© "Russia in Global Affairs". № 1, January - March 2008

Fuad Ahundov is a political scientist.

Contrary to expectations, the end of the Cold War did not bring about a strengthening of general security and one of the reasons for this was a sharp deterioration of ‘local’ conflicts, most of which flared up in the territories of former socialist federations – the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region stands out among other conflicts: the government in Baku and a number of international organizations – first of all the Council of Europe and the Organization of the Islamic Conference – have qualified it as Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan.

Diplomats from many countries are working toward finding a settlement for this and many other conflicts. Yuri Merzlyakov, co-chairman of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, is taking care of the problem on Russia’s behalf. It goes without saying that a durable peace settlement and finding a long-lasting stable peace is impossible without understanding – including on the part of the mediators – the essence of the conflict. In this light, it is totally counterproductive to apply highly stereotypical and unimaginably oversimplified schemes to this conflict.

MANIPULATIONS WITH SELF-DETERMINATION

One of the over-simplistic formulas (which is popular, but still highly erroneous) suggests an opposition between the right of nations to self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity. This was the opinion of Tigran Torosyan, speaker of the Armenian parliament, who commented on the Karabakh conflict in Russia in Global Affairs (No. 4, 2007).

It is hardly possible to consider such interpretations as correct. First and foremost, the right of nations to self-determination does not automatically mean the right to secession and endless fragmentation of states. Russian President Vladimir Putin made a note once on the dangers inherent in “broad interpretations” of the right to self-determination when applied to local conflicts in former socialist federations. As he commented on the West’s readiness to press forward with recognizing Kosovo’s independence in spite of objections from the Serbian government, Putin said: “Do you ever think that employing the principle of self-determination for nations will fuel negative processes far beyond the former post-Soviet space?” “Why provoke this? I think this is highly detrimental and dangerous,” he said.

Scrupulous politicians and diplomats have always recognized the degree of risks coming from broad interpretations of the right to self-determination, which Putin warned about. The UN Charter, as the cornerstone of international law, does not contain anything that would make it possible to consider this right as a basis for an endless partitioning of countries up to the ‘self-determination of streets’ and ‘sovereignty of households.’ Many researchers, including Dr. Yuri Reshetov, point out the absence of an equation mark between the right to self-determination and the right to secession. The former right can and must be implemented in the form of autonomies, local self-government, etc. Moreover, one should not mix up the notions of nationality, nation, and ethnic group.

The evolution of the principle of self-determination can be traced throughout the process of forming the UN Charter. The proposals examined at a conference in Dumbarton Oaks did not include provisions concerning self-determination. They were put in the charter at the San Francisco conference as amendments by the great powers. The materials summarizing the process of looking over the amendments said that the principles of equality of nationalities and the right to self-determination are two integral elements of a single norm. Participants in the conference also stipulated that the principle of equality and self-determination of peoples conforms to the UN Charter’s objectives by virtue of the fact that implies only the right to self-government as opposed to the right to secession. Thus, the origin and legitimate content of the principle of equality and self-determination state unambiguously that the principle initially ruled out secession. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not contain the right to self-determination of a nationality either.

The principle of self-determination received a boost as the colonial system collapsed. As huge ‘colonies,’ ‘overseas dependencies’ and ‘overseas territories’ that previously had names like British Tanzania, the Belgian Congo, etc., shook off the colonial yoke, European governments thousands of kilometers away could no longer exercise power in the lands they had controlled in the past. Colossal territories with huge populations were left without any government at all, and this process, unique in its own way, required a legislative framework, for which the principle of self-determination alone could provide legal grounds.

Still, the wars for mineral resources that broke out soon after (like the rebellions in the Katanga province of the former Belgian Congo and in Nigeria’s Biafra) made it very clear what staking on the rights of peoples to self-determination was fraught with after the power of far-away metropolitan European countries had disappeared. European power was replaced with a chain of bloody wars of extermination, the splitting of countries and the monopolization of power by feudal princes, tribal chiefs, etc.

One way or another, the UN agencies reaffirmed some significant postulations in the wake of tough anti-colonial and, more importantly, post-colonial experiences.

First, the right of a nation to self-determination should not be mixed up with the rights of ethnic minorities, as the authors of the UN Charter did not intend this right for minorities.

Second, self-determination must not undermine a nation’s unity or create obstacles to exercising this unity to the detriment of national sovereignty.

