HAYK KOTANJIAN: AZERBAIJAN: ANTI-DEMOCRATISM AND COLONIALISM IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF REGIONAL SECURITY
Regnum
Feb 12 2008
Russia
On February 7, a conference called "Caucasus and Middle East countries
as potential partners in the process of forming regional security
system" started in Yerevan, Armenia. REGNUM publishes full text of
Major General, Commandant (INSS, MoD, Republic of Armenia), Doctor
of Political Sciences, Fellow Member (Russian Academy of Military
Sciences), Counterterrorism Fellow (National Defense University,
USA), Member (CSTO Academic-Expert Council) Hayk Kotanjian’s report
at the conference.
In the community of international organizations and scholars dealing
with the settlement of the Karabakh Conflict, it is common to express
peacemaking optimism concerning the settlement at the beginning of
each year. With all due respect to these expectations, I believe the
consideration of the problems of real peace and security in the region
in the circle of experts as a no less useful effort.
The Karabakh Conflict resolution by peaceful democratic tools is
one of the key problems for the security of Armenia, Azerbaijan and
the South Caucasus region on the whole (1). This report is devoted
to the evaluation of colonial essence of certain antidemocratic
manifestations of the former metropolitan country’s policy in relation
to the self-determined Nagorno Karabakh. The appraisal of essential
characteristics of the states’ democratization processes in the
region, as well as the realization of collective and individual human
rights can be considered as an integrative political-legal basis for
comprehension of regional security architecture formation process,
founded on the principles of peaceful coexistence and cooperation
enjoying equal rights in the South Caucasus.
Let’s begin with the overall assessments. While analyzing positions
of the Azerbaijani authorities regarding the Karabakh issue as a
regional security factor together with its other aspects, external
assessments of the neighboring state leadership’s democracy in the
context of international-legal norms of human rights and liberties
protection are of special attention. A comprehensive non-partisan
assessment is given to the authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan
by Freedom House (2), a renowned US-based human rights organization.
Like in previous years the last annual survey of Freedom House declared
Azerbaijan as a "not free country". Evidently, the democratization
process is not smooth in the neighboring states – both in Armenia
and in Georgia; however, Freedom House considers these two countries
"partially free", unlike "not free" Azerbaijan.
The Western colleagues consider the Azerbaijani government
antidemocratic in its political-legal essence. This is, first of all,
expressed in the dynastic inheritance and maintenance of power as well
as in imposing by the head of the state, the cult of his father-the
former ruler of the country-on the people of Azerbaijan thereby
resembling to the sultanate-style dictatorships. It is well-known that
the authorities’ response to the assessment of their democratization
extent is considered as an important component of democracy by human
rights organizations. From that perspective, it is symptomatic that
on 24 December, 2007, the neighboring state’s President, ignoring
the assessments of Freedom House, declared that the world community
recognized Azerbaijan as a democratic country and called his son the
next heir to the rule (3).
>From stability and security perspectives, the "non-freedom" of our
neighboring state is reflected in the colonialist manifestations
towards the rights and liberties of the natives in the Eastern
Transcaucasia. That first and foremost, concerns the right of peoples
to equality and free external and internal self-determination.
Antidemocratism of the neighboring state’s authorities regarding
the Karabakh settlement is expressed in denying the fact of legal
democratic suspension of the administrative and hierarchic relations
between Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan (4).
The illegality of the declaration of independence by Azerbaijan
in 1991 (5) without holding a referendum on the issue of seceding
from the USSR lies in the basis of ignoring the mentioned political
and legal fact. The fact of declaring Azerbaijan independent without
fulfillment of the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous
Oblast and other regions of densely-populated Armenian habitations to
free and independent choice of their political status – in defiance
of the USSR acting Law "On procedure of settling issues related to
withdrawal of a Soviet Republic from the USSR" (6) is also qualified
as a law infringement. Instead, by passing a legislative act on the
liquidation of Nagorno Karabakh autonomy, the Republic of Azerbaijan
proved to be an entity of metropolitan colonial oppression of Nagorno
Karabakh people’s will to free self-determination (7). As a reaction
to this illegal act, in compliance with the acting Law and principles
of direct democracy, Nagorno Karabakh seceded from the Azerbaijan SSR-
by holding a referendum.
At the beginning of 1992 the Republic of Azerbaijan unleashed
a colonial war in response to proposal of the newly elected NKR
authorities to start peace negotiations.
