Nagorno-Karabakh – an abiding tragedy:
As an Irish person, I can well appreciate different peoples or ethnicities disputing the same territory. I only have to look to the north of my own country to see that Republicans and Unionists have been fighting over the same small piece of land for hundreds of years. Nowadays, thankfully, peace has broken out and it seems that future arguments about territory and sovereignty will take place in parliament or at the ballot box, where they belong.
Sadly, we cannot say the same about the Israel-Palestine conflict or several others on the African continent. In the former Soviet Union, I have been aware of the conflict regarding the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh for over thirty years and I have followed developments there keenly. Unfortunately, while the Northern Ireland conflict claimed over 3,000 lives over thirty years, the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute has claimed ten times that in the same period.
I visited Azerbaijan recently and as I visited Armenia last year and spoken with many of the people of both countries, I think I’ve acquired a reasonable understanding of their long running feud.
While I don’t wish to apply blame to any Government or group of people, present or past, I think it is safe to say that this dispute, like the one in Ireland, and like the ones in the Middle East and Africa, all have their roots in colonialism and empire building.
Unfortunately Nagorno-Karabakh is a very bitter dispute and nothing I am going to say will resolve it. I can only try to describe it in the fairest terms I can apply. While I can eventually see people living in Northern Ireland in peace and harmony with each other, I fear this will not happen in Nagorno-Karabakh. It is actually a fascinating example of how Soviet borders, ethnic identity and the collapse of the Soviet Union combined to create a conflict that has lasted for more than three decades.
The simplest way to understand it is this:
Nagorno-Karabakh was internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but for most of the modern period its population was overwhelmingly Armenian.
That contradiction is at the heart of the whole dispute.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous region in the southwestern part of Azerbaijan, close to the Armenian border. The word "Nagorno" means mountainous or highland. Armenians traditionally call the area "Artsakh".
The region has a very long Armenian historical and cultural connection. However, the modern political dispute really took shape during the Russian and Soviet periods.
After the Russian Empire expanded into the Caucasus in the 19th Century, the area became part of the Russian imperial system. When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, Armenia and Azerbaijan both claimed parts of the region, and fighting took place.
Then after the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks took control of the Caucasus.
This is where the Soviet Union effectively created the political problem that would eventually explode.
In 1921, the Soviet authorities decided that Nagorno-Karabakh would remain within Soviet Azerbaijan, while providing for autonomy. In 1923, the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was formally created inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
The important point is that the population of the autonomous region was predominantly Armenian. By the late Soviet period, roughly three-quarters of the population were ethnic Armenians.
So you had an Armenian-majority territory sitting inside Azerbaijan.
During the Soviet period this did not produce a full-scale war because Moscow ultimately controlled everything. National borders between the Soviet republics were, in practical terms, internal administrative boundaries.
But the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh continued to have a strong sense of separate identity and, at various times, sought to have the territory transferred to Soviet Armenia.
The situation changed dramatically in 1988.
As Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms weakened Soviet central control, the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh began demanding that the territory be transferred from Azerbaijan to Armenia.
That quickly became violent. There were serious ethnic clashes, including violence against Armenians in Azerbaijan and against Azerbaijanis in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And that transformed what had been an internal Soviet dispute into an international territorial conflict.
Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent states. Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan and proclaimed the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, which later became known as Artsakh.
Azerbaijan, naturally, rejected this. From the Azerbaijani perspective, this was Azerbaijani territory being taken away by an Armenian separatist movement with the backing of Armenia.
From the Armenian perspective, it was an Armenian-majority population trying to escape Azerbaijani rule and protect itself from what it regarded as discrimination and persecution. Both sides therefore had a powerful narrative.
The first Nagorno-Karabakh War lasted from roughly 1988 until a ceasefire in 1994. The Armenians and Armenian forces won the war. Now they did not merely control Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Armenian forces also took control of substantial surrounding Azerbaijani territory, creating a land connection between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia.
Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced during the conflict. Azerbaijanis were expelled from areas controlled by Armenian forces, while large numbers of Armenians also fled or were expelled from other parts of the region. The war left enormous bitterness on both sides.
For the next 26 years, therefore, there was a strange situation. Internationally, Nagorno-Karabakh was recognised as part of Azerbaijan. In reality, it was controlled by ethnic Armenians and had its own unrecognised government, supported by Armenia.
No country, including Armenia itself, formally recognised Nagorno-Karabakh as an independent state. There were negotiations for years, but no permanent settlement was reached.
Then came 2020 - Azerbaijan had become considerably wealthier because of its oil and gas revenues and had spent heavily on its armed forces. Turkey also became an important military and political supporter of Azerbaijan.
In September 2020, Azerbaijan launched a major military offensive. This time Azerbaijan won substantial territory back from the Armenian side.
The war lasted about six weeks and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire in November 2020. Azerbaijan regained all of the surrounding territories that had been occupied by Armenian forces and also captured significant parts of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, including the strategically important city of Shusha.
