Nagorno-Karabakh President Disputes Fires and Numbers, Oil and UN
Nagorno-Karabakh President Disputes Fires and Numbers, Oil and UN, in Exclusive Interview with Inner City Press
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee, Correspondent at the UN
UNITED NATIONS, November 13 -- Of the so-called frozen conflicts in the world, the one in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan, claimed by Armenia, heated up this Fall -- literally.
In August and September 2006, Azerbaijan and Armenia traded volleys of draft resolutions in the UN General Assembly, about a series of fires in the Nagorno-Karabakh region which on most maps is Azerbaijan, but is not under Azeri control.
The subtext of the fight was that Azerbaijan wants the dispute to be addressed in the UN General Assembly, while Armenia prefers the ten-year process before the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. In the UN General Assembly these frozen conflicts are often treated as footnotes, particularly to a press corps which covers the Security Council in the most minute detail, at the expense of most other activities undertaken by the world body.
Last week Inner City Press sat down for an interview with the president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Arkady Ghoukasyan, and asked him about the fires, about the UN and other matters.
"The fires were provoked by Azerbaijan firing," Mr. Ghoukasyan said. "They used special bullets that would ignite wheat fields."
In the UN, "the countries of the Islamic Conference are present and Azerbaijan is hoping to use their support," said Mr. Ghoukasyan. He added that most countries in the UN know little of the Karabakh conflict, so "Azerbaijan can try propaganda in the United Nations," in a way that it can't with the OSCE "experts."
By contrast, the situation in Abkhazia is routinely put on the UN Security Council agenda by Russia, with representative of Georgia often excluded from the meetings and resorting to sparsely-attended press conferences outside, most recently on October 12.
President, flag & correspondent
On Nagorno-Karabakh, UN observers see Turkey backing Azerbaijan, while the NKR is represented, if one can call it that, by Armenia. The interview, originally scheduled for a hotel across from UN Headquarters, was moved six blocks south to the Armenian mission in a brownstone on 36th Street, to a second-story room with the Nagorno-Karabakh flag on the table. Through a translator, Mr. Ghoukasyan argued that no negotiations that do not involve representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh can solve the problem. "The prospects are diminishing, without Nagorno-Karabakh involvement, it's just impossible to come to a resolution," he said.
Hot Words From Frozen Conflicts
Inner City Press asked Mr. Ghoukasyan to compare Nagorno-Karabakh to certain other so-called frozen conflicts, two of which are before the OSCE: Transnistria a/k/a Transdnestr, and South Ossetia, where a referendum was held on November 12, the results of which no country in the world recognized.
"We already had our referendum," Mr. Ghoukasyan said, "back in 1991. We would only hold another one if Azerbaijan and the co-chairs of the OSCE group agreed in advance to recognize its results."
Mr. Ghoukasyan said he had come to the U.S. less to build political support or to propose a referendum than to raise funds for infrastructure projects in Nagorno-Karabakh, mostly from "different circles of Armenians in the United States." He is on a whirlwind tour: "Detroit Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and maybe Fresno, we are still finalizing our West Coast program," he said. A highlight will be a telethon from Los Angeles on November 23.
Speaking of funds, and of infrastructure, Inner City Press asked about the impact of the Baku - Tbilisi - Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline on the conflict.
"Azerbaijan is trying to get maximum political dividends from fact of this pipeline," said Mr. Ghoukasyan. "Since the West is interested in undisruptible oil, Azerbaijan tries to beef up their price for this stability. This emboldens Azerbaijan, making it more aggressive and less willing to come to agreement."
What would an agreement look like?
"In any resolution, we think that Karabakh should have physical land connection with Armenia," said Mr. Ghoukasyan.
At a press conference about the BTC pipeline earlier this year, the Azeri Ambassador told Inner City Press that twenty percent of Azerbaijan's territory has been occupied by Armenia.
