Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 1, 1999:
His Excellency Arkady Ghoukasian
Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is a great honor for me to appear before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. We are familiar with the role played by this organization in providing forums for exchanges of opinions regarding important international issues and principles based on unshakeable respect for human rights and the equal standing of all states and peoples.
Our encounter is an exceptional opportunity to address some of the misconceptions disseminated by our opposition regarding the position and objectives of the Nagorno-Karabakh leadership.
Perhaps for the first time in its long history, the Caucasus has the attention of the world’s leading states. The political and humanitarian crises that have shaken our region reflect the challenges which confront even the developed democratic states.
The Caucasus is a special region found on the geographical, religious and ethnic frontiers of Europe and Asia. Through the centuries, it has been a point of conflict between the interests of different states. The situation is complicated by the insufficient experience in establishing sovereignty and civilized political-diplomatic relations of the regional leadership, due to obvious historical causes.
I am profoundly convinced that neutralization of the unproductive trends, circumstances, and objective and subjective factors is only possible if the leaders of the Caucasus are cognizant of their responsibility to cultivate more farsighted visions of a region free of external influences. They must be ready to stabilize political life through tested methods, foremost through the democratization government structures.
I guarantee you that Nagorno-Karabakh is prepared to make great efforts to stabilize the region and create conditions which secure its orientation towards political transparency, economic integration, and development.
With that in mind, we have recently made serious concessions with the intention of resolving this conflict and establishing relations with Azerbaijan. Our concern is to prevent the Karabakh issue from endangering the peace and stability of the Southern Caucasus. Regrettably, I must report that Azerbaijan has not reciprocated.
Our position is based on the new international norms and laws taking form today. Fully abiding by these will result in all peoples and states having an equal right to defend their national interests. This trend inspires optimism among the leadership and people of Nagorno-Karabakh to seek a peaceful, political solution to the conflict.
Before addressing the current state of the search for a solution, allow me to make some observations on the role and place of Nagorno-Karabakh in the geopolitics of the Caucasus and present the causes which gave rise to the conflict.
From a geopolitical perspective, Nagorno-Karabakh is located at the fault line of two powerful, but different civilizations, Christian and Islamic. This status has left an indelible mark on the political history of my people. As in the past, so today, that area has been coveted by regional powers as a means of establishing their influence in the Southern Caucasus. I pause to remind you that in 1813, when the respective zones of influence of Persia and Russia changed, the treaty which ceded Nagorno-Karabakh to Russia along with the rest of the Southern Caucasus was signed near the village of Gyoolistan in Karabakh.
The Nagorno-Karabakh issue garnered the attention of international organizations for the first time after the fall of the Russian Empire. During the 1918-20 period of state formation in the Caucasus, Nagorno-Karabakh became the staging ground of vicious battles between the newly created Azerbaijani Republic and the recreated Republic of Armenia. In 1920, more than 20,000 Armenians perished brutally at the hands of Turkish and Azerbaijani military units in Shooshi, then the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.
We have to consider the tragic conditions in which the Armenian people found themselves during World War I. As you know, Ottoman Turkey was perpetrating a genocide against the Armenians of Western Armenia starting in 1915. The Republic of Armenia was so emaciated from its inception that it could not defend its rights in historic Armenian territories and provide security to the population.
Internal difficulties were complicated by detrimental external circumstances. The net result was the recognition of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh by international bodies, in the form of the League of Nations, as contested territory. Incidentally, that area was larger than the current Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was decided to leave the final settlement of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Paris Peace Conference in conjunction with the matters of the independence of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Among others, contemporary English scholars have deemed Allied policy to be pro-Azerbaijani during the 1918-1920 period, as a result of which resolution of the Karabakh issue was interminably postponed. The plan was to wait for military-political developments favorable to Azerbaijan; in other words, for a change in the ethnic composition of Nagorno-Karabakh.
It was assumed that Azerbaijan would serve as a bastion to prevent the Sovietization of the Southern Caucasus. In reality, the opposite happened. Azerbaijani leaders were the first to surrender to the Bolsheviks.
The Red Army, which occupied Armenia in late 1920, decisively altered the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh. Under Stalin’s direct pressure and an illegal decision of the party body, Nagorno-Karabakh was forced into the Azerbaijani SSR, despite the wishes of the majority of the Armenian population.
