Nagorno-Karabakh: War Fails to Resolve the Conflict
- Hratch Tchilingirian
- Jun 23, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Imagine Boris Johnson ordering the bombing of Edinburgh because the Scots voted for independence in a referendum, or the British Government declaring war against Northern Ireland because it wished to join the Republic of Ireland. Unlike the political dialogue and the search for legal remedies that dissatisfied nations of the United Kingdom utilise to resolve their conflicts, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who have been natives of the territory for centuries, have been the target of years of demonisation in Azerbaijan for voting for independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Karabakh was a ‘devolved statelet’ within the Soviet legal system. Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, has on numerous occasions declared that ‘Karabakh is Azerbaijan’.[1] But one wonders: why would a leader of a country bomb its own people, a region of its own territory? The simple answer is that from a legal perspective Karabakh has never been part of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan—with substantial Turkish military involvement and thousands of mercenaries from Syria— attacked the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to ‘liberate’ it from the control of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh. By the end of a 44-day devastating war, the Armenians not only lost control of significant parts of Karabakh, but also the seven regions around Karabakh, which they had controlled since the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s, as a security buffer zone and as a bargaining chip in the negotiations process for final status.
After the recent ‘historic victory’, President Ilham Aliyev declared that ‘there is no Nagorno-Karabakh conflict anymore’. It was resolved militarily. Nevertheless, the conflict—the core of which has been Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and the Karabakh Armenians right of self-determination—remains unresolved. A ceasefire agreement was signed on 9 November 2020 with Russian mediation (2,000 Russian peacekeepers have been deployed in Karabakh), but the absence of a final settlement or a peace treaty keeps this oldest conflict in the former Soviet Union unresolved for the foreseeable future.
Baku has portrayed the war as a ‘last resort’ response to decades-long Armenian intransigence to negotiate a settlement. Yet, since 1994, the only ‘status’ the Azerbaijani leadership was willing to grant to the Karabakh Armenians was ‘highest form of autonomy’—more or less similar to the status Karabakh had during Soviet times. Neither self-determination nor independence were ever on Baku’s agenda. Yet the legal and political developments that occurred towards the end of the Soviet Union are still relevant to the final political and legal solution of the Karabakh conflict.
On 30 August 1991, the Supreme Council of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (Azerbaijan SSR) declared independence by restoring the independent Republic of Azerbaijan that existed between 1918 and 1920, and declared the establishment of Soviet power in Baku as illegal. Two articles formulated in the Constitutional Act were significant: Article 2 stated that ‘The Azerbaijani Republic is the successor of the Azerbaijani Republic which existed from 28 May 1918 to 28 April 1920’; and Article 3 declared that ‘The treaty on the establishment of the USSR on 20 December 1922 is considered not valid in the part related to Azerbaijan from the moment of signing it’.[2] Furthermore, the law previously proclaimed the Azerbaijani nation’s sovereignty over the republic. Azeri was confirmed as the state language, and the republic’s land and natural resources were defined as ‘national wealth’ belonging to ‘the Azerbaijani people’.
By refusing to become the legal successor of Azerbaijan SSR, Baku freed itself from recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as an Autonomous Region, a semi-state within the legal framework of the Soviet Union. Back in 1923, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh were recognized as a legal entity within Azerbaijan SSR by becoming a state unit within a state, ie the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. As such, legally speaking, in 1991 the ‘Mountainous Karabakh Republic’ was declared over territories that the Republic of Azerbaijan had no sovereignty over—in view of the fact that it had rejected the Soviet legal system, the very legal basis of its claim over Karabakh. The Armenians argue that Nagorno-Karabakh was not part of the first republic of Azerbaijan between 1918 and 1920. Indeed, on 26 August 1919, the government of Azerbaijan and the Karabakh National Council had signed an interim agreement whereby the sides had agreed that the Paris Peace Conference would settle ‘the problem’ of Karabakh. This implied Azerbaijan’s recognition of Karabakh as a distinct ‘legal entity’.
