EX-SECURITY CHIEF WINS VOTE IN SEPARATIST KARABAKH
Michael Mainville

Agence France Presse — English
July 20, 2007 Friday 10:05 AM GMT

Former security chief Bako Sahakian was declared winner Friday in a
presidential vote in the disputed ethnic-Armenian dominated territory
of Nagorny Karabakh.

The victory by the ex-head of the National Security Service of this
unrecognised statelet reflected fears among the public that Azerbaijan
might try to take back Karabakh by force, analysts said.

Sahakian, who is also a former soldier and interior minister, won
85 percent of the vote at Thursday’s polls, the central election
commission said after all votes had been counted.

His nearest rival, deputy foreign minister Masis Maylian, came a
distant second with 12 percent of the vote. Seventy-seven percent of
Karabakh’s 92,000 registered voters took part.

Analysts said the results reflected a siege mentality in Karabakh,
which Azerbaijan has repeatedly vowed to regain after Armenian-backed
separatists seized control in a war in the early 1990s.

"It is logical that a country that is under constant threat of
war would choose a person from the security services," said David
Petrosian, a political analyst in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. "The
population trusts people from the security services to protect them."

Officials here said they hoped the vote would shore up the
region’s democratic credentials, boosting its efforts to become an
internationally recognized country after 15 years of self-declared
independence.

But the international community has ignored the vote and Azerbaijan
denounced the election as having "no legal effect whatsoever."

Maylian had accused authorities of orchestrating a pro-Sahakian
campaign, using government resources to back his candidacy. His office
filed nearly 20 complaints over alleged irregularities during the
campaign and vote.

He nonetheless described the vote as fair, praising the "swift
response" of elections officials to his complaints.

"We have realized the task put before us, to have an alternative
choice and preserve the image of (Karabakh) as a democratic state,"
he told a press conference Friday.

Elections officials said complaints would be investigated but that
overall the vote had proceeded normally and met democratic standards.

Backed by their ethnic brethren in Armenia, separatists seized Karabakh
and seven surrounding regions from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.

The war was one of the bloodiest of the many conflicts that followed
the collapse of the Soviet Union, claiming 30,000 lives and forcing
nearly one million people on both sides to flee their homes.

Armenia and Azerbaijan remain officially at war over Karabakh and
the dispute is a major source of instability in the strategic South
Caucasus region wedged between Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Heavily armed and supported by Armenia’s widespread diaspora community,
Karabakh’s 150,000 people have remained defiant in the face of
oil-rich Azerbaijan’s promises to regain control of the region by
force if necessary.

Sporadic clashes continue along Karabakh’s border and international
mediation has repeatedly failed.

A full-blown conflict could derail Western-backed efforts to build
a series of pipelines to carry Azerbaijani and Central Asian oil and
gas through the South Caucasus to Europe.

Friday’s results were preliminary, with final confirmation expected
later in the day.

Outgoing president Arkady Ghukasian, who endorsed Sahakian, was
ineligible to run after two terms as president.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress