Baku is attempting to assert sovereignty through force and ethnic cleansing while denying Armenians the right to self-determination.
BY ALEX GALITSKY | Foreign Policy
In a recent Foreign Policy article, Robert M. Cutler argued Azerbaijan’s military assault on Nagorno-Karabakh last year achieved what the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group couldn’t achieve after decades of ill-fated negotiations. Although Cutler is right to critique the Minsk Group’s inability to produce results, to suggest Azerbaijan’s so-called “military solution” has improved the prospects of long-term peace is a disturbing and dishonest proposition.
For the Armenian people, Azerbaijan’s military victory last November merely marked a new phase of suffering and persecution. Up to 100,000 Armenians were displaced as a result of fighting that saw Azerbaijan target civilian infrastructure, including homes, schools, hospitals, and cultural sites. Hundreds of prisoners of war and civilian captives still remain in illegal detention, where they have been subjected to torture, and an ongoing state-sanctioned campaign of cultural destruction has placed ancient Armenian heritage at risk.
This was the very outcome multilateral diplomacy sought to avoid—and the reason why Cutler’s expectation that “real peace and reconciliation” can proceed from this point is entirely unrealistic.
Although Cutler perversely attributes the failure of the OSCE Minsk Group to Armenia’s intransigence, its real weakness was its inability to compel Azerbaijan to address the root of the conflict: the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Cutler dismisses the issue by endorsing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s claim that Azerbaijan’s military victory has made a status determination process for Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians redundant. In doing so, not only does Cutler legitimize Baku’s recourse to ethnic cleansing as a means of “resolving” the issue of status, but he grossly mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict.
The status of Nagorno-Karabakh has been contested since the time of the Armenian genocide, when the leaders of the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic collaborated with their Ottoman patrons in the annihilation of the region’s Armenian population, including in Baku, Shushi, and Nakhchivan. When the Bolsheviks eventually subjugated the region in 1921, they inherited a powder keg.
To secure Armenian support for Soviet rule amid fierce resistance, Nagorno-Karabakh was granted autonomous oblast status: an administrative division designated for small nations within the jurisdiction of a constituent Soviet Republic. However, despite assurances the majority-Armenian region would be placed under Armenian administrative control, the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) was handed to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) by a decision from the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, then-headed by soon-to-be Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
This fateful decision, designed to win the favor of then-Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the support of his fledgling country, set into motion decades of political, economic, and cultural repression against Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population—laying the foundations of the contemporary conflict.
The principle of self-determination was enshrined in international law to resolve the very predicament Nagorno-Karabakh finds itself in today.
In an effort to remedy the injustice, Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians began to call for reunification with the Armenian SSR as early as 1945. Attempts to petition the Supreme Soviet were often met with crackdowns. But in later years, with the reforms of glasnost and perestroika, a popular movement for self-determination started to gain significant traction in early 1988, when the NKAO’s National Assembly voted to reunify with Armenia and a subsequent referendum for reunification passed with overwhelming support among the region’s Armenian community, which constituted approximately 80 percent of the region’s population at the time.
These pleas would once again be ignored by the Kremlin. Betrayed by the promise of reform, by the end of February 1988, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were gathering in a series of unprecedented demonstrations that shook the Soviet Union to its core.
Azerbaijan’s authorities responded almost immediately by inciting pogroms against Armenians across Azerbaijan, including in Sumgait (February to March 1988), Kirovabad (November 1988), and Baku (January to February 1990), resulting in the destruction of homes and businesses, horrific abuses against civilians, and hundreds of people dead.
Most of the 400,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan were forcibly displaced or fled as a result while those who remained became the victims of a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing known as Operation Ring. In response to worsening violence, the NKAO’s authorities conducted a second referendum on Dec. 10, 1991, in which a majority supported self-governance. This triggered a full-scale war that would end with Nagorno-Karabakh securing its de facto independence following a cease-fire mediated by Russia in 1994.
Although it was widely recognized that Armenians faced severe repression under Azerbaijani rule, the question of status always proved elusive during the OSCE’s negotiations—with Azerbaijan vehemently opposing any measure it saw as legitimizing the de facto independence of Nagorno-Karabakh.
For Azerbaijan, a fixation on “territorial integrity” was central to its objection of the OSCE’s status-determination efforts, as it repeatedly sought to advance the counterfactual assertion that the region’s indigenous Armenian population were so-called “occupying” their own ancestral lands. To that end, as Cutler does, Azerbaijan would routinely draw reference to four United Nations Security Council resolutions that took on an almost mythological status in Azerbaijan’s discourse surrounding the conflict.
Although Azerbaijan has sought to get as much mileage as possible from these resolutions, it’s not the smoking gun Baku would like to have the world believe. While the resolutions called for the withdrawal of ethnic Armenian forces from regions captured in the conflict, they never charged Armenia with occupation—nor contested the right of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians to self-determination.
Additionally, the provisions of the resolutions applied as much to Baku as to local Armenian self-defense forces, including its calls for all parties to respect international law, cease attacks on civilians, and ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to affected civilian populations. As such, Azerbaijan’s siege of Stepanakert as well as its widely documented restriction of water, electricity, gas, and humanitarian relief to besieged civilian populations were all clear violations of the U.N. resolutions.
Azerbaijan and Turkey tried to get a U.N. General Assembly resolution passed in 2008 to reaffirm the language of “occupation” and preservation of “territorial integrity” that appeared in the security council resolutions. While it passed with 39 votes (with 100 states abstaining), Azerbaijan’s efforts were repudiated by the OSCE Minsk Group’s co-chairs Russia, France, and the United States, which all opposed the resolution and remarked in a statement that they viewed the measure as “selectively propagating only certain of those principles to the exclusion of others, without considering the Co-Chairs’ proposal in its balanced entirety.”
All U.N. Security Council resolutions urged the conflict parties to adhere to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (CSCE)—now the OSCE—conflict resolution efforts. Azerbaijan’s reluctance to cite this crucial aspect of the U.N. resolutions is likely explained by the fact the CSCE at the time explicitly called for the inclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh’s elected authorities in negotiations and was prefaced on an adherence to the CSCE’s founding principles—of which self-determination was paramount.
In fact, the principle of self-determination was enshrined in international law to resolve the very predicament Nagorno-Karabakh finds itself in today—included in the U.N. Charter and backed by a corpus of customary international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that has repeatedly reaffirmed the right to self-determination as preceding territorial integrity in cases where fundamental rights have been violated. This was best demonstrated in practice when the United States recognized Kosovo’s independence as the “only viable option to promote stability” in light of Serbia’s assault on the Kosovar people and its history of ethnic cleansing.