Russian peacekeepers were deployed to the remaining Armenian-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabakh. But the underlying dispute still wasn't resolved.
Then came September 2023 - Azerbaijan launched another military operation against the remaining Armenian-controlled part of Nagorno-Karabakh. This was not another six-week war like 2020. It was a very short offensive. Azerbaijani forces quickly overwhelmed the Armenian forces in the enclave, and the Armenian authorities there agreed to cease fighting.
That effectively ended the existence of the separatist Armenian administration. Almost the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh — more than 100,000 people — subsequently fled to Armenia. Now, they fled because they felt they had no choice – people I met in Armenia told me people feared for their lives if they stayed in what was now Azerbaijani territory. My Azerbaijani friends tell me a different story – they say that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of their country and always will be. But, they claim that if Armenians still want to live there, they are welcome and that their culture and religion will be respected. Armenians say it will never happen – the roots are too deep and too bitter.
By the end of 2023, Azerbaijan had therefore established full control over the territory. The self-declared Republic of Artsakh subsequently ceased to exist.
For Azerbaijanis, the events of 2020 and especially 2023 were enormously significant. For almost thirty years, Azerbaijan had been living with what it regarded as the occupation of part of its internationally recognised territory. Generations of Azerbaijanis had grown up as refugees or descendants of refugees from the areas that had been lost. So when Azerbaijan's army recovered the territories, it was regarded by many Azerbaijanis as the restoration of territorial integrity and the correction of a historic injustice. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who organised the 20230 and 2023 offensives which regained control of Nagorno-Karabakh is a hero in Azerbaijan and will rule indefinitely as a result.
The capture of Shusha in 2020 was particularly symbolic because of its enormous cultural importance to Azerbaijan. And the final Azerbaijani victory in 2023 was presented by Aliyev as the culmination of a decades-long struggle. The 2020 victory undoubtedly strengthened his position domestically and the 2023 victory consolidated it.
It is important, however, to understand that there is another side to the story. For Armenians, the outcome was catastrophic. They lost control of a territory in which Armenians had constituted the overwhelming majority for generations, and virtually the entire Armenian population left the region after Azerbaijan established control.
So when you hear an Azerbaijani describe what happened as "liberation", you are hearing the Azerbaijani interpretation. When you hear an Armenian describe it as the loss of Artsakh, you are hearing the Armenian interpretation. Both terms reflect deeply entrenched national memories.
The legal and political situation, however, is clearer than the competing historical narratives sometimes suggest: Nagorno-Karabakh was internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. The unresolved question was how the Armenian population of the territory could have security and political rights within that state. That question ultimately ceased to be relevant in the same way after 2023 because the Armenian population largely left.
So, in one sentence, the whole story is: The Soviet Union put an overwhelmingly Armenian-populated territory inside Soviet Azerbaijan; the collapse of the Soviet Union turned that administrative anomaly into a war; Armenian forces won the first war and controlled the territory for nearly three decades; Azerbaijan won the 2020 war and then the September 2023 offensive brought the remaining territory under Azerbaijani control.
And that explains why the subject is so emotionally charged in Azerbaijan today. For many Azerbaijanis, particularly those who remember the displacement of the 1990s, Aliyev is the leader who finally achieved something that Azerbaijani governments had failed to accomplish for almost thirty years.
Historical Development:
Forgive me if this article is becoming long and complicated. All I have explained so far is what the current situation is. There is an important part of the story that I didn't explain properly: how did a territory that eventually became part of Azerbaijan come to have an overwhelmingly Armenian population? In other words, how did the people who lived or still live in Nagorno-Karabakh get there. In Northern Ireland, it is relatively easy to trace how Scots were ‘planted’ in Ulster in the 17th Century. Nagorno-Karabakh is a little more complicated.
The short answer is that Nagorno-Karabakh had a long established Armenian population centuries before the modern Republic of Azerbaijan existed. For many Armenians, that’s the problem in a nutshell – the ‘we were here first’ view.
Modern political borders are relatively recent. You can't really look at the map of today's Azerbaijan and assume that everyone living inside those borders had historically been Azerbaijani.
Armenians have lived in the mountainous parts of Karabakh for many centuries, and the region has a long Armenian Christian cultural and historical connection. There were also substantial Muslim populations in the broader Karabakh region, particularly in the lowlands. For centuries, therefore, Karabakh was a mixed region rather than a neat Armenian-or-Azerbaijani territory.
Things become much clearer in the 18th century. In the 1740s, the Karabakh Khanate was established. It was a Muslim-ruled political entity, and its population included both Muslims and Armenians. The khanate was centred on the lowlands and mountains of Karabakh. The important point is that political control and ethnic population was not the same thing. An area could be ruled by a Muslim khan while containing a large Armenian Christian population.
Then Russia conquered the region – we are back to imperialism again. The Russian Empire incorporated the Karabakh Khanate in the early 19th century, following the Russo-Persian wars. This gives us the first reasonably reliable population figures.
