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Contents | Key Points | Foreword | One: Introduction | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six: Conclusion | Author | Map Nagorno-Karabakh Searching for a Solution Foreword Among the current violent disputes in the former Soviet Union, there is no doubt that the war over Nagorno-Karabakh has taken on the characteristics of a “protracted conflict.” That is unfortunate, for there seem to be many components of the dispute that provide the opposing parties enough flexibility to explore a variety of options toward a comprehensive settlement. In that spirit, the United States Institute of Peace convened a roundtable of leading experts on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in late March 1998 to discuss and examine possible ways of resolving it. This report, written by Patricia Carley, a former program officer in the Institute’s Research and Studies Program, is a summary of the discussions. The Institute regularly canvasses area-studies specialists and other academics, as well as foreign-policy officials and representatives of the disputing parties, on these kinds of conflicts to isolate the elements of common understandings and assumptions on issues in the dispute, and to try to arrive at some conclusions on common interests that could support a settlement among the disputing parties. In a few crucial respects, the roundtable’s participants had a sound comparative framework for analyzing this particular conflict. In fact, this war has followed a pattern found in other such conflicts between and within Soviet successor states, as expertly detailed by Galina Starovoitova in a previous edition of the Institute’s Peaceworks series, Sovereignty after Empire: Self-Determination Movements in the Former Soviet Union (No. 19, October 1997): Newly independent Soviet successor states or their internal “autonomies” challenge the artificial borders imposed by the Kremlin during the Soviet era; national minorities or other “identity” groups that populate these enclaves wage a battle for self-determination and independence from the state, which in turn cracks down on the secessionist movement in a protracted campaign of repression and outright warfare; in some cases, neighboring “mother countries” actively support the cause of their ethnic kin in the disputed territory. The facts of the dispute examined in this roundtable discussion seem simple enough: Armenia supports the aspirations for independence of the predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, located in the western regions of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan seeks to preserve its national and territorial integrity, particularly since Nagorno - Karabakh’s armed forces have not only fortified their region, but have also occupied a large swath of surrounding Azeri territory in the hopes of linking the enclave to Armenia. As a result of the fighting—which has been tenuously halted by a 1994 cease-fire agreement—thousands of refugees and displaced persons live a desperate existence, unable to return home and complicating the prospects for a comprehensive peace settlement. In short, the Nagorno-Karabakh war fits the pattern of conflicts in and around the former Soviet Union all too well. However, in some crucial respects, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is unique when compared to the conflicts in Georgia, Tajikistan, Moldova, and in Russia’s ethnic republic of Chechnya. If nothing else, the conflict has dominated electoral politics in the two principal Soviet successor states involved in the dispute. Armenia’s recent presidential elections—stemming from the February 1998 constitutional coup against President Ter-Petrosian—brought to power his prime minister and former “president” of the self-declared “Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Robert Kocharian. Not surprisingly, Kocharian takes a more hardline position on Nagorno-Karabakh, but, as this report suggests, he may be the one leader who can mobilize his country around a peace agreement. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan’s recently concluded presidential election, which maintained Soviet-era leader Heydar Aliev in power, has been mired in charges of corruption and vote-rigging. The eroding legitimacy of the Baku regime will make it more circumspect about accepting an agreement that appears to give any sort of concessions to the Karabakh Armenians. The international dimensions of this conflict also set it apart from other disputes in the former Soviet Union. Russia and Turkey, traditional rivals in this area of the Caucasus, back opposing sides in the dispute. The United States government has had to accommodate conflicting interests as well—its desire to respond to its own influential Armenian community, and the objective of the Clinton administration to secure alternative oil pipeline routes for Azerbaijan’s sizable Caspian Sea oil reserves. The one external factor that clearly distinguishes this conflict from others in the former Soviet Union is the active involvement of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose so-called Minsk Group of member-states has endeavored to find a peaceful solution to the Armenian-Azeri dispute. As the discussion among the Institute’s roundtable participants points out, the Minsk Group’s September 1997 peace plan for settling the dispute—guaranteeing Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomy within Azerbaijan in a “phased” approach—elicited a solid rejection from Karabakh Armenians and an immediate acceptance from Azerbaijan; it also led to the ouster of Armenia’s Ter-Petrossian, following his conditional acceptance of some aspects of the plan and his efforts to garner support from a skeptical nation. As this report goes to press, the OSCE’s Minsk Group has presented a new peace plan for the disputing parties to consider—one that promotes the notion of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan existing in a “common state.” The new proposal drew another swift rejection—this time from Azerbaijan, which viewed the common-state approach as amounting to independence for Nagorno-Karabakh. Moreover, the new plan proposed that all outstanding issues be settled comprehensively—another apparent advantage for Karabakh’s Armenians, since the issues of Azerbaijan’s occupied territory and Nagorno-Karabakh’s status would be negotiated simultaneously. Had Azerbaijan accepted the new plan, it would have lost the leverage it held in the previous plan’s “phased approach” of linking concessions over the Armenian enclave’s status to the withdrawal of Nagorno-Karabakh’s forces from occupied Azeri territory. As this report suggests, Russia continues to have a strong interest in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus. And while many analysts point to Russia as the principal author of the new plan (which resembles Russia’s own peace plan for Georgia’s dispute with its separatist republic of Abkhazia), the fact that the other members of the Minsk Group consented to the new proposal suggests, at the very least, that the group discerned enough change in the dispute’s political dynamic to justify a different approach to concessions. Azerbaijan may not have been willing to go that far, but it has maintained its adherence to the Minsk Group process as a way of finding a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Indeed, informed observers see the next phase of the Minsk Group’s mission as a search for a compromise between the group’s September 1997 plan and its most recent proposal. The Institute will continue to monitor developments in the search for a settlement. The Institute of Peace has devoted much of its recent work to analyzing the sources and possible solutions to these types of conflicts in the Soviet successor states. Besides Starovoitova’s study, the Institute has published several works on the broader dimensions of these types of conflicts, including two Peaceworks also written by Patricia Carley—U.S. Responses to Self-Determination Movements: Strategies for Nonviolent Outcomes and Alternatives to Secession (No. 16, July 1997) and Self-Determination: Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Right to Secession (No. 7, March 1996). These two works summarize the discussions of an Institute working group that has examined issues of self-determination and sovereignty. In addition, Ambassador John Maresca details an attempt to mediate the Nagorno-Karabakh war in his case study in Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict (United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996).
Richard H. Solomon, President United States Institute of Peace Contents | Key Points | Foreword | One: Introduction | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six: Conclusion | Author | Map
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