InternationalCaveat emptor: Weak negotiating strategies and settlement pitfalls
Published: Thursday September 10, 2009
Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh - What follows is the text of a talk given by Professor Levon Chorbajian at a pan-Armenian conference convened in Stepanakert, the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, on July 11, 2009.
I would like to thank the organizers for calling this conference at this timely moment. And I would especially like to pay my respects to the people of Karabakh and Armenia for courageously challenging Soviet and Azerbaijani authority and reversing the clear injustice of assigning this territory to the Azerbaijan S.S.R. in the early 1920s. The result is an independent Karabakh and it is a great achievement. I am not unmindful of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made and continue to be made to keep this reality afloat. My purpose is to call those sacrifices to mind and to argue that we should not participate in a process that would cause them to have been made in vain.
I am not going to be entirely critical of Armenian diplomacy regarding Karabakh. It has had its successes. If it had not, we would not be able to be here. But I do want to say that Armenia and Karabakh have clear historical and ideological resources on their side which have not been put to full use or-even worse--put to any use at all. When Azerbaijan and Turkey negotiate, they negotiate from maximalist positions, and they are very reluctant to make concessions. Armenians do not seem to follow suit. Why have governments in Yerevan, for example, acted to assure Turkey that they have no claims on that nation, as though we were the guilty party and had, therefore, to reassure others of our good intentions?
Not a narrow dispute
Concerning Karabakh, and also the opening of the Turkish border, I would say first that there has to be a recognition that Pan-Turkism is not a marginal ideology in Turkey or Azerbaijan. The Turks and the Azerbaijanis have their differences, but they have both long coveted Armenian territories to fulfill their ambition of an unbroken territorial link between them. This should not be underestimated, and what follows from this observation is that the Karabakh Question is not, as the Minsk Group insists, a narrow dispute limited to Nagorno-Karabakh. No, it is about Karabakh but also about the fate of Armenia and the Armenian people on an independent Armenian homeland. That is what is at stake.
My focus is on bargaining strategies that I believe have not been effectively used by the Armenian side and need to be used. The first, and I will not have a lot to say about it because it has been noted by several previous speakers, is the exclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh from the negotiating process. This is the single greatest flaw in the negotiating process and, to my knowledge, without precedent in the history of conflict resolution.
The second is that territorial claims have traditionally been decided on the basis of three criteria: (1) Who has lived there historically? (2) Who lives there now? (3) What do the people who live there now want? It is actually unusual for all three of these to fall on one side. Consider the case of Northern Ireland, a colonized territory, but one where the Catholics are a minority in their own land and have been for a long time. But in the Karabakh case all three criteria do favor the Armenian side. I think this point that Karabakh presents one of the world's strongest cases in favor of independence should be stressed repeatedly and there should be no compromise on it.
The transfer of parcels
The third issue concerns borders. The current borders of Nagorno-Karabakh are much smaller than the territory that Azerbaijan received in 1923. At that time Karabakh and Armenia shared a border. Territories were taken from Karabakh and from southern Armenia (Siunik was wider at that time than it is now) to form Red Kurdistan, and as soon as the goal of that change, which was never to territorially recognize the Kurds but rather to aggrandize Azerbaijani territory, was accomplished, the Kurds were quickly abandoned and Red Kurdistan disappeared to became a part of Azerbaijan proper. The northern Armenian-populated areas of Shahumian and others were also separated out of Karabakh and made parts of Azerbaijan itself. The transfer of parcels of land from Armenia and Karabakh to Nakhichevan and Azerbaijan continued into the 1930s. These territories transferred from Armenia to Azerbaijan included, but were not limited to, three mountain lakes near the village of Istisu and the villages of Istisu, Zar, and Zivel. Furthermore, Armenian villages in Kelbajar and the Lachin Corridor were, shall we say, ethnically cleansed. I think it is incumbent on Armenian negotiators to study maps from the 1920s and 1930s and document these changes, especially now that the fate of the occupied territories is still in the balance. The point must be forcefully and repeatedly made that the so-called occupied territories, at least those between Karabakh and Armenia are, in fact, Armenian and should remain so. And also that this is essential to the national security of Armenia and Karabakh.
Shushi
The fourth issue is that Azerbaijan repeatedly makes preposterous claims that Armenians do not confront and challenge, thereby lending them a credibility they do not deserve. The entire claim of Azerbaijani historians that the Azerbaijanis are descendents of the Caucasian Albanians and therefore a nation of long standing with a prior claim to Karabakh is utterly baseless and false. It needs to be challenged rigorously whenever it is raised. (See Rouben Galichian, The Invention of History: Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Showcasing of Imagination (London: Gomidas Institute, 2009).
Or let us consider the argument that Shushi is an Azerbaijani city. It was briefly in the 18th century but part of the 18th century is a only a small slice of history. By 1900 Shushi was the third largest city in the Transcaucasus after Baku and Tiflis and the majority of its nearly 40,000 inhabitants were Armenian. The Armenians of Shushi operated a printing press, schools, and a theater complex. Of the 21 newspapers and magazines published in the city at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, 19 were in Armenian and two in Russian. And consider how the Armenian city of Shushi was turned into an Azerbaijani city in March and April of 1920. The Armenian section of the city was destroyed by Azerbaijani and Turkish forces and twenty thousand Armenians were killed. The ruins of these buildings stood as a silent testimony of Azerbaijani intentions until they were razed in the 1960s. (See Shahen Mkrtchian and Shchors Davtian. Shoushy: The City of Tragic Fate (Yerevan: Gasprint, 2008).