What’s more, Nagorno-Karabakh was dismembered with long term intentions. One part was constituted as an Armenian autonomous region. The rest was diluted in other administrative districts of Soviet Azerbaijan with the calculation of severing the physical and geographic link between that Armenian autonomy and Armenia.
The Karabakh issue was not resolved. It remained frozen for 70 years. Despite that, the Armenian majority of Nagorno-Karabakh repeatedly petitioned and wrote letters to Moscow demanding that the unconstitutional and nonlegal 1921 decision be declared annulled and an examination of the possibility of having Nagorno-Karabakh become part of Armenia.
I call your attention to the fact that under the tyrannical Soviet regime, such unauthorized actions were brutally investigated and terminated. Meanwhile, the intellectual elite was driven out of the area.
Nagorno-Karabakh was the only Soviet autonomous region where over the course of seventy years not only did the population not grow, but actually shrank. Today, some one million Armenians of Karabakh origin live outside the republic. That is a unique international case where population shrinks while having a high birth rate.
It is not the ‘nationalists" in Armenia, as the Azerbaijanis would have you believe, but rather the very people of Karabakh which has never accepted being forcefully grafted into Azerbaijan. As proof, I would like to cite not just anyone, but the former head of the KGB of the Azerbaijan SSR and now president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev. In April 1969, in a report sent to communist party leaders in Moscow, he notes that nationalist expressions and efforts to extract the region from Azerbaijan and unite it with Armenia have been observed in Nagorno-Karabakh. This testimony belies his emphatic statements in recent years that the Karabakh issue arose in 1988 as a consequence of so called "aggression" by Armenia.
Actually, in 1988, at the first signs of liberalization, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, and this I want to stress, using only democratic means of expressing its will - letters, demonstrations, as well as through government decisions - once again raised the issue of extracting Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijani rule. Just days before the official collapse of the Soviet Union, on December 10, 1991, a plebiscite was held in Nagorno-Karabakh through which an overwhelming majority of the population was in favor of becoming totally independent of Azerbaijan.
After the plebiscite, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh elected a parliament with the aim of forming a government. The first government of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) set about its duties despite being totally blockaded and later being subjected to aggression by Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan waged a massive campaign against Karabakh using the arms and ammunition of the Fourth Army of the USSR stored in Soviet Azerbaijan. To have some idea of the munitions thus available to Azerbaijan consider that stored in that republic were the strategic reserves intended for use by the Soviet army against NATO forces in the entire Middle East.
The war continued from the fall of 1991 to May 1994 with alternating fortunes. There was a time when 60% of Nagorno-Karabakh was occupied and the capital, Stepanakert, and the other towns were under almost constant artillery and aerial mass bombardment. In August, 1992 the U.S.Congress adopted a bill condemning Azerbaijani operations and barring direct government to government aid to that country.
By May 1994, the NKR Defense Army liberated most formerly Azerbaijani occupied parts of the NKR. During these operations, some Azerbaijani territories to the south, which had become bases of attack, were also taken over. Creation of this cordon of security enabled the elimination of immediate threats to the population.
Thus, the main objective of the Azerbaijani war machine was thwarted. Official Baku’s plan was plain, eliminate or deport, under fear of death, the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan was rooted in the war it started.
Today, the Karabakh army oversees 8.5% of Azerbaijan, while the latter occupies 15% of the NKR. I quote these figures only because the widely quoted "20% of Azerbaijan and one million refugees" statement is the product of the Azerbaijani disinformation machine. It is interesting that Azerbaijan never mentions the 500,000 Armenian refugees that were created when they were forced from their homes in Azerbaijan proper.
At present, the NKR is a de facto independent state with all the requisite governmental entities. The NKR National Assembly, for which the second election was held in April 1995, is composed of 33 full time professional delegates. Based on the NKR parliament’s "Law about the President of the NKR," the second presidential election were held in September 1997.
In September of last year, local elections were held which were unprecedented in their scope and nature. This attests to the deepening roots of democratic forms of government. The judicial system is now being reformed to insure the irrevocability of the democratization process. Some fundamental laws have been passed to structure economic relations during the process of converting to the free market.
I would like to gratefully stress that today, the United States of America is the only country which is, according to a 1998 decision by Congress, providing humanitarian assistance to Nagorno-Karabakh’s population. This eight million dollar project is being implemented by the Agency for International Development through international non-governmental organizations in cooperation with the government of Nagorno-Karabakh. I assure you that every dollar of American taxpayer money allocated by legislators will go to its intended purpose of alleviating the difficulties of the people of Karabakh.