On the disputed numbers of displaced people, Mr. Ghoukasyan quipped, "I always suspected they are bad in mathematics." He estimated it, "maximally," to be 13%, and put the number of displaced Azeris at "only" 650,000, rather than the one million figure used by Azerbaijan. Mr. Ghoukasyan admonished, "There is information in books."
And so to the library went Inner City Press. Therein it is recounted that while "in 1989, the Armenian Supreme Council made Nagorno-Karabakh a part of Armenia, this decision was effectively annulled by NKR declaring its independence in 1991. Whether the decision to declare independence was made cooperatively with Yerevan is not yet known."
The UN's role is dismissed: "with one exception the UN never condemned the capture of Lachin, the strategic link between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The UN passed Security Council Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884... Each UN resolution reiterated the international body's support for the OSCE Minsk Group process."
Going back, some pundits blame the conflict on Stalin: "he took a part of Armenia and gave it to Azerbaijan, and now so many people are dying while trying to correct his foolish mistake. Now redefining the borders is as painful as cutting someone's flesh when that person is alive."
Fast forward to 1977, when the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast's first secretary from 1973 to 1988, Boris Kevorkov, told visiting journalists that Karabakh Armenians were happily separated from the Armenian republic, saying that "the history of Nagorny (Mountainous) Karabakh is closely interwoven with Azerbaijan's... By contrast, the region is close to Armenia geographically but is separated by high mountains, which were an insuperable barrier in the past for any extensive contacts." (Quoted in Claire Mouradian's "The Mountainouse Karabagh Question").
Also found are rebuttals, including from Azeri poet Bakhtiyar Vahadzade in his 1988 Open Letter, that "since 1828, our people have been divided into two parts," and that both Azeris and Karabakh Armenians "emanate from the same ethnic stock: the Caucasian Albanians." Others say Turkey always takes the Azeri side. There are references to the shoot-down of an Iranian C-130 aircraft in 1994 as it crossed the Azeri-Karabakh line on contact, and of Iran's demand for an apology.
Going back, a volume by Mazda Publishers in Costa Mesa, California entitled "Two Chronicles on The History of Karabakh," contains the full texts of Tarikh-e Karabakh (History of Karabakh) by Mirza Jamal Javanshir and of Karabakh-name by Mariza Adigozal Beg. In the introduction, translator-from-Persian George A. Bournoutian reports that "Armenian historians maintain that all of Karabakh was, at one time, part of the Armenian kingdom and that the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has had an Armenian majority for several hundred years. Azeri historians assert that the region was never part of Armenia and that the Armenian population arrived there from Persia and the Ottoman empire after the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) when, thanks to the Russian policy that favored Christians over Muslims, the Armenians established a majority in what became Nagorno-Karabakh." In a footnote he addresses nomenclature: "Nagorno-Karabakh is the Russian designation. The Armenians call is [sic] Artsakh or Gharabagh and the Azeris Karabag."
Finally, on the question of numbers, Arif Yunosov in "The Migration Situation in CIS Countries" opines that the conflict has caused 353,000 Armenia refugees and 750,000 Azeris -- less than the one million figure used by Azeri President Aliev, but large, and 100,000 larger than acknowledged in the interview. And a more solid figure than Aliev's 20%, but more than was acknowledged, is 13.62 percent. The search for truth continues. If the comparison is to the original, Soviet-defined Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, it must be noted that NKR is claiming, beyond the Oblast, the territory of Shahumian.
By the end of the interview, Mr. Ghoukasyan was focusing on two regions of the old Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast over which now Azerbaijan has de facto control: Martakert and Martuni. While Mr. Ghoukasyan's point was that these should be subtracted from the 13 percent, they raise a larger question, that of break-aways from break-aways.
The analogy, to Inner City Press, is to the serially-opening or "nesting" Russian dolls. Inside one republic is another, but inside the breakaway is another smaller portion, that either wants to remain with the larger, or to itself be independent. Northern Kosovo comes to mind, and the portion of Abkhazia into which a Tbilisi-based government is trying to relocate.
