NAGORNO-KARABAKH MUST NO LONGER BE BARRED FROM THE NEGOTIATING TABLE

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
2009-07-17 17:58
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic

The NKR permanent representative to the USA, Robert Avetisyan’s
article in Radio Free Europe

Just a month or two ago, it seemed to many observers that the Karabakh
conflict was closer than it had been for years to a negotiated
solution. But the much-trumpeted "breakthrough" never materialized.

This is not surprising. Once an active participant in the peace
process, the central party in the dispute — the Nagorno Karabakh
republic (NKR), which in 2009 marks the 18th anniversary of its
de facto independence, but whose international status has not been
formalized — is conspicuously absent from the talks today.

Since 1997, Azerbaijan has refused to negotiate directly with the NKR,
preferring to discuss the resolution with Armenia. The NKR appreciates
Armenia’s role in the peace process, but it should be understood from
the outset that Karabakh’s elected officials must be represented in
the talks Counterpoint: Advice For Armenia On Resolving The Karabakh
Disputeevery step of the way.

Indeed, politically the NKR is a separate state with its own democratic
traditions, and, in the long run, any serious progress towards
resolving the conflict cannot take place unless its representatives
return to the negotiating table and agree to share the responsibility
for implementing the hoped-for peace agreement.

Azerbaijan: Oil-Backed Warmongering Will Not Work

Many analysts believe that the high oil prices of the past few years
gave rise to the nationalist illusion in Baku that, by channeling
millions of petrodollars into upgrading its armed forces, Azerbaijan
could launch a new offensive and thus bring the NKR under its control
by force. Azerbaijani presidential administration official Elnur
Aslanov issued an implicit warning last month that the "leadership of
Armenia must understand that it is necessary to protect its citizens
from a new war" and should therefore stop helping Nagorno-Karabakh
defend its hard-won freedom.

Despite the temporary euphoria created by the influx of petrodollars,
and because of Azerbaijan’s history of military-backed coups
d’etat, the least desirable option for the country’s ruling family
is to start a war, during which the army could again snap out of
control. But rising military expenditures and the threat to attack
Nagorno-Karabakh again should still be taken seriously, because that
rhetoric could inspire opportunistic skirmishes on the Line of Contact
that currently separates the Azerbaijani armed forces from the troops
of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army. This could lead to larger,
possibly uncontrolled, clashes.

Azerbaijan’s zero-sum logic was visible from the very first
days of the conflict in February 1988, when Azerbaijan responded
to Nagorno-Karabakh’s peaceful and constitutional appeal to the
Soviet leadership to reconsider its status within the USSR with the
unprecedented massacre of ethnic Armenians in the Caspian city of
Sumgait, hundreds of miles away from Nagorno-Karabakh.

The events in Sumgait were the continuation of policies implemented by
Heydar Aliyev during his tenure as the first secretary of the Communist
Party of Azerbaijan in the 1970s and early 1980s. Aliyev bragged in
2000-03 that for two decades he executed a policy of economic and
demographic discrimination against Nagorno-Karabakh in a deliberate
effort to force its majority-Armenian population to emigrate. As a
result of Aliyev’s strategy, the growth of the Armenian population of
Nagorno-Karabakh stopped, while the number of ethnic Azeris increased
artificially.

Following the collapse of the USSR in late 1991, Azerbaijan advanced
from pogroms to full-scale armed aggression. Reports compiled between
1991 and 1994 by the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(CSCE, later renamed OSCE) document the openly declared genocidal
intentions of that military campaign.

Azerbaijan ignored four consecutive UN Security Council resolutions
calling for a Karabakh cease-fire, and is therefore responsible for
the continuing consequences of the war it started. Azerbaijan must
appreciate the lessons of the early 1990s: all previous such attempts
by Baku to use force against Nagorno-Karabakh proved infinitely more
costly than the perpetrators anticipated.

Self-Determination: International Law And History Do Matter

Azerbaijan’s standard approach to arguing the legitimacy of its claims
on Nagorno-Karabakh is to stress the principle of the territorial
integrity of states while downplaying the right of peoples to
self-determination.

Although the territorial-integrity principle does apply to
Azerbaijan as a general theoretical notion — as it does to NKR,
Armenia, or any other state — it does not apply to Baku’s claims
on Nagorno-Karabakh. The reason is straightforward: in contrast
to, say, Spain (with its potentially secessionist Basque country)
or the United Kingdom (with its potentially separatist Scotland),
no independent Azerbaijani state ever controlled Nagorno-Karabakh —
neither in 1918-20, nor after 1991. It was the Soviet leadership that
imposed on Nagorno-Karabakh the subordinate status of an autonomous
region within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. When the
USSR began to weaken in the late 1980s, this artificial "matryoshka
doll" construct collapsed immediately, with Baku losing any measure of
direct power over Stepanakert three years before declaring sovereignty
in 1991.

Importantly, the NKR’s right to self-determination also hinges on
the fact that the region has for centuries been the centerpiece
of Armenian statehood. Nagorno-Karabakh — the historic Armenian
province of Artsakh — is the only territory where the self-rule and
political institutions of a compactly residing Armenian majority were
maintained continuously from the fifth century to the present day,
with the exception of several decades in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Artsakh is the birthplace of the earliest known Armenian constitutional
edict — the fifth-century document called "The Canons of Aghven." It
governed Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian kingdoms and principalities
hundreds of years before most European peoples became nations,
and 15 centuries prior to the time when the people known today as
"Azerbaijanis" were officially designated as such for the first time
in the Soviet census of 1939.

Among the dozens of Armenian medieval churches and monasteries and
hundreds of Armenian stone inscriptions (some dating from the fifth
century) on the territory of the NKR is the Monastery of Amaras. It was
founded by the foremost Armenian saint, St. Gregory the Enlightener,
shortly after he proclaimed Christianity the official faith of the
Kingdom of Armenia, which thus became in 301 A.D. the world’s first
Christian state. It was at Amaras one century later that the inventor
of the Armenian alphabet, St. Mesrob Mashtots, founded the first-ever
school where that script was taught.

The indigenous Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh is fiercely
protective of that centuries-old Christian heritage, now under
threat. The international community should continue investigating
the barbarous demolition of dozens of medieval Armenian churches and
cemeteries in the formerly Armenian-populated province of Naxcivan
and the region south of the city of Ganja.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress