CHAPTER 6

Final Thoughts

This volume has attempted to describe the military, political, economic, and diplomatic steps that have been taken to define Nagorno-Karabakh— and also to demonstrate the costs to all sides from this “Frozen Conflict.” The Soviet Union/Russia is not the progenitor of ethnic conflict, nor did it have the ability in the 1980s and 1990s to stop it. Russia has, however, become an expert at using those conflicts to further its own political ends. In Karabakh, villagers that argued with neighbors and threatened violence with axes and old hunting guns suddenly found themselves aligned with groups armed with tanks, artillery, and aircraft. Playing both sides against the middle, Russia has emerged as the indispensable party in any peacemaking/peacekeeping operation. It is in this respect that the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is a created conflict: Russia supplied the weaponry to create a hot war in 1992, and it has supplied the diplomacy that has kept the conflict “frozen” but not resolved ever since. As a result, Russia has troops stationed in Armenia, it owns the commanding heights of the Armenian economy, and it is Azerbaijan’s major weapons supplier. It now will have peacekeepers on Azerbaijani territory until 2025. The winner of this frozen conflict is not Armenia, Azerbaijan, or the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh (living there or as internally displaced persons). The winner is Russia.

What remains to be examined is the legal status of the participants. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as already described, is

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based on the reliance of each side on competing principles of international law. For Armenia, the overriding issue is the right of a people to self-determination. This principle, taken in its abstract, would give any minority people the right to secede from a larger political body and form its own state. Nagorno-Karabakh would have the ability to secede from Azerbaijan and obtain its independence. Kurds living in Armenia would have the right to secede. Within this new Kurdish state, Armenians would have the right to secede and rejoin Armenia. The principle continues ad absurdum until one could discuss individual blocks of individual streets seceding from whatever country in which the inhabitants reside if those inhabitants share a common ethnicity. Most of the English Midlands would now be divided into Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, and Chinese statelets.

For Azerbaijan, the two principles of international law are state sovereignty and the legitimacy of international borders. Faced with Russian efforts to expand their influence by supporting minority groups throughout the former Soviet Union (except inside the borders of the Russian Federation), countries such as Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine are equally firm on these principles. The inviolability of state borders has been a long-established principle of international law—World War II was fought to halt German and Japanese violations of this principle by their invasions of neighboring countries. Armenia tries to claim that it supports the inviolability of borders by denying its role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The European Court of Human Rights, however, ruled in “Chiragov and others v. Armenia” that Yerevan has violated this basic principle of international order.

State sovereignty has been challenged two times since the collapse of the Soviet Union: by the West in the case of Kosovo and by the Russians in the case of Crimea. In both cases, the result has not been universally accepted and has been challenged by states in the international order. In Nagorno-Karabakh, however, all countries—including Armenia—claim they respect Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over the former oblast. Armenia’s official, legal position is that the fighting is a matter internal to the Azerbaijani state. Where Armenia parts company with the rest of the world, however, is their goal for the future of the enclave: they claim that the principle of self-determination supports an independent existence for Karabakh.

It is an argument worthy of consideration. There is a general principle in international law, however, that a people can only secede if both

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the secessionists and the recognized state agree. Based on this, Nigeria fought and kept Biafra, the Philippines fought the Huks, Oman held onto Dhofar, the American North fought the American South. In Texas v. White (1868), the United States Supreme Court ruled that the states of the Confederacy never separated from the United States. They said it was impossible, since the constitution only provided for how states could join the union, and not leave it. It said that once the state had joined the American body politic it had become a member of an indestructible union.1

In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Soviet Constitution of 1977 provided a mechanism by which a republic could leave the union but— like the American constitution—had no provision that authorized an oblast to secede. Since Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence while the Soviet Union still existed, it tried to perform an act that was literally impossible. The fact that self-determination requires the approval of both sides of the conflict still remains. While there have been plebiscites and demands from the Nagorno-Karabakh “legislature” for secession, this has never been approved by the authorities in Baku because of the absence of the Azerbaijani population from the region (and thus unable to participate in a plebiscite) and the lack of consent by the central government.

Even if Baku agreed to give the enclave its independence, it still leaves unanswered the status of the provinces surrounding Nagorno Karabakh whose population was ethnically Azerbaijani before the war. Multiple UN resolutions have reaffirmed the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force. The international community does not recognize ethnic cleansing, and the 4th Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from changing the ethnic composition of the occupied territory. Article 49 prohibits mass forcible transfer from an occupied territory, except for security reasons and—in the event of a security evacuation—the population is to be returned to their homes as soon as hostilities cease.2

Article 49 also prohibits the occupier transferring part of its own population into the occupied territory, yet Armenia did exactly that with Syrian

1Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868). Web. Retrieved 5 August 2019. https://sup reme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/74/700/.

2International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), “The Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949,” 151. Web. Retrieved 5 August 2019. https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/ass ets/files/publications/icrc-002-0173.pdf.