FORMER SECURITY CHIEF WINS PRESIDENTIAL VOTE IN NAGORNO-KARABAKH
Pravda, Russia
July 21 2007
The former security chief of Nagorno-Karabakh has won elections
for the presidency of the Armenian-controlled breakaway region,
the election committee said Friday.
Bako Saakian took 85 percent of Thursday’s vote, election committee
head Sergei Nasibian said.
Saakian, 47, had headed Nagorno-Karabakh’s security service since 2001
but resigned in June to stand in the election. He ran as an independent
and will replace Arkady Gukasian, who served two five-year terms.
Saakian pledged to push for full independence of the mountainous
territory inside Azerbaijan, whose claim to autonomy is not recognized
by any country. His main rival, Masis Mailian, got some 12 percent
of the vote, and the remainder was split among three other candidates.
Three-quarters of the territory’s 92,000 registered voters cast
ballots.
It was the fourth presidential election in the impoverished territory
that has been controlled by Armenian and ethnic Armenian forces since
a shaky 1994 cease-fire ended one of the bloodiest conflicts that
followed the Soviet collapse.
The six-year war killed 30,000 people and drove more than 1 million
from their homes, including many of the region’s ethnic Azeris.
Today, it remains one of the region’s "frozen" conflicts in the former
Soviet states.
Azerbaijan has rejected the vote as illegitimate and maintained that
Armenian separatists came to power in the former autonomous region
as a result of ethnic cleansing.
Azerbaijan and Armenia remain locked in a dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh
despite more than a decade of coaxing from international mediators led
by the United States, Russia and France to resolve the region’s status.
Armenian Presdent Robert Kocharian congratulated Saakian in a message
that said the election "bears witness to an irreversible historical
reality – the existence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic."
The mostly agricultural region of 146,000 people tied to Armenia by
swaths of Azerbaijani territory also under ethnic Armenian control
has faced a steady brain drain and dire economic problems despite
financial aid from Armenia and the Armenian diaspora.
Saakian has said that international recognition of Kosovo
as an independent state would pave the way for acceptance of
Nagorno-Karabakh’s sovereignty.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a Russian-Turkish term that means "mountainous
black garden." Ethnic Armenians, who now account for virtually the
entire population of the territory, prefer to call it Artsakh.