98.6% OF NAGORNO KARABAKH’S VOTERS CHOOSE INDEPENDENCE

Tiraspol Times & Weekly Review, Moldova
Dec 11 2006

Voters in unrecognized Nagorno Karabakh went to the polls Sunday
to confirm their wish for independence. Nearly 99% approved a new
constitution declaring NKR an independent country. The result of the
vote echoes a similar referendum held in Pridnestrovie in September.

The government of Nagorno-Karabakh has been de facto independent
for more than 15 years, with U.S. and Armenian support STEPANAKERT
(Tiraspol Times) – The population of Nagorno-Karabakh has
overwhelmingly approved a new pro-independence constitution, returns
from a Sunday referendum showed. According to official preliminary
figures released on Monday, 98.6 percent of voters approved the
constitution, which describes Karabakh as a sovereign state. Turnout
was 87.2 percent.

" – The constitution is adopted and December 10 from now can be
declared as a Constitution Day," election commission chief Sergey
Nasibyan told Reuters by telephone.

The vote was held on the 15th anniversary of a referendum in which
Karabakh, which split from Azerbaijan in a 1990s war that killed
35,000 people, declared independence.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous territory about
half the size of Cyprus, is still unresolved. The majority of people
in Nagorno-Karabakh are Christian ethnic Armenians who associate
themselves with neighboring Armenia rather than Azerbaijan, a majority
Muslim state.

The new plebiscite sends an important signal to the rest of the
world of a commitment to continued de facto independence by the young
country. A political expert explains that its "Soviet-style" result
of nearly 100% approval is not surprising, in view of the animosity
between the two sides in the conflict and the lives that were lost
in the war for independence.

The Nagorno Karabakh vote echoes a similar referendum where
Pridnestrovie voted 97% in favor of independence on 17 September. In
that vote, more than 94% also rejected unification with Moldova,
making it clear to the world that future talks of a joint state are
fruitless and that the wounds from the Moldovan 1992 invasion of
Pridnestrovie have not yet healed.

Like Moldova, Azerbaijan calls a basic human right "illegitimate"
Azerbaijan and the so-called "international community" do not
recognize the right of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh’s to live in
independence. Azerbaijan is determined to restore its control over the
country, whose population has repeatedly said that it does not accept
to live under Azerbaijan. An official statement from Azerbaijan said
that the referendum was illegitimate, copying a phrase which Moldova a
few days earlier had used to describe the peaceful democratic election
in neighboring Pridnestrovie.

" – But how can it be illegitimate for us to simply express our vote,
peacefully and democratically?" asked a resident as she went to the
polls. "It is not as if we are killing anyone, which is what they do
when they want to impose their rule on a people that doesn’t want it.

Democracy can never be illegitimate. It is a basic human rights."

The fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh was the bloodiest of the
independence wars that broke out when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

A fragile ceasefire has been in force since 1994 but there are still
occasional exchanges of gunfire.

Ethnic clashes in the late 1980s escalated after the collapse of the
Soviet Union into full-scale fighting. Though Azerbaijan lost that war,
it is now threatening a new military campaign to crush the dream of
freedom of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh if stalled peace talks
do not soon produce the results that Azerbaijan wants.

Nagorno-Karabakh differs from other "frozen conflicts" in the ex-Soviet
Union in that it has repeatedly received funding from the United
States Congress. Throughout the 1990s, NKR’s independence leaders
collaborated with other unrecognized countries but at the advice of
American consultants, they withdrew their close ties.

Washington felt that it was not beneficial for NKR to be lumped with
Abkhazia and Pridnestrovie (Transdniester), and the consultants held
out the promise of quick international independence recognition if
Nagorno-Karabakh would seek its own way.

No such promise materialized, and Nagorno-Karabakh is now again
inching closer to the other unrecognized countries in the region.

Pridnestrovie had representatives at the vote Representatives from
Pridnestrovie, or Transnistria as some call it, were on the scene in
NKR during Sunday’s vote.

" – We have come here, first of all, in order to support the people
of Nagorno Karabakh, who came to the referendum to express their
thirst for freedom. The result of the referendum is already known:
the people of Nagorno Karabakh confirmed their desire to live
independently and freely, and we congratulate them for that," one of
the representatives of Tiraspol, the PMR Member of Parliament Lubomir
Rybyak, told reporters in Stepanakert.

" – We visited a small Karabakh village not far from the Iranian
border. I went up to two elderly women and introduced myself. One of
the women hugged me and said: ‘You are our brothers.’ I was amazed and
touched that in such a remote village they know about Pridnestrovie,"
Lubomir Rybyak said. In his opinion, the national referendum for
approving and adopting the new Nagorno Karabakh Constitution was held
in accordance with international norms.

Few countries in the world use the figure of a nationwide democratic
referendum to approve a Constitution. Pridnestrovie did so in 1995,
as one of the first of its time. Venezuela did it in 1998, and now,
in 2006, Nagorno Karabakh has successfully done it, too. (With
information from Reuters; Regnum)