How small can these Russian dolls become? And how will the UN-debated status of Kosovo, now frozen into 2007, impact or defrost other frozen conflicts? Developing.
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.
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee, Correspondent at the UN
UNITED NATIONS, November 13 -- Of the so-called frozen conflicts in the world, the one in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan, claimed by Armenia, heated up this Fall -- literally.
In August and September 2006, Azerbaijan and Armenia traded volleys of draft resolutions in the UN General Assembly, about a series of fires in the Nagorno-Karabakh region which on most maps is Azerbaijan, but is not under Azeri control.
The subtext of the fight was that Azerbaijan wants the dispute to be addressed in the UN General Assembly, while Armenia prefers the ten-year process before the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. In the UN General Assembly these frozen conflicts are often treated as footnotes, particularly to a press corps which covers the Security Council in the most minute detail, at the expense of most other activities undertaken by the world body.
Last week Inner City Press sat down for an interview with the president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Arkady Ghoukasyan, and asked him about the fires, about the UN and other matters.
"The fires were provoked by Azerbaijan firing," Mr. Ghoukasyan said. "They used special bullets that would ignite wheat fields."
In the UN, "the countries of the Islamic Conference are present and Azerbaijan is hoping to use their support," said Mr. Ghoukasyan. He added that most countries in the UN know little of the Karabakh conflict, so "Azerbaijan can try propaganda in the United Nations," in a way that it can't with the OSCE "experts."
By contrast, the situation in Abkhazia is routinely put on the UN Security Council agenda by Russia, with representative of Georgia often excluded from the meetings and resorting to sparsely-attended press conferences outside, most recently on October 12.
President, flag & correspondent
On Nagorno-Karabakh, UN observers see Turkey backing Azerbaijan, while the NKR is represented, if one can call it that, by Armenia. The interview, originally scheduled for a hotel across from UN Headquarters, was moved six blocks south to the Armenian mission in a brownstone on 36th Street, to a second-story room with the Nagorno-Karabakh flag on the table. Through a translator, Mr. Ghoukasyan argued that no negotiations that do not involve representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh can solve the problem. "The prospects are diminishing, without Nagorno-Karabakh involvement, it's just impossible to come to a resolution," he said.
Hot Words From Frozen Conflicts
Inner City Press asked Mr. Ghoukasyan to compare Nagorno-Karabakh to certain other so-called frozen conflicts, two of which are before the OSCE: Transnistria a/k/a Transdnestr, and South Ossetia, where a referendum was held on November 12, the results of which no country in the world recognized.
"We already had our referendum," Mr. Ghoukasyan said, "back in 1991. We would only hold another one if Azerbaijan and the co-chairs of the OSCE group agreed in advance to recognize its results."
Mr. Ghoukasyan said he had come to the U.S. less to build political support or to propose a referendum than to raise funds for infrastructure projects in Nagorno-Karabakh, mostly from "different circles of Armenians in the United States." He is on a whirlwind tour: "Detroit Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and maybe Fresno, we are still finalizing our West Coast program," he said. A highlight will be a telethon from Los Angeles on November 23.
Speaking of funds, and of infrastructure, Inner City Press asked about the impact of the Baku - Tbilisi - Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline on the conflict.
"Azerbaijan is trying to get maximum political dividends from fact of this pipeline," said Mr. Ghoukasyan. "Since the West is interested in undisruptible oil, Azerbaijan tries to beef up their price for this stability. This emboldens Azerbaijan, making it more aggressive and less willing to come to agreement."
What would an agreement look like?
"In any resolution, we think that Karabakh should have physical land connection with Armenia," said Mr. Ghoukasyan.
At a press conference about the BTC pipeline earlier this year, the Azeri Ambassador told Inner City Press that twenty percent of Azerbaijan's territory has been occupied by Armenia.
On the disputed numbers of displaced people, Mr. Ghoukasyan quipped, "I always suspected they are bad in mathematics." He estimated it, "maximally," to be 13%, and put the number of displaced Azeris at "only" 650,000, rather than the one million figure used by Azerbaijan. Mr. Ghoukasyan admonished, "There is information in books."