Last but not least, a research paper The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, which the UN compiled in 1981, indicates that the principle of equal rights and self-determination, as put in the UN Charter, does not grant an unlimited right of secession to people living in the territory of an independent sovereign state, and such a right cannot be regarded as a provision of lex lata. Support for the right of secession or instigation for it on the part of foreign countries should be viewed as a gross contradiction to the principle of respect for territorial integrity that underlies the principle of the equality of states. It states further that it would be dangerous to include recognition of a general and unrestricted right to secession in international law, since the rights of the population living in the territory of one or another country are regulated by the national constitutional law of that state.

The authors of the paper said at the same time that the principle of equality and self-determination must serve the unification of peoples on a voluntary and democratic basis and must not break up the existing national state entities. It is important to avoid any formulations of the principle that might be interpreted in terms of expanding the sphere where it has an effect or preconditioning its application to the peoples that already constitute an integral part of an independent and sovereign state.

Acting in any other manner would be tantamount to connivance with separatist movements in sovereign countries and might provide a pretext for putting the national unity and territorial integrity of sovereign countries into jeopardy. The authors also believe that the right to self-determination has been put into international documents for purposes other than instigation of separatist or nationalistic movements.

Also, the authors voiced confidence that the international community has become mature enough to be able to tell genuine self-determination from ones that are fronts for acts of secession.

Dr. Natalia Narochnitskaya, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee and the chairperson of the Duma’s commission in charge of studying the practice for ensuring human rights and basic freedoms in foreign countries, summed up both the theoretic development of international law and the political experience painfully gained by the world community. “One should not make references to the right of peoples to self-determination,” she said. “In the first place, contrary to illusions, international law does not recognize this right. Otherwise it would plant a bomb under any federated or multiethnic state. This immediately sets a precedent and gives a pretext for analogies – for example, Chechnya in Russia or the Basques in Spain. The international community will never accept this, all the more so that international law really does not recognize it. International legislation interprets that right currently as the right to cultural autonomy, in the first place, that is, the right to maintain ethnic life within the boundaries of a state where a different nation is dominant.”

Dr. Valentin Romanov, a professor of international law at the Russian University of People’s Friendship, said that although the UN Charter lists self-determination as a principle, the latter does not show up among the principles that, according to the Charter’s Article 2, provide guidelines for the activity of the organization and its members. The principle of self-determination is not a self-domineering concept but, rather, one of the basics for peaceful and friendly relations between nations. Add to this that the UN Charter inseparably links self-determination to equality of peoples, which presupposes respect for the rights of not only a self-determining ethnic entity, but also the rights of the remaining part of the population, the life and future destiny of which will be affected by the self-determination process.

An analysis of international documents (as opposed to their quasi-scientific interpretations) dispels all doubts that the thesis on the right of peoples to self-determination does not apply to local conflicts in the former Soviet Union in general and to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in particular, to say nothing of the fact that it cannot provide grounds for sawing off a part of territory of an internationally recognized sovereign state. It is noteworthy that quasi-states usually ignore the internationally accepted meaning of self-determination and cling to its so-called Leninist version, which suggests “self-determination up to secession” that first appeared in the documents of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Bolsheviks). It showed up later on many occasions in the documents of various Communist parties, and yet one will easily notice that international law operates according to a different interpretation, which straightforwardly says that secession is inadmissible.

The process of self-determination – especially secession – can only be implemented through legitimate methods. It means that secession is possible only where it is envisioned in the national legislation. As life shows, this clarification is more than important.

Armenian “self-determination” in both mountainous and lowland Karabakh went hand in hand with acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis. The Hocali Massacre on February 26, 1992, was the bloodiest, but far from the only such episode.

But most importantly, the involvement of the Armenian army’s regular units made up of draftees in military operations in Azerbaijani territory rules out any talk of “self-determination.” The whole story stirs up memories of the Third Reich’s concern for the “oppressed ethnic Germans” in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other European countries at the end of the 1930s.

Many analysts say that the May 9, 1992, seizure of the town of Susa, where Azerbaijanis made up the majority of the population and were totally unwilling to accept ‘self-determination in the form of secession,’ as well as the seizure of Lacin located outside of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, provided evidence of a war for territory. Even more, it is impossible to classify the seizures of districts adjoining Nagorno-Karabakh and the expulsion of all the population from there as acts of self-determination.