In addition to the violations of the legislation, the official Baku,
proclaimed her Declaration of Independence in 1991 on the legal
succession from the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, thereby
depriving herself of the right to include Nagorno Karabakh in her
territory, based on the fact that Nagorno Karabakh, having the status
of a disputed territory, wasn’t included in the Democratic Republic
of Azerbaijan throughout the whole period of its existence from 1918
to 1920 (8). Heretofore, Karabakh was a constituent part of the
Russian Empire and previously – of Persia, but not of Azerbaijan,
which didn’t exist as an independent state until 1918.
Another colonial attribute of the antidemocratic nature of the
Republic of Azerbaijan is the contradiction of her Constitution (9)
to the essence of the international-legal norms on the peoples’
right to dispose their own destinies through free expression of
popular will of the self-determined population in complete freedom,
formulated by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1966 International
Covenants on Human Rights and the UN Charter (10). World practice
proves that in this very way, i.e. without interference from the
metropolitan country, the rights of the peoples of Bangladesh, Eritrea,
East Timor, Montenegro, and at this moment Kosovo too were exercised,
to self-determine through free expression of will in the referenda
held among the self-determining nations, and not in the populations
of their former metropolitan countries, namely in Pakistan, Ethiopia,
Indonesia or Yugoslavia-Serbia.
A few words concerning the manifestation of antidemocratism, namely
the propaganda of xenophobia, violence and war are worth mentioning.
The efforts by the OSCE Minsk Group on the peaceful resolution of
Karabakh Conflict are based upon the UN fundamental principles:
interdependence of peace, progress and democracy in relations with
other nations, assuming that lasting peace is a premise, and democracy
is an utmost condition for secure and sustainable development of
nations. These very principles, reflected in the UN Charter and the
Human Rights Covenants, exclude war propaganda.
However, recurring statements by the statesmen of our neighboring
country contain a direct threat of war. Suchlike public addresses by
the head of our neighboring state to the population of almost all the
regions in Azerbaijan at national events and international meetings,
as well as their widespread broadcasting through mass media lead
towards a motivation of inevitability of resumption of war in line
with the propaganda of war and violence.
Yet by conducting open colonial war propaganda, the official Baku,
contrary to the logic of the Minsk process, mobilizes its population
to regain Karabakh by force. A concrete evidence of Azerbaijan’s
preparation to war is its purposeful excess of limitations, anticipated
by the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). Instead
of the permitted 220 tanks, Azerbaijan has 579, i.e., exceeding 2.63
times; instead of 220 armored combat vehicles-1174 (exceeding 5.34
times); instead of 285 artillery pieces of 100mm caliber and higher-788
ones (exceeding 2.76 times), instead of 100 battle planes-128 pieces
(exceeding 1.28 times). It should be noted that Armenia continues to
meet its international commitments according to the CFE Treaty, and
the NKR declares its eagerness to become a responsible participant
in this treaty which is of such importance for the regional security.
The statements by the statesmen of the neighboring country as a
matter of fact are a gross violation of the International Covenants
on civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights, and
which are difficult not to qualify as incitement of its own people
to genocidal actions towards the Armenian population. Unfortunately,
an example of such a manifestation of colonial disregard towards their
international commitments is given by the head of the neighboring state
himself. In his last New Year address to the Azerbaijanis all over
the world President Aliyev threatened the Nagorno Karabakh Armenians
with ethnic cleansing: "If Armenians residing in Nagorno-Karabakh
want to decide their fate, they must do it basing on the principle
of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, but if they do not want to do
this, they must leave Nagorno-Karabakh and create their second state
in another place" (11).
The antidemocratic nature of the Baku authorities’ position
on the peoples’ right to self-determination is reflected also
upon domestic level regarding the rights of ethnic minorities to
internal self-determination. Skepticism towards Baku’s promises
to render high-level autonomy to the Armenians is based upon the
complete disregard of the Azerbaijani Armenian refugees’ rights
while conducting negotiations on fulfilling the rights of refugees
and temporarily displaced persons of Azerbaijani nationality. A
symptomatic and sobering example of the Aliyev regime’s colonialism and
antidemocratism regarding the rights of ethnic minorities to internal
self-determination within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan is
the routing of the Talysh Mugan Autonomous Republic in 1993 which
was accompanied by its leader’s and his ethnopolitical companions’
arrest (12).
The fact of total obfuscation and pressure on accurate information in
Azerbaijan is reflected in the assessments by "Freedom House" as one
of the key features of the antidemocratic regime of this "not free"
country. The official policy of the titular nation’s dominance to the
detriment of parity with the native peoples of the neighboring country
is reflected in the purposeful reconstruction of the scientific history
of the nations of the region, which is targeted at distortion of their
identity, as well as at reducing the place and the role the indigenous
people in the historical development of the Eastern Transcaucasian
culture. In the policy of historical falsifications the grounding
of Azerbaijan’s historical right to the possession of territory,
which has been populated by millennia-old indigenous Armenians in
Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia, has a special place. As it is known
from the text of the President Aliyev’s speech at the anniversary
meeting at the National Academy of Sciences, he made a political
order on the falsification of the Eastern Transcaucasian history on 14
December, 2005 (13). As a result of the state policy of substitution
of scientific history with totalitarian special propaganda, there
occurs a break between the reality and the antiscientific history
of the nations of Eastern Transcaucasia, framed up in the depths of
current authorities.