And so to the library went Inner City Press. Therein it is recounted that while "in 1989, the Armenian Supreme Council made Nagorno-Karabakh a part of Armenia, this decision was effectively annulled by NKR declaring its independence in 1991. Whether the decision to declare independence was made cooperatively with Yerevan is not yet known."
The UN's role is dismissed: "with one exception the UN never condemned the capture of Lachin, the strategic link between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The UN passed Security Council Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884... Each UN resolution reiterated the international body's support for the OSCE Minsk Group process."
Going back, some pundits blame the conflict on Stalin: "he took a part of Armenia and gave it to Azerbaijan, and now so many people are dying while trying to correct his foolish mistake. Now redefining the borders is as painful as cutting someone's flesh when that person is alive."
Fast forward to 1977, when the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast's first secretary from 1973 to 1988, Boris Kevorkov, told visiting journalists that Karabakh Armenians were happily separated from the Armenian republic, saying that "the history of Nagorny (Mountainous) Karabakh is closely interwoven with Azerbaijan's... By contrast, the region is close to Armenia geographically but is separated by high mountains, which were an insuperable barrier in the past for any extensive contacts." (Quoted in Claire Mouradian's "The Mountainouse Karabagh Question").
Also found are rebuttals, including from Azeri poet Bakhtiyar Vahadzade in his 1988 Open Letter, that "since 1828, our people have been divided into two parts," and that both Azeris and Karabakh Armenians "emanate from the same ethnic stock: the Caucasian Albanians." Others say Turkey always takes the Azeri side. There are references to the shoot-down of an Iranian C-130 aircraft in 1994 as it crossed the Azeri-Karabakh line on contact, and of Iran's demand for an apology.
Going back, a volume by Mazda Publishers in Costa Mesa, California entitled "Two Chronicles on The History of Karabakh," contains the full texts of Tarikh-e Karabakh (History of Karabakh) by Mirza Jamal Javanshir and of Karabakh-name by Mariza Adigozal Beg. In the introduction, translator-from-Persian George A. Bournoutian reports that "Armenian historians maintain that all of Karabakh was, at one time, part of the Armenian kingdom and that the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has had an Armenian majority for several hundred years. Azeri historians assert that the region was never part of Armenia and that the Armenian population arrived there from Persia and the Ottoman empire after the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) when, thanks to the Russian policy that favored Christians over Muslims, the Armenians established a majority in what became Nagorno-Karabakh." In a footnote he addresses nomenclature: "Nagorno-Karabakh is the Russian designation. The Armenians call is [sic] Artsakh or Gharabagh and the Azeris Karabag."
Finally, on the question of numbers, Arif Yunosov in "The Migration Situation in CIS Countries" opines that the conflict has caused 353,000 Armenia refugees and 750,000 Azeris -- less than the one million figure used by Azeri President Aliev, but large, and 100,000 larger than acknowledged in the interview. And a more solid figure than Aliev's 20%, but more than was acknowledged, is 13.62 percent. The search for truth continues. If the comparison is to the original, Soviet-defined Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, it must be noted that NKR is claiming, beyond the Oblast, the territory of Shahumian.
By the end of the interview, Mr. Ghoukasyan was focusing on two regions of the old Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast over which now Azerbaijan has de facto control: Martakert and Martuni. While Mr. Ghoukasyan's point was that these should be subtracted from the 13 percent, they raise a larger question, that of break-aways from break-aways.
The analogy, to Inner City Press, is to the serially-opening or "nesting" Russian dolls. Inside one republic is another, but inside the breakaway is another smaller portion, that either wants to remain with the larger, or to itself be independent. Northern Kosovo comes to mind, and the portion of Abkhazia into which a Tbilisi-based government is trying to relocate.
How small can these Russian dolls become? And how will the UN-debated status of Kosovo, now frozen into 2007, impact or defrost other frozen conflicts? Developing.
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.
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