Our authorities, responsible for our people’s fate, are aware of the role Nagorno-Karabakh has in establishing a lasting peace and stability, are ready to take risks for peace and find a way out of the ongoing political and military crisis.
Distressingly, during the five years following the cease-fire, the government of Azerbaijan has taken no steps to gain the confidence of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. On the contrary, not only do Azerbaijani authorities not conceal their intentions of using Caspian oil money to technologically re-arm their army and round it out with professional mercenaries, but they also have not ceased their anti-Armenian propaganda in their mass media.
I cannot avoid pointing out that after almost immediate rejection by Azerbaijan of the new proposals made in recent months by the OSCE Minsk Group’s co-chairs, anti-Armenian propaganda has notably increased.
As you know, in November of last year the Karabakh side accepted the new proposal made by the OSCE Minsk Group’s co-chairs as a basis of negotiations. This, despite the fact that the draft document contains aspects unacceptable to us.
The basis of our position is confidence in and respect for international public opinion. We are convinced that resumption of hostilities and a return to Nagorno-Karabakh’s humanitarian crisis of 1991-94.
We see these proposals as different from their predecessors because they aim for a comprehensive solution to the conflict. With an interested and creative approach by the sides, they should allow resolution of the perceived contradiction between two principles of international law, the right to national self-determination and territorial integrity of states. This, even though we are convinced that the basis of the solution of the Karabakh problem must be equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
Their rejection of the latest mediation efforts attests the unrealistic and rigid nature of the Azerbaijani authorities’ position. Official Baku, disregarding current realities, proposes a return to the previous proposals which contained unilateral concessions on the part of Nagorno-Karabakh, and an indefinite postponement of resolution of the final political status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, this is the crux of the issue upon which depends the establishment of a durable peace in the region.
It is very obvious that an arrangement based on Azerbaijan’s conditions, that is our withdrawal from their territories before resolving the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh, would result in a loss of interest in future negotiations about that status by our opponents. This would undoubtedly scuttle a comprehensive solution and obstruct international security guarantees to Nagorno-Karabakh.
We are concerned by the Azerbaijani leadership’s rejection of a "common state" concept proposed by the mediators. This demonstrates yet again the Azerbaijani authorities’ goal of establishing a homogenous national dictatorship by securing Azerbaijani suzerainty. This clearly contradicts the latest trends in democratic development.
The Republic of Azerbaijan, which does not even protect the rights of its Azerbaijani citizens, cannot accept as a civilized system of relations in which all citizens, regardless of nationality, are treated equally.
I would like to believe that Azerbaijan’s rejection and Nagorno-Karabakh’s willingness to accept the concept of a "common state" will be seriously evaluated and an objective assessment given by the international public to the respective positions of the sides.
I assure you that a final and comprehensive solution to the conflict is in the vital interest of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. However, it is only possible to come to an agreement through mutual concessions and if Azerbaijan renounces its extreme posture.
Today, we face a choice. Either we come to an agreement with Azerbaijan to jointly create a common state based totally on mutual parity or we continue to demand international recognition of the NKR. If, from now on, Azerbaijan maintains an uncompromising stance in the conflict resolution process, we will have no choice but to pursue the second option.
We would appeal to the international public to recognize the independence of our republic, which was declared in 1991 in accordance with fundamental international legal norms and principles as well as the Soviet laws then in effect.
Even more, that independence was declared by the will of the people as expressed through plebiscite, defended through war, and confirmed through post-war years of peaceful building.
That is the only way we can obtain international guarantees for our people’s security and the republic’s status and economic development.
Foremost on the agenda today is the logical acceptance of new realities in our interconnected world. The Azerbaijani authorities have to overcome their delusion that this long term confrontation can be resolved without taking into consideration the national interests of all the parties to the conflict.
Allow me once again to thank the leadership of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council for inviting me to address this influential gathering. It has allowed us to express our viewpoint regarding the avenues for resolving the fundamental issues impacting upon the long term development of the region.
I believe that we are capable of overcoming the inertia of enmity and conflict in an unstable region and build the foundations of traditions of peace, democracy, and economic development in the 21st century.