Karabakh Peace Process Must Be Fully Inclusive
Radio Free Europe/RadioLiberty - Prague, Czech Republic
By Javid Huseynov, Vugar Seidov, Adil Baguirov and Tomris Azeri
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Azeris displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh
and the surrounding territories occupied by ethnic Armenian troops continue
to live in camps in Azerbaijan.
September 01, 2009
The dispute over the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh has festered for
more than two decades. One of the keys to finding a peaceful resolution of
the conflict is achieving the normalization of relations between the
region's ethnic Armenian and Azeri communities.
In 1992, a mission of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
(CSCE, precursor to the OSCE) headed by then-U.S. Secretary of State James
Baker worked out the so-called Baker Rules, which were agreed to by all
sides in the conflict. Those rules recognized the two communities of
Nagorno-Karabakh as "interested parties," and Armenia and Azerbaijan as
"principal parties."
In this context, one could only welcome the headline of an *RFE/RL
commentary*NagornoKarabakh_Must_No_Longer_Be_Barred_From_The_Negotiating_Table_by
Robert Avetsiyan, a representative of Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic
Armenian
community, entitled "Nagorno-Karabakh Must No Longer Be Barred From The
Negotiating Table." Unfortunately, the author stopped short of mentioning
the ethnic Azeri community that, prior to the 1988 conflict, comprised
one-third of Nagorno-Karabakh's population and 99 percent of the population
of seven other adjacent districts of Azerbaijan currently occupied by
Armenian forces.
Falling into the general pattern of Armenian-Azerbaijani disagreements,
Avetsiyan's piece quickly shifted from discussing the legal and political
aspects of conflict resolution to counterproductive historical allegations
attempting to deny the Azeri identity. Unfortunately, some of these
assertions need to be addressed.
First Christians In The Caucasus
The modern Christian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh has its roots in the
ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania, called Aghvank in Armenian. While the
Armenian language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages,
Caucasian Albanians -- the pre-Islamic ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis --
spoke an indigenous Caucasian language. Both Caucasian Albania and Armenia
were converted to Christianity in the fourth century.
3The religion was first brought to Armenia by an ethnic Parthian noble, St.
Gregory the Illuminator, but the first Christian church in the Caucasus was
built in Albania. The church of Kish was established in the present-day
Sheki region of Azerbaijan by St. Eliseus, a disciple of St. Thaddeus, who
in 201 A.D. converted King Abgar IX of Edessa, making Osroene the first
Christian state.
The territory of present-day Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) belonged to
Caucasian Albania in the first century A.D. ("Great Soviet Encyclopedia,"
1973). Upon the Islamic conquest of the Caucasus in the ninth century,
Artsakh was ruled by the Albanian princes (C. J. F. Dowsett, "A Neglected
Passage In The 'History Of The Caucasian Albanians'", BSOAS, 19(3), 1957),
while the Albanians in the eastern plain of Karabakh mixed with the Turkic
population and became Muslims (R.G. Suny, "Looking Towards Ararat: Armenia
In Modern History," 1993). Thus the "Canons Of Aghvan," composed in the
fifth century, were a part of the Caucasian Albanian historical heritage
shared by present-day Azerbaijanis.
The monasteries of Amaras and Gandzasar remained the citadels of an
autochthonous Albanian Apostolic Church up until 1836, when the Russian
authorities incorporated it into the Armenian Apostolic Church. At the time,
Gandzasar was the see of the Catholicate of Caucasian Albania, while the
Amaras monastery was first claimed by the Armenian Church only in 1848.
Territory Of Karabakh
The first independent state in Nagorno-Karabakh was the 18th-century
Karabakh khanate, established with a capital in present-day Shusha circa
1751 and ruled by an Azeri khan (R. Hewsen, "Journal Of The Society For
Armenian Studies," Vol. 6, 1995, p. 270). Throughout the 19th century,
Armenians remained a minority on the territories of Karabakh and present-day
Armenia despite their major resettlement from Ottoman and Persian domains
after the Russian conquest.
Upon the fall of the Russian Empire, in 1918-20, the territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh was under the control of the Azerbaijan Democratic
Republic, whose authority over Karabakh was officially recognized by the
Allied powers. After the establishment of the Azerbaijan SSR in 1921, the
Bolshevik Kavburo voted to not to incorporate but to retain Nagorno-Karabakh
in Azerbaijan.
While the nationality of "Azerbaijani" was first indicated in the 1939
Soviet census, the millions of Azeris did not appear out of nowhere. The
formulation of a uniform Azerbaijani identity started in pre-Christian
Caucasian Albania and Atropatene, incorporating Islamic and Turkic elements
in medieval times, to become the first secular, democratic Muslim nation in
1918.