In other words, unlike numerous other conflicts, the Armenian-Azerbaijani standoff over Nagorno-Karabakh reveals the presence of territorial claims on the part of Armenia.

Incidentally, in 1988 when, according to Armenian claims, “deputies of Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional council passed a resolution” [at a session that was illegitimate, in fact, since the council’s deputies of Azerbaijani ethnicity – 30 percent of the total list – were not informed of its convocation – F.A.], the document spoke precisely of “Nagorno-Karabakh’s unification with Armenia.” Two years later, the Armenian parliament passed a constitutional act on the region’s merger with the then Soviet republic of Armenia.

Realizing that this was an overt territorial claim, Armenia tries to pass it off today as a nation’s right to “self-determination,” i.e. secession from Azerbaijan. Armenians living in the North Caucasus, where their population is almost as large as in Armenia proper, could claim secession from Russia in much the same way, for instance.

Imagine a homeless person who seizes a house belonging to legitimate owners, then throws them out along with their possessions. When the case goes to court, a lawyer says that the right to housing falls into the category of basic human rights, that each person must have shelter over his or her head, that society should not sit back and watch how people are reduced to a life on the streets, that it must fight poverty and help the homeless to find a place to live. These arguments do have grounds, and yet the right to housing and the importance of fighting poverty do not justify the seizure of someone else’s house. References to self-determination of nations as a tool for legitimizing self-proclaimed quasi-states are nothing more than juridical trimmings, or attempts to impart the consonance with international law postulation to completely unlawful acts. They represent an overt misuse of notions and terms.

Another thing is obvious, too. The Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are not a nation in the legislative sense of the word. The commonly accepted understanding of a nation as a stable, historic community of people living within certain boundaries and who perceive themselves as an entity cannot be applied to the community of ethnic Armenians living in one of the regions of Azerbaijan. What is more, this formulation shows that the notion is losing the former ethnic underpinning today. The existence of the Republic of Armenia per se furnishes the Armenian people with enough opportunities for self-determination and development of its own statehood. It is amid this background that one can and should raise the issue of local self-government and development of the humanitarian sphere, but not in any way the issue of secession and creation of a fourth independent state in the South Caucasus, which would be the second Armenian state in the region.

BIAS IN THE GUISE OF FAIRNESS

While discussions on an alleged contradiction between the right to self-determination and territorial integrity go on continuously in the pages of research periodicals, attempts to provide a systemic analysis of the conflict are much scarcer. Vladimir Kazimirov has tried to do something along these lines in Russia in Global Affairs (No. 1, 2008, pp. 188-199). Alas, his article will mislead readers rather than fill in existing blanks.

The prehistory of the conflict is so recondite and tragic that even the conflicting sides themselves stay away from sorting out (at least in public) who of them was the first to throw a stone at their neighbor’s house. Such sorting outs have fallen out of fashion in both Baku and Yerevan. Yet Kazimirov, who has not taken part in the real settlement of the conflict for quite some time and thus has overlooked the progress of the situation, finds it necessary to delve into the past. The historical references he makes abound in inaccuracies and look overtly biased and apologetic.
Even a cursory analysis of events in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, actions and statements by the sides leaves no doubts that the case in hand has evolved from territorial claims of one state to another state. This is a conflict of philosophies, if you like it – tolerance versus monoethnicity, harmonious co-existence with neighbors versus the tactics of endless territorial claims to neighboring countries.

There are very few countries where a single nation makes up more than 99 percent of the population. The best known examples are Japan and Iceland - insular state entities that formed amid conditions of a natural geographic isolation. Armenia is the only monoethnic state in the Caucasus, a multiethnic and multi-religious part of the globe where even neighboring villages sometimes speak different languages. Most remarkably, Armenia is not surrounded by water but, rather, by multi-ethnic countries, namely Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and Georgia.

However, Armenia was not always ethnically homogeneous. At the time when the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was established within the boundaries of the modern Republic of Armenia, i.e. with the inclusion of Geicha and Zangezur, Azerbaijanis were equal in number with Armenians, according to some data, or even surpassed them, according to other data. “Armenianization” was carried out quite artificially and to no small a degree with the aid of multiple resettlements and ethnic cleansings. The resettlements and ethnic cleansings were not only a Soviet practice: they began in the early 19th century when Russia invaded the Caucasus. It was the time when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians began to move to Russia from Persia and Turkey. In 1828, the Russian Empire’s ambassador to Teheran, Alexander Griboyedov, who was named in charge of the Armenians’ resettlement, drew the Tsar’s attention to what he described as “inept Armenian propaganda against local Moslems” (who had to make room for Armenian resettlers).

