Vahram TER-MATEVOSYAN, PhD*
During the final years and after the collapse of the Soviet Union a number of violent conflicts erupted in different parts of its territory. The South Caucasian region has experienced three ethnically rooted conflicts (Abkhazian, South Ossetian and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict). These conflicts have remained stubbornly intractable in spite of various mediation efforts. This article aims to touch upon the background of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh, the Russian language name came from the Soviet period) conflict, its past dynamics and prospects of resolution.
There are different perspectives on the origins and primary reasons of the conflict. There is, however, consensus that the roots of the current phase of the conflict date back to the early 1920s. Two days in early July 1921 proved to be fateful for the making of the conflict. On July 4, members of the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party voted to transfer the region of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. However, next morning, with a key role of Josef Stalin, the Soviet Commissar for Nationalities, the Armenian populated region, without voting by the members of the Caucasian bureau, was handed to Soviet Azerbaijan out of ”…the necessity for national peace among Muslims and Armenians and of the economic ties between upper [mountainous] and lower Karabakh.” In July 1923, the Nagorno-Karabakh gained the status of the autonomous oblast in the territory of Soviet Azerbaijan and retained it until the late 1980s. During the entire existence of the Soviet Union, various leaders of Soviet Armenia, intellectuals from Armenia, Karabakh, Russia have sent a number of petitions to the Soviet leadership with claims to undo Stalin’s decision and bring Karabakh under Soviet Armenia’s control. These claims were particularly intensified in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of dissident movements in Armenia. The leaders of Soviet Armenia had to appease the increasing demands of intelligentsia who had started to pose assertive claims about ”historical lands”, ”Western Armenia” and ”territorial demands” from Turkey. The question of Karabakh also greatly featured in the intellectual discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. In the same period, the leadership of Soviet Armenia was becoming aware that Soviet Azerbaijan under Heydar Aliyev was determined to change the demographic dynamics in the Nagorno-Karabakh oblast. Thousands of Armenians from Karabakh had to leave either for other regions of Azerbaijan or for Russia. Between 1975 and 1989, the Armenian population of Karabakh has decreased to 75 percent. The size of the Armenian population in the NKAO was decreasing at the expense of newly arriving Azerbaijanis. This policy of demographic engineering had greatly disturbed local intellectuals who started to send more petitions to the leadership of Soviet Armenia. The latter, in turn, decided to allow Armenians from Karabakh to study in the institutions of higher education in Armenia instead of going to Baku. A number of other steps were also taken to stop the migration of Armenians from Karabakh.
It bears mentioning that the final decade of the Soviet Union proved to be politically the most turbulent one. From 1982 to 1985, it changed four leaders and many were hopeful that Gorbachev and his reformist agenda would bring stability to the Soviet Union. However, his policy of ”Glasnost” and ”Perestroika” came to dismantle not only ideological and socio-economic foundations of the Soviet state, but also the roots of ethnic coexistence. One of the early efforts to benefit from Gorbachev reformist agenda were the people of Karabakh who in February 1988 went to the streets of Stepanakert, the capital of NKAO, with demands to join with Soviet Armenia. Amid a climate of growing nationalism, the Soviet of People’s Deputies of Nagorno-Karabakh passed a resolution by a vote of 110-7 requesting the oblast’s transfer to the Armenian SSSR.
The resolution caused a chain of reactions. Moscow’s negative response, which came after three days, put an end to high hopes that Armenians had in Gorbachev and his reforms. A week after the NKAO’s Supreme Council decision, between February 26 and 29, Soviet Azerbaijan reacted with a carefully orchestrated massacres in the industrial city of Sumgait which was only a few km away from Baku. In the broad daylight, around 30 Armenians were killed, 400 were wounded, their properties looted by the angry mobs. 18,000 Armenians of Sumgait had to flee the city. It was a harbinger of troubles that had to follow. The Sumgait massacres in February 1988 were unprecedented in the Soviet Union, however, they were meant to be only the beginning of series of massacres in the territory of Azerbaijan. Mass violence and atrocities against Armenians in Kirovabad and Baku (in 1989 and 1990 respectively) came to ascertain the fears that the Soviet leadership was incapable of defending Soviet citizens.
Meanwhile, popular movements in Armenia and Azerbaijan were feeding the public with even more intensified nationalistic sentiments. On December 1, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Armenia SSR and the Artsakh National Council adopted a joint decision on the reunification of the Armenian SSR and the Mountainous Region of Karabakh. In the May 1990 parliamentary elections, the Pan-Armenian movement came to power in Armenia ousting the Communists from power. In August 1990, Armenia adopted its Declaration of independence, which reconfirmed the reunification decision adopted in December 1989. After a year, in September 1991, more than 98% of Armenians voted for the independence of Armenia in the referendum. Many scholars emphasize the fact that the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR, which adopted a declaration of independence on August 31, 1991, based it on the idea of restoration of the ”People’s Republic of Azerbaijan”, which existed in 1918-1920. During its short existence, Karabakh (as well as Nakhijevan) was never a constituent part of it and was disputable territory with Armenia. After some 50 days, on October 18, 1991, the Constitutional act was adopted on the State Independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
On September 2, two days after Soviet Azerbaijan adopted the declaration on the state independence, Nagorno-Karabakh adopted its own declaration of independence. On December 10, 1991, two weeks before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh participated in a nation-wide referendum (Azerbaijanis boycotted it) and voted for the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. The popular vote adhered fully to both international law and the law of the still existent Soviet Union on the procedure of leaving the USSR. The Article 3 of the law, adopted on April 3, 1990, provided the procedure for the autonomous entities within the Soviet republics to leave the Soviet Union. Hence, the people of Karabakh adhered to the SU legal acts when adopting declaration of independence and holding referendum. It needs to be emphasized that Karabakh’s independence was based on the result of a referendum and not on the government or parliamentary declarations or decisions, which was the case not only in Azerbaijan, but also in some other countries of the Communist bloc.
The initial years of post-Soviet transformation in Azerbaijan were particularly impactful. From 1991 to 1993, Azerbaijan had three presidents, two interim presidents, and a number of military revolts. Each time the removal of the president in Azerbaijan was either followed or succeeded by domestic instability and substantial territorial losses in Karabakh or in the surrounding regions. Even the arrival of Heydar Aliyev, former leader of Soviet Azerbaijan, did not stop the territorial losses of Azerbaijan. In fact, Azerbaijan has lost most of the territories during his tenure. In May 1994, the military leadership of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh agreed to Azerbaijani requests for a ceasefire, which, aside from a handful of relatively minor violations, was held until the mid-2000s.
* Assistant Professor, American University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia
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