Prior to 1939, Azerbaijanis were called Turks, until Stalin decided to
disassociate the Turkic people of the Caucasus and Central Asia from Turkey.
In a similar move in the 1920s, Soviet authorities granted the Zangezur
region to Armenia, separating Azerbaijan into two disjoined parts, and got
rid of the Turkestan toponym in Central Asia.
Violence Erupts
The Armenian side often claims that the Sumgait events of February 27, 1988,
were a precursor to the violence in Nagorno-Karabakh. But the first acts of
violence took place in the Gugark region of Armenia in the fall of 1987.
Subsequently, thousands of Azerbaijani refugees were forced to flee Armenia
and were settled in Sumgait by the Soviet authorities.
These events were followed by clashes in the Askeran region of
Nagorno-Karabakh on February 22, 1988, when two ethnic Azeris were killed by
an ethnic Armenian mob. Among the convicted perpetrators of the Sumgait
events were also three ethnic Armenians who killed a quarter of the 26
ethnic Armenians who died in the violence, according to the deputy
prosecutor-general of the USSR at the time.
While Sumgait is often highlighted in the context of Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict, less attention is paid to the 1992 Khojaly massacre of ethnic
Azeris by Armenian forces. Named the "largest massacre" of the conflict by
Human Rights Watch, Khojaly's civilian death toll was some 20 times that of
Sumgait.
While both Azerbaijani and Armenian perpetrators in Sumgait were tried and
sentenced by the court of law, those responsible for Khojaly were never
brought to justice, despite the fact that the then-military commander in
Nagorno-Karabakh (and now the president of Armenia), Serzh Sarkisian, has
admitted Armenian responsibility for this atrocity (Thomas De Waal, "Black
Garden: Armenia And Azerbaijan Through Peace And War," NYU Press, 2004).
In its efforts to settle historical differences with Turkey, the Armenian
side often appeals to the notion of justice. Yet the so-called
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) is an unjustly established monoethnic
Armenian entity in the Caucasus. It is not independent, because it cannot
sustain itself without the existence of its sponsor, Armenia.
But most importantly, it was established after the exodus of one ethnic
group forced by another. The self-proclaimed "NKR officials" cannot speak on
behalf of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, because one-third of them were
stripped of the right to choose their leaders due to their ethnicity.
Therefore, Azerbaijan -- along with all reputable organizations including
the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE -- consider the "NKR
elections" and "NKR officials" illegitimate. Moreover, in the words of
then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones, these "NKR
officials" constitute "criminal secessionists."
Contrary to the Armenian allegations that Azerbaijan intended to cleanse
Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian population, in a letter addressed to the
UN Security Council on November 9, 1993, the chairman-in-office of the CSCE
Minsk Conference on Nagorno-Karabakh detailed the territories occupied by
Armenian forces and outlined the required timetable for their withdrawal.
Additionally, all four of the 1993 UN Security Council resolutions on
Nagorno-Karabakh call for the immediate withdrawal of Armenian forces from
the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. It has been 16 years since the "NKR
officials" and their protectors in Yerevan refused to fulfill these
international demands.
At present, Armenia's military occupation of the region precludes the
much-desired participation of Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian community
in the peace process, because the region's ethnic Azeris were stripped of
this right. Lasting peace in Nagorno-Karabakh cannot be achieved without a
return of the region's ethnic Azeri population and their harmonious
coexistence with the ethnic Armenian community. Furthermore, to reestablish
the much-needed trust between the two nations, it is important for both
Armenians and Azerbaijanis to refrain from any hostile, derogatory, or
inflammatory rhetoric.
*Dr. Javid Huseynov is general director of the Azerbaijani-American Council.
He was assisted in the preparation of this article by U.S. Azeris Network
Managing Director Dr. Adil Baguirov, Azerbaijani National Cultural
Association (Hungary) founder Dr. Vugar Seidov, and Azerbaijan Society of
America President Tomris Azeri. All four are originally from the once
Azeri-populated regions currently under Armenian military occupation. The
views expressed in this commentary are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL*
# # #
The U.S. Azeris Network (USAN) <http://www.usazeris.org/> is a registered non-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian genuine grassroots advocacy and voter education network that is facilitating political activism and efforts by the Azerbaijani-Americans and other Turkic-Americans and their associations, organizations, councils, conferences, and other formal, semi-formal and informal groups, on federal, state and local levels. USAN is the first nationwide grassroots organization uniting Azerbaijani-Americans, being created by the grassroots, for the grassroots.