Take for instance the mass deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia on the basis a decree from Stalin in 1948-1953. While the Crimean Tatars, Chechens and other nationalities were deported under the formal pretext of punishment for their collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, the Azerbaijanis were forced to move out simply because of their ethnic origin. Other repressed peoples were deported from all major places of residence, but Azerbaijanis were only deported from Armenia, obviously because it was to be “cleaned up.” The authorities also decided to “clean up” all place-names in Armenia. The Soviet Council of Ministers, in numerous resolutions, changed more than 2,000 names. Yet, the Soviet period was not enough for such an “epoch-making” Armenianization of place-names. According to Manuk Vardanian, the head of Armenia’s State Real Property Cadastre Committee, “the process of renaming populated localities in the country, whose names have Turkic origin, must be completed in 2007.”

The reader needs only to look up familiar place-names in Armenia or in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia or its abridged version. After a place-name, one will see in parentheses the date when it was renamed and its historical name. For example, Yerevan (Erivan, named after Revangulukhan), Sevan (Gekcha, “wonderful” in Azerbaijani), Stepanakert (Khankendi, “khan’s village” in Azerbaijani), etc. The next wave of resettlements and ethnic cleansings occurred in 1985 and in 1988-1989 (the last wave also affected Russians belonging to the Molokans religious group, Kurds and other nationalities).

In fact, the conflict around Nagorno-Karabakh did not begin in 1988, as Vladimir Kazimirov claims. It began much earlier – at the instigation of Armenian nationalistic quarters. On December 11, 1985, the newspaper GAMK, which is published in Armenian in France, published a political manifesto from the nationalistic party Dashnaktsutiun. It said, in part, that the organization had plans to fight for a “free and united Armenia” with the inclusion of “Armenian territories listed in the August 1920 Treaty of Sevres, such as Nakhichevan, Akhalkalaki and Karabakh.” Not only Azerbaijani politicians, but Armenian ones too, including the leader of the National Democratic Union of Armenia Vazgen Manukian, admitted that the tone of the standoff in the Karabakh issue was set by “parties of the Spiurk,” or the Armenian diaspora.

Kazimirov, who tries to be evenhanded, resorts to outright stretching along the way. For example, he puts an equation mark between the ethnic cleansing in Armenia from 1985-1989, in which no less than 200 people were killed by the roughest count, including several dozens killed very brutally, while another 240,000 people were forced to flee their homes, and the amorphous allegations that “Armenians were squeezed out of Nakhichevan.” Armenian nationalists have been fanning the latter story in recent years, but they have failed to present any proof to the world community and will not likely present any. Attempts to counterbalance the genocide in Hocali with Armenian myths about a “tragedy” in the village of Maraga look equally awkward.

Kazimirov turns a blind eye to the main element of the conflict – the terrorist methods that the Armenians resorted to from the very start of the confrontation with Azerbaijan. Influential people in Nagorno-Karabakh, some of them law-abiding Armenians, were the victims of terrorist acts.

The April 14, 1992 murder of the regional legislature speaker Artur Mkrtchian, the director of Stepanakert airport A. Shukhanian, and Valery Grigorian, a senior official at the Stepanakert Communist Party City Committee, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Armenian terrorists have repeatedly bombed buses and subway trains in Azerbaijan. They even used the services of North Caucasian militants who had received training in camps run by Armenia’s secret services. A number of terrorist acts were committed in Russia too. It is enough to recall the assassination of Colonel Vladimir Blakhotin, the commander of the Soviet Union’s Interior Troops in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, in April 1991. He was killed by a group of Armenian militants who had arrived from Nagorno-Karabakh. The investigation of explosions in the Baku metro and at a Baku railway station also exposed a criminal grouping headed by Armenian secret services officer Jaan Oganessian. Its members also committed a number of terrorist acts in Russia, including in Chechnya.

On November 20, 1991, a Mi-8 helicopter was brought down near the village of Karakend. It was carrying a group of important Azerbaijani government officials, Russian military observers Major General I.D. Lukashov and Lieutenant-Colonel M.V. Kocharov, and Kazakhstan’s First Deputy Interior Minister S.D. Serikov, who were traveling to the region on a peacekeeping mission.