The world academic community has already registered specific attempts
on realizing the political order of the neighboring state’s head -
to make primeval the history of densely-populated Turkic peoples
residing in the territory of Eastern Transcaucasia, subject to
Persia. The scientific fact of Turkic peoples’ habitation for 900
years in the South Caucasus seems an unacceptably small period for
the Baku authorities. The falsifiers try to prolong that history for
ten thousand years – back to the era of creating Mesolithic artifacts
of Gobustan by the pre-historic man of the Stone Age Epoch.
These distortions of the past, which were ordered from above,
are pierced through the manipulations with the Iranian toponym
"Azerbaijan" with its antiscientific usage towards Persia’s former
Caucasian provinces for the periods. The political application of that
term preceded well before the Turkic peoples settled in the territory
of the Eastern Transcaucasia. As it is known, the Turkic peoples of
Caucasian provinces also were not prominent as "Azerbaijanis" and their
settling territory as "Azerbaijan" in the official documentation of
the Russian Empire. In a word, the famous joke: "The USSR is a country
with an unpredictable past" is fully applicable to Azerbaijan, where by
the authorities’ order, a new history of the region is written-with
a radical change of place and role of settled indigenous peoples and
newly arrived nomadic tribes.
These are the manipulating positions from which the Baku authorities
impute to the Armenians the crimes against the "Azerbaijani people"
even in those periods, when Turkic ancestors of contemporary
Azerbaijanis didn’t enter the South Caucasus from Central Asia.
Preparing a ground for justifying colonial claims to the territory
of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, the Baku authorities, manipulate
the repatriation fact of the limited contingent of the Armenians (who
had been taken away earlier to Persia by Shah Abbas) in the aftermath
of the Russian-Persian War of 1828. Some of academicians politically
committed by the Baku authorities try to thrust on the Azerbaijani
community the opinion that all the Armenians arrived to the Eastern
Transcaucasia. The given "scientifically tailored" propaganda is
recently carried out right from President Aliyev’s mouth. Similar
authorities’ violence of human rights on free access to the truthful
scientific information targets at spoiling Azerbaijani people by the
belief that Artsakh is allegedly the fatherland of Turkic peoples,
and the Armenians in Karabakh and Armenia are, for the most part,
either descendants of re-settlers or are not Armenians at all.
In the policy of demolishing the trust among nations, the Baku
authorities spare a special place to conscious distortion of the
information on the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. State
propaganda of disrespect for the memory of 1.5 million Armenian victims
surpasses the boundaries of separate publications, taking the form of
sacrilege, directed by the Baku authorities. For examples of coarse
falsification of the Eastern Transcaucasian history, we may bring the
attempts of politico "balancing" of the genocidal crimes against the
Armenian population, which were committed at the beginning of the 20th
century, with "the genocide against the Azerbaijanis". Based upon
these falsifications, the Decree of the President of the Republic
of Azerbaijan "On the Genocide against the Azerbaijanis" was issued
in 1998 (14). The representatives of Baku intelligentsia themselves
in the narrow confidential circle are mocking at the dishonest and
dangerous way of political "consolidation of the Azerbaijani people"
against the Armenian and Russian peoples. They know that as a matter
of fact at the beginning of the 20th century, massacre of Armenians
and resistance of Armenians to that massacre took place, as well
as later-in response to pogroms of peaceful Armenian population in
Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku in 1990.
It should be mentioned that the Baku authorities’ sneering at the
pain and human dignity of the millions of Armenian families in
the Diaspora together with the propaganda of xenophobia among the
Azerbaijani population, play also a diametrically opposite role – it
consolidates Armenians all over the world for adequate counteraction
to the State defamation of the Armenian Genocide.
The recent campaign of commemorating the "genocide" victims, as if
committed by Armenians against the Mountain Jews, serves to confront
Armenians and Jews. The historic truth was defied by the manipulators
(by means of the informational war) to such an extent of sneer, that
excavating mass burials of the Armenians, killed at the beginning of
the 20th century, are presented as "victims" of genocidal actions by
the very true victims; that is the Armenians. The goal is to destroy
centuries-old good neighborly relations that existed between Shirvan
Armenians and the Mountain Jews, aiming to push Israel and Jewish
lobby organizations to anti-Armenian positions.
