ANOTHER ‘MISTAKE’ BY USA ALI VERDIYEV
Baku Sun, Azerbaijan
May 25 2007
A statement on an official US website about the history of an
Azerbaijani region has again caused protests in Baku shortly after
Washington managed to calm emotions in the Caucasus republic over a
controversial paragraph in its annual human rights report.
The official CIA website said that Russia actually passed the breakaway
region of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in the 1920s, in a covert
hint that the region might have been within Armenia before then.
"Armenian leaders remain preoccupied by the long conflict with Muslim
Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a primarily Armenian-populated
region, assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s by Moscow," the
website says.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has criticized the statement as
a "mistake" and stressed that any information posted on official
US websites should be in accordance with the position of the US
administration.
"We will certainly deal with this issue. The Foreign Ministry will
appeal to both the US embassy in Baku and the Azerbaijani embassy
in the US in order to clarify this erroneous information on the CIA
website," the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Khazar Ibrahim, told local
news portal Day.az.
However, the public relations officer of the US embassy in Baku,
Jonathan Henick, said that the information on the CIS website did
not reflect the official position of the US.
"This is just information about the history of the region and we do
not hold that all the information on that site is accurate," he said,
promising to clarify the issue with Washington next week.
The statement followed a significant chill in relations between the
US and Azerbaijan in late April over a paragraph in the annual report
of the US Department of State on human rights practices in Armenia,
which denied Yerevan’s occupation of Azerbaijani territories.
Washington swiftly corrected the paragraph following strong protests
from the Azerbaijani side, which immediately cancelled top level
security talks with the US in response to the move.
Enjoying strong political and military support from Russia, Armenia
occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts
before military hostilities ended in a cease-fire in 1994. One
million Azerbaijanis were uprooted from their homes in Armenia,
Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding seven districts in the wake of
the devastating war which claimed thousands of lives on both sides. A
long series of peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia, brokered
by the OSCE Minsk Group, have been under way for more than a decade,
leaving only a gloomy ray of hope of achieving a breakthrough in
the negotiations.
In Soviet times Nagorno-Karabakh was a region populated by ethnic
Armenians and Azerbaijanis and is now a bone of contention between
the two neighboring Caucasus republics. Official statistics said that
more than 60 per cent of the population in Nagorno-Karabakh were
ethnic Armenians and the rest were Azerbaijanis, who were evicted
from the self-styled separatist region during the war of 1992-1994.
Khazar Ibrahim explained further that the mistake in the statement
is that the Soviet decision on Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1920s did not
pass the region to Azerbaijan, but simply said that Nagorno-Karabakh
should remain part of Azerbaijan.
"There is an official document concerning the decision of the plenary
session of the Caucasus bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party dated 5 July 1921. The session was attended by Stalin,
Ordzhonikidze, Kakharadze, Kirov, Orakhalashvili, Sigapner, Nazaretyan,
Narimanov and Myasnikov. Ordzhonikidze and Nazaretyan raised the
issue of handing over Nagornoi-Karabakh to Armenia," Ibrahim said.
"The decision passed at the plenary session, however, says that
Nagorno-Karabakh should remain within Azerbaijan due to the necessity
of reconciliation between Armenians and Muslims, economic ties
between the mountainous and lowland parts of Karabakh and relations
with Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, the decision says that a regional
self-administration should be applied to Nagorno-Karabakh, including
the town of Shusha," he said.
A renowned historian and Azerbaijani MP, Jamil Hasanli, believes that
Azerbaijan itself is to blame for the appearance of such mistakes on
the official sites of other countries.
"We have been writing books about the history of Azerbaijan, including
Nagorno-Karabakh, only in the Azerbaijani language. This means that
we declare our position only to ourselves. It is high time that we
wrote books in different languages so that others can read the true
history," Hasanli told Day.az.
Hasanli also confirmed that the truth is that Nagorno-Karabakh was
not passed to Azerbaijan under any decision, but has always been part
of Azerbaijan.
The historian cited the works of an outstanding Caucasus researcher
from Russia, Vasiliy Potto, who lived in the 19th century and said that
ethnic Armenians were moved to Nagorno-Karabakh from Iran after the
Russian empire took over the South Caucasus in the early 19th century.
Russia occupied the South Caucasus, including the territories of
contemporary Azerbaijan and Armenia, following two wars with Iran in
1812-13 and 1826-27.
Hasanli said that the best proof as to the aboriginal population
of Karabakh is the census taken in 1823. According to the book,
"Description of the Karabakh province", published in Russia in 1866,
the results of the census showed that "92 per cent of the population
[in Karabakh] were Muslims and only 8 per cent were Christians –
the successors of ancient Albanians living in the region.