Karabakh’s Election Conundrum

09-Nov-05
Institute of War and Peace
By Rufat Abbasov in Baku

Refugees from the capital of the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabakh had a chance to pick their own representative to the Azerbaijani parliament for the first time in the 14 years since Azerbaijan became independent.
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More than 3,000 former residents of the regional capital Khankendi – called Stepanakert by the Armenians – cast their ballots on November 6 to elect a deputy to the Milli Mejlis or national assembly.

Collecting the votes was a complex affair, as the people listed on the electoral roll now live scattered across Azerbaijan. To cope with the situation, election officials established nine polling stations for Khankendi voters and arranged buses to bring them in. None of the sites was actually in Nagorny Karabakh.
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The Azerbaijani refugees, or more accurately “internally displaced persons”, IDPs, who left as a result of the conflict had to try to build new lives in often squalid camps, although many have since moved into more permanent housing or left to work as migrant labour in Russia. The government says three quarters of a million Azerbaijanis became forced migrants, although this figure also includes those who moved from Armenia itself.
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Prolonged negotiations overseen by the OSCE have so far failed to reach a final resolution of the dispute, and an uneasy truce holds on the frontline.

To underscore its position, Azerbaijan’s Central Election Commission, CEC, treated the disputed lands no differently from anywhere else in the country when it drew up a map of constituencies for the November election.

Three constituencies including Khankendi – and thus three Milli Mejlis seats – were set aside for areas lying inside the old boundaries of the prewar Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region. There are at least seven other constituency whose boundaries include Armenian-controlled areas lying outside Karabakh proper.

The demarcation clearly had a political intent, to reassert Azerbaijan’s claim to govern the disputed region by giving representation to some of its people.
[...].
Azerbaijani officials insisted that the Armenian section of the electorate would be welcome to vote. The CEC even asked the OSCE and Council of Europe, CoE, to help draw up accurate voter lists for Armenians living in Stepanakert/Khankendi. Mats Lindberg, head of the CoE’s mission in Azerbaijan, said the request was received too late to do anything about it.

However, given the total lack of contact between the two communities across the front line that divides them, it currently seems unlikely that either group would either want or be able to take part in the other’s political institutions.
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Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.