Among similar outcomes of involving scientists in the antiscientific
elaboration of the Baku regime’s informational war which is untwisted
by special propagandists under the flag of human rights protection,
the fact of falsifying the authorship of sneering at the victims’
bodies of the Khojalu tragedy deserves special attention. Details of
the given provocation, as a tool for political struggle for power in
Baku, are stated by fresh traces in the well-known interview of the
Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov to the Czech journalist Dana
Mazalova (15). The Armenian party has all the proofs that corpses
of those killed were in the responsibility zone of the Azerbaijani
authorities and the physical contact of the Armenians with the bodies
to abuse them was impossible.
The fact that the analytical community in Azerbaijan, as well
as in Armenia, is represented by sufficiently wide spectrum
of views on security realities and perspectives of our South
Caucasian division of the European Neighborhood raises hopes. I
was honored to know praiseworthy Azerbaijanis in the multinational
professional environment, together with the impartial and worthy
representatives of different states and organizations. I am sure
that there are specialists in our neighboring country, who realize
the counter-productivity of restoring the colonialism towards the
Nagorno Karabakh’s people in the process of the European Neighborhood
formation. The given problem could become a subject of an unbiased
study for Azerbaijan’s politically non-committed scientists, who
are preoccupied with perspectives of secure democratic development
of the region, as well as for the co-chairs of the Minsk Group and
international analytical community.
1. "National Security Strategy of the RA". Yerevan, 2007,
Special issue of defense-academic quarterly "Haikakan
banak" MoD, RA. Freedom House. Map of Freedom in the
World. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (2007) (http://www.freedom
house.org/template.cfm?page=36 3&year=2007&country=7129)
2. See Ilham Aliyev, "My Universities", 24 December, 2007
( amp;Pid=19934); Ilham Aliyev,
excerpts from his direct address: "In the contemporary world the
transition of power from one member of a family to another in itself
isn’t considered as an antidemocratic fact". "Moreover, I’d like
to mention that the true heir of Heydar Aliyev is my younger son,
Heydar Aliyev, the youngest member of our family".
3. Act on the referendum results on the independence of the
Nagorno Karabakh Republic, 10 December, 1991, Stepanakert,
Nagorno Karabakh Republic, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
( ml).
4. Constitutional Act "On the state independence of the Republic of
Azerbaijan", 18 October 1991, No 19-20.
5. See USSR Law "On procedure of settling issues related to withdrawal
of a Soviet Republic from the USSR" No 1410-1 of 3 April 1990." USSR
Supreme Council ().
6. AzR Law "On abolition NKAO AzR", 26 November 1991. Registers of
AzR SC, 1991, No 24.
7. See "Journal". League of Nations, Geneva, No 17, p. 130: among
the arguments lying in the basis of the resolution by the League of
Nations on non-recognition of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan,
the fact of "impossibility of precise identification of the Azerbaijani
real borders in connection with its territorial disputes with its
neighbors" was mentioned.
8. See Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan,
Chapter II. "Basis of the State", Chapter III. "Basic
Rights and Liberties of a Person and Citizen"
( o/Constitution/constitution
01 r.html).
9. See CSCE. Helsinki Final Act, 1 August, 1975. Principle VIII. OSCE
website ( ru.pdf); International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. UN GA Resolution 2200 A (XXI),
16 December, 1966. UN Centre for Human Rights: International Treaty
Collection; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights. UN GA Resolution 2200 A (XXI), 16 December, 1966, UN Centre
for Human Rights. Human Rights: International Treaty Collection.
10. President Ilham Aliyev’s congratulations to the people of
Azerbaijan on the occasion of the Solidarity Day of all the
Azerbaijanis all over the world and New Year. 31 December, 2007
23:59. President Aliyev Heydar oglu Aliyev. Official website of
the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Documents/Addresses
( les.php/item_id=20080101020429299&sec_id=135).
11. See Farmoni Fakhraddin Aboszoda (Abbasov). The
History of Our Republic. CentrAsia. 2003,
( 39900).
12. See President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the ceremonial
assembly, dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the National Academy
of Sciences (14-12-2005 14:15), , the President of
Azerbaijan, official website (
id=2007081 0125435235&sec id=11)
13. Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
"On the Genocide against the Azerbaijanis". Heydar Aliyev,
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Baku, 26 March, 1998
(; dil=ru&sid=MTMyMjMzMTA4MTMyNjE1)
or ()
1 4. Interview of the AzR President Ayaz Mutalibov to the Czech
journalist Dana Mazalova, "I am a humanist at heart", "Nezavisimaya
Gazeta", 2 April, 1992.
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