A Russian survey of 1823 showed that the broader Karabakh region was predominantly Muslim. However, the mountainous districts were very different: Armenian communities were heavily concentrated in the mountains. This distinction between mountainous Karabakh and the broader Karabakh region is extremely important. If you look at the whole historical Karabakh area, the population figures can make it appear predominantly Muslim.
If you look specifically at the mountainous area that eventually became the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, the Armenian presence was much stronger. And the population changed during the 19th century. There was considerable movement of people after the Russian conquest, including Armenians moving into the Russian-controlled Caucasus from territories that had previously been under Persian and Ottoman rule.
By the late 19th century, Armenians had become a very substantial part of the population of the mountainous Karabakh area. But there is an important complication here. The demographic statistics for this period are disputed.
Azerbaijani and Armenian historians have often used different geographical definitions of "Karabakh" and different population sources, producing very different figures.
For example, the Russian Imperial census of 1897 showed that the population of the much larger Karabakh administrative districts was mixed, with Muslims forming the majority overall. But Armenians were heavily concentrated in the mountainous areas. So it would be misleading to say that "all of Karabakh was Armenian." It wasn't. It is more accurate to say that the mountainous part of Karabakh had a very substantial and eventually dominant Armenian population, while the wider Karabakh region contained a large Muslim/Azerbaijani population as well.
Then the Russian Tsarist Empire collapsed in 1917. This is when the modern territorial dispute really began. There was no independent Azerbaijan or Armenia with today's borders before 1918. When the Russian Empire collapsed, both the newly emerging Armenian and Azerbaijani states claimed territories in the Caucasus, and there were mixed populations in many of those areas.
Karabakh became one of the most fiercely disputed. There were Armenians living in the mountains and Azerbaijanis living in other parts of Karabakh. Neither side could simply say, "Everyone here is one nationality, therefore the territory obviously belongs to us."
Then the Bolsheviks took control. This is where the modern map was effectively created. In 1921, the Soviet authorities decided that Nagorno-Karabakh would remain within Soviet Azerbaijan, while providing it with autonomy. In 1923, the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was established inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
And here we arrive at something rather extraordinary. The new autonomous region was overwhelmingly Armenian. The early Soviet figures put the Armenian population at roughly 89–95 percent of the population of the autonomous region, depending on the particular year and boundary used.
By the final Soviet census in 1989, Armenians still represented about 77 percent of the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, while Azerbaijanis represented only about 22 percent. There certainly were Azerbaijanis living there and their numbers actually increased considerably during the Soviet period. But the mountainous autonomous region was already overwhelmingly Armenian when it was established.
It is also important not to imagine that Armenians suddenly arrived and displaced Azerbaijanis in the 20th century – they didn’t – they had ‘always’ been there. The Armenian population was already deeply rooted in the mountainous region.
At the same time, Azerbaijanis had deep historical roots in the broader Karabakh region. This is why both sides have such powerful historical arguments.
The Armenian argument is essentially:
"We have lived here for centuries, we are the overwhelming indigenous population of the mountains, and we should have the right to determine our own future."
The Azerbaijani argument is:
"This territory was legally placed inside Azerbaijan, the wider region has a long Muslim/Azerbaijani history, and international law recognised Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory."
And both arguments contain genuine historical facts. There is one other fascinating point.
The word "Azerbaijani" itself is relatively modern in this context. Before the Soviet period, Russian sources commonly referred to the Muslim population of the region as "Tatars" or "Caucasian Tatars", while the term Azerbaijani became standard later.
So when we look back at an 18th- or 19th-century population and call somebody "Azerbaijani", we're partly applying a modern national identity retrospectively.
The same applies, to some extent, to the idea of a single Armenian national territory.
People in the Caucasus historically identified themselves through a mixture of religion, language, local community, dynasty and ethnicity. The modern idea that every piece of territory must belong exclusively to one nation only became powerful in the 19th and especially 20th centuries. Back to imperialism again and marking of territory.
That is really the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh. The population didn't neatly correspond to the political borders. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no solution that could satisfy everybody.
If you gave the territory to Azerbaijan because it was legally inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic, the Armenians could say:
"But we are the overwhelming majority living here."
If you gave it to Armenia because Armenians were the overwhelming majority, Azerbaijan could say:
"But you're taking internationally recognised Azerbaijani territory away from us."
That is essentially the conflict in a nutshell. One final point is particularly important: Nagorno-Karabakh was never simply "Armenia inside Azerbaijan." It was an autonomous Armenian-majority region inside Soviet Azerbaijan, surrounded by areas that contained substantial Azerbaijani populations.
That distinction is what makes the history considerably more complicated — and much more interesting — than either side's simplified version of the story.
My preferred solution to the problem would be what we now have in Northern Ireland. I would leave Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan but share power between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the region. As practically all ethnic Armenians have now left the region and have been integrated into Armenia, it is unlikely to happen. Some parts of Karabakh have been re-settled by formerly displaced Azerbaijanis but apparently large areas remain unpopulated - deserted towns and villages abound. It is a sad end to what, with a little more diplomacy and less military action, could have been a solution that all sides might have agreed to.
Comments