of pages enriched by their diverse mixture of nature, nurture, history, and memoir. On the one hand, “Soil” offers useful gardening tips, such as how deep to plant crocuses and alliums. But along the way, readers discover that tumbleweed was transported from Europe, black-eyed peas arrived aboard slave ships, and both gardens and children need patience and grace.

The recipient of the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Ms. Dungy unearths American history, one that recognizes the toil of America’s Black citizens and honors their unquenchable thirst to “grow their own beauty” in what was a very parched land. Scattered throughout “Soil” are time-tested words of wisdom intended to support the flourishing of native and imported plants as well as inspire those willing to dig into their ancestral roots to uncover the resilience from whence they come.

Ms. Dungy, a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, recently spoke with the Monitor. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did this idea get started, the telling of American history by sharing stories about gardening, the lives of African Americans – including your own ancestors – and your experiences as a mother?

“Soil” began as a simple environmental study of the plants, animals, and insects that were in my garden. I was working to create a space of welcome, ... a space in my yard for native plants and animals, and to encourage pollinators to come. But I was doing the bulk of my writing in 2020, when my daughter was home and I was responsible for overseeing her remote schooling. ... The nation was erupting. An awakening or reckoning with social injustice and disparities occurred, ... and there was a catastrophic wildfire just miles from my home. It became impossible for me not to weave all these events together. I had to pay attention to all that was happening around me.

© BEOWULF SHEEHAN/SIMON & SCHUSTER

CAMILLE T. DUNGY

Writing about soil, planting, and growing became a metaphor, not only for all that was growing and happening in the world, but also for your desire to unearth family history. What has digging into your ancestral soil revealed?

I can’t understand who I am right now and who my daughter can be, if I can’t fully understand who my family has been and what experiences they had that were passed along to me.

I am, as the saying goes, the wildest dreams of my ancestors. I hold their hopes and aspirations. The history of this nation is a complicated history that’s sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutal. Yet, that’s the history that grounds us. We are rooted, ... our feet are in this ground, ... we are connected to this earth, and it goes deeper than that. Our connection with the past gives us the foundation we need to move forward.

How has American soil affected African Americans’ perspectives on nature, planting, harvesting, or farming?

One of the realities of the African American community is that there are a lot of us who are deeply connected to the land, to growing, and to gardening. We are nurturing plants in our yards, containers on our balconies, and pots in our sunrooms. That aspect of the Black experience isn’t magnified in media, literature, or movies, so the connection that many of us have to the soil frequently comes as a surprise to people outside the Black community.

An insightful story from “Soil” was that Black people had to cut flowers from their own gardens to have floral arrangements for their loved ones’ funeral services; white florists wouldn’t sell them any. How did you come across that bit of history?

That’s one of the experiences my mother shared from her childhood in central Virginia. Even when white florists did sell Black people flowers, the flowers were old, subpar, wilting. Black people couldn’t go inside the store to pick what they wanted. So, Black people who grew flowers would make bouquets and create beauty from and for their community. It was a kind of collective uplift that pushed against a demoralizing and diminishing institutionalized system. Segregation was ubiquitous.

Your fondness is for a garden to be a “riot of color” rather than a monochromatic design, which you say offers the benefits of structure and order. What’s behind your preference?

So much of “Soil” operates as metaphor and fact. In the community where I live, I am a different ethnicity and color than most everybody else. It’s important to me that I live in a space that is willing to embrace the glory of diversity and difference as something that is wonderful. In terms of the garden, different pollinators are attracted to different colors, different shapes, different blooming seasons. On a practical basis, it’s useful to have many different colors, many different shapes and kinds of plants available [for] the many different forms of nonhuman life that might come to my garden. And I just find lots of color glorious!

How many different kinds of plants are in your garden?

I have no idea. Close to 70 or 80? What’s been important to me is not how many, but how much I try to get to know them and encourage them by the way I serve them. What grows is the result of a lot of hard work, research, attention, and care. About seven years ago, when I first started this project to re-wild my yard, I didn’t have nearly the level of competence or knowledge that I have now. Gardening has taught me patience. I’m willing to just see what emerges with as little intrusion as possible. There’s just enough intervention to keep things healthy and safe. But not so much that I’m commanding. Hard work, research, attention, and care are vital to parenting as well.

Life’s demands can preclude some women from cultivating their creativity. What does “Soil” have to say to those women?

I deeply interrogate throughout the book the artistic tradition that prioritizes the solitary genius – the artist who can go off by herself and create art in isolation. This is particularly problematic in environmentally focused writing because of what it says about where people are supposed to find beauty and sublimity – that the only places of true beauty are pristine, unpeopled spaces. It suggests that the quotidian aspects of our daily lives, the messiness of having to do laundry and the dishes and helping your child with homework, are not spaces worthy of creating art.

Gardens, history, and hope must all be tended, or they will be lost, you say.  What are some ways to nurture those essentials?

My hope is that “Soil” is a guidebook for that work. We need to keep returning to our soil so that we can cultivate a growing knowledge of what we’re planting, a growing knowledge of our history, and a growing desire to look at the questions about how we move forward. It’s about finding ways to fully connect with nature and finding ways to build better connections with each other. We can make choices about composting, planting native plants, not using biocides. ... We can prioritize community over isolation. When we choose work that sustains our soil, our gardens, and our history, we also sustain within us a sense of hope.

Contributor Maisie Sparks is the author of “Holy Shakespeare!” and other works.

AP

Steven Bradford (right) and Reginald Jones-Sawyer, members of California's Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, attend a Dec. 14 meeting in Oakland, California.

California will soon join a long list of places contemplating one way to repair their societies from a brutal past – with cash payments. A task force set up in 2020 to recommend how the state can compensate Black residents for generations of discriminatory harm will send its final report by July 1. The state Legislature may want to see first how other places, either with a legacy of slavery or recent mass violence against civilians, have succeeded in trying to set up a reparation program or actually delivered on one.

Not many, according to scholars of transitional justice. Which helps explain why Gov. Gavin Newsom, in reacting to the task force’s preliminary findings in May, downplayed the role of money. “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments,” Mr. Newsom said.

In many places where people still struggle for reparations as a quick correction for past abuse, the emphasis has been on what is called self-repair. As Pedro Welch, a descendant of a formerly enslaved people in Barbados told the Monitor, “We as individuals can seek self-reparations – through genealogy and the reconstitution of families, reconnecting with our history, repairing trauma.”

“We can declare we are free,” he said, a spiritual exercise which may help solve one problem with reparations. A person’s mental liberation from a harmful legacy can lift the stigma of victimhood implied by a government selecting those deserving of reparations. It reaffirms one’s dignity and moral agency, perhaps evoking similar self-reflection among those who have benefited from past discrimination. 

“We have to work on that men­tal, spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al lib­er­a­tion of our­selves,” Za­kiya Uzoma-Wada­da, head of the Emancipation Support Committee in the former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, told a local newspaper. Reparations, she says, are more than payment. They include emancipation from mental bondage.

Two scholars of reparations, Luke Moffett and Sunneva Gilmore, even suggest that monetary reparations cannot bring healing unless society reframes the notion of a “sick victim” needing state intervention. “We suggest that victims find their own way to live with the past as they await reparations, through ‘self-repair’ measures,” they wrote in the Journal of Law and Society.

For governments weighing reparations – such as in California – the two scholars recommend an appreciation for “the different paths down which victims can go to get themselves to the position that they were in before the harm or wish to be in afterwards.”