International terrorists Monte Melkonian, Vazgen Sisliyan and others took an active part in the military fighting against Azerbaijan. The New York Times reported that Armenia’s President Levon Ter-Petrossian attended the funeral of terrorist Monte Melkonian (who had been on Interpol’s most wanted list and who was killed in Nagorno-Karabakh) in the summer of 1993. In 2001, the French authorities released from jail Varoujan Karapetian, who had been sentenced to life in prison for planting a bomb at Orly airport in Paris. Armenia gave him – and other terrorists who had finished their terms in prison – a state welcome.

Kazimirov throws out all pretences of impartiality when he gets down to the seed of the problem. He states bluntly that “there is no other conflict in the former Soviet Union where there is such an overt desire for revenge. In this light, the position and arguments of the Azerbaijani side require close attention.” He says this at a time when international observers, including co-chairmen of the OSCE’s Minsk Group, admit that the settlement process is being obstructed by Armenia and not by Azerbaijan. A one-sided analysis of this sort is nonsensical in mediatory diplomacy.

Kazimirov exclaims pathetically that high-ranking officials at the OSCE “do not have the right to offer feeble reactions to serial threats coming from officials, to incidents at the line of contact, or to the acceleration of the arms race.” He purports that mediators are not referees, “yet they are obliged to defend the peace mission that the parties to the conflict signed a long time ago. The OSCE is first of all an organization for security, and cooperation in Europe comes second.”

The answer to why the OSCE does not react to statements by Azerbaijani officials is all too obvious – whatever the intensity of the willingness to bring the conflict to a peaceful settlement, no one has taken away the right of a country to self-defense yet. Like the principle of territorial integrity, this is a cornerstone element of world order. This gives a still clumsier look to Kazimirov’s desire to pedal on the allegation that combat operations and the occupation continued due to official Baku’s aggressiveness and commitment to “forceful solutions” and not due to aggression on the part of Armenia. As a mediator, he must know perfectly well that it was Armenia that repeatedly broke the ceasefire.

Finally, when Kazimirov tries to compare the Azerbaijani and Armenian defense potentials at the time when hostilities broke out, he somehow hushes up the massive “lending” of combat units by the Russian army to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh during Pavel Grachev’s reign at the Russian Defense Ministry. Illegal supplies of weaponry skyrocketed too. Members of the State Duma, the late General Lev Rokhlin and incumbent Siberian governor Aman Tuleyev estimated those supplies at $1 billion in 1997. Russian servicemen who took part in operations on the Armenian side were taken prisoner more than once by Azerbaijani forces. They were handed over to Russia at the personal requests of Boris Yeltsin and Pavel Grachev, and Kazimirov is fully aware of this.

The retired diplomat’s efforts to apportion all responsibility for military action and its aftermath exclusively to Azerbaijan look unconvincing, to put it mildly, as does his desire to accuse Baku of encroaching on four UN Security Council resolutions. Remember that those resolutions demand a pullout of troops from the occupied territories and are addressed to Armenia.

Kazimirov’s claims that Armenia has ostensibly repeatedly accepted even unfavorable proposals from the mediators and that Azerbaijan rejected them are bewildering.

In reality, Yerevan also rejected the ‘package’ and ‘stage-by-stage’ peace plans. It only accepted a plan promulgating a ‘common state’ concept.

Kazimirov’s fumbling to find a criminal element in the fact that the Azerbaijani Constitution does not envision a referendum on a part of the country’s territory is ludicrous, as legislation in many countries also does not envision this.

The plan he proposes boils down to an “exemplary flogging” of Azerbaijan for calling for a military resolution to the conflict, but this plan hinges on the thesis that “the Azerbaijanis are to blame for everything” and it a priori will not lead to a durable peace, the same way that the craving to appease Hitler at the expense of Austria and Czechoslovakia did not.

Amid the background of Kazimirov’s openly pro-Armenian stance, his calls for guarantees for the non-resumption of military actions are viewed in Baku as Moscow’s intention to officially extend protection to Armenia. Thus it is not at all surprising that Yuri Merzlyakov, as the Russian co-chairman of the Minsk Group, has to regularly disavow the statements of his predecessor as ones that do not reflect Russia’s policies in the region. Otherwise they could deal a blow to Russia’s image in the region and to its mediatory role.