Hayk Kotanjian: Azerbaijan: Anti-democratism and colonialism in the perspective of regional security

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On February 7, a conference called “Caucasus and Middle East countries as potential partners in the process of forming regional security system” started in Yerevan, Armenia. REGNUM publishes full text of Major General, Commandant (INSS, MoD, Republic of Armenia), Doctor of Political Sciences, Fellow Member (Russian Academy of Military Sciences), Counterterrorism Fellow (National Defense University, USA), Member (CSTO Academic-Expert Council) Hayk Kotanjian’s report at the conference.

In the community of international organizations and scholars dealing with the settlement of the Karabakh Conflict, it is common to express peacemaking optimism concerning the settlement at the beginning of each year. With all due respect to these expectations, I believe the consideration of the problems of real peace and security in the region in the circle of experts as a no less useful effort.

The Karabakh Conflict resolution by peaceful democratic tools is one of the key problems for the security of Armenia, Azerbaijan and the South Caucasus region on the whole (1). This report is devoted to the evaluation of colonial essence of certain antidemocratic manifestations of the former metropolitan country’s policy in relation to the self-determined Nagorno Karabakh. The appraisal of essential characteristics of the states’ democratization processes in the region, as well as the realization of collective and individual human rights can be considered as an integrative political-legal basis for comprehension of regional security architecture formation process, founded on the principles of peaceful coexistence and cooperation enjoying equal rights in the South Caucasus.

Let’s begin with the overall assessments. While analyzing positions of the Azerbaijani authorities regarding the Karabakh issue as a regional security factor together with its other aspects, external assessments of the neighboring state leadership’s democracy in the context of international-legal norms of human rights and liberties protection are of special attention. A comprehensive non-partisan assessment is given to the authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan by Freedom House (2), a renowned US-based human rights organization. Like in previous years the last annual survey of Freedom House declared Azerbaijan as a “not free country”. Evidently, the democratization process is not smooth in the neighboring states — both in Armenia and in Georgia; however, Freedom House considers these two countries “partially free”, unlike “not free” Azerbaijan.

The Western colleagues consider the Azerbaijani government antidemocratic in its political-legal essence. This is, first of all, expressed in the dynastic inheritance and maintenance of power as well as in imposing by the head of the state, the cult of his father–the former ruler of the country–on the people of Azerbaijan thereby resembling to the sultanate-style dictatorships. It is well-known that the authorities’ response to the assessment of their democratization extent is considered as an important component of democracy by human rights organizations. From that perspective, it is symptomatic that on 24 December, 2007, the neighboring state’s President, ignoring the assessments of Freedom House, declared that the world community recognized Azerbaijan as a democratic country and called his son the next heir to the rule (3).

From stability and security perspectives, the “non-freedom” of our neighboring state is reflected in the colonialist manifestations towards the rights and liberties of the natives in the Eastern Transcaucasia. That first and foremost, concerns the right of peoples to equality and free external and internal self-determination. Antidemocratism of the neighboring state’s authorities regarding the Karabakh settlement is expressed in denying the fact of legal democratic suspension of the administrative and hierarchic relations between Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan (4).

The illegality of the declaration of independence by Azerbaijan in 1991 (5) without holding a referendum on the issue of seceding from the USSR lies in the basis of ignoring the mentioned political and legal fact. The fact of declaring Azerbaijan independent without fulfillment of the right of the people of Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and other regions of densely-populated Armenian habitations to free and independent choice of their political status – in defiance of the USSR acting Law “On procedure of settling issues related to withdrawal of a Soviet Republic from the USSR” (6) is also qualified as a law infringement. Instead, by passing a legislative act on the liquidation of Nagorno Karabakh autonomy, the Republic of Azerbaijan proved to be an entity of metropolitan colonial oppression of Nagorno Karabakh people’s will to free self-determination (7). As a reaction to this illegal act, in compliance with the acting Law and principles of direct democracy, Nagorno Karabakh seceded from the Azerbaijan SSR– by holding a referendum.

At the beginning of 1992 the Republic of Azerbaijan unleashed a colonial war in response to proposal of the newly elected NKR authorities to start peace negotiations.

In addition to the violations of the legislation, the official Baku, proclaimed her Declaration of Independence in 1991 on the legal succession from the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, thereby depriving herself of the right to include Nagorno Karabakh in her territory, based on the fact that Nagorno Karabakh, having the status of a disputed territory, wasn’t included in the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan throughout the whole period of its existence from 1918 to 1920 (8). Heretofore, Karabakh was a constituent part of the Russian Empire and previously — of Persia, but not of Azerbaijan, which didn’t exist as an independent state until 1918.

Another colonial attribute of the antidemocratic nature of the Republic of Azerbaijan is the contradiction of her Constitution (9) to the essence of the international-legal norms on the peoples’ right to dispose their own destinies through free expression of popular will of the self-determined population in complete freedom, formulated by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1966 International Covenants on Human Rights and the UN Charter (10). World practice proves that in this very way, i.e. without interference from the metropolitan country, the rights of the peoples of Bangladesh, Eritrea, East Timor, Montenegro, and at this moment Kosovo too were exercised, to self-determine through free expression of will in the referenda held among the self-determining nations, and not in the populations of their former metropolitan countries, namely in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Indonesia or Yugoslavia-Serbia.

A few words concerning the manifestation of antidemocratism, namely the propaganda of xenophobia, violence and war are worth mentioning. The efforts by the OSCE Minsk Group on the peaceful resolution of Karabakh Conflict are based upon the UN fundamental principles: interdependence of peace, progress and democracy in relations with other nations, assuming that lasting peace is a premise, and democracy is an utmost condition for secure and sustainable development of nations. These very principles, reflected in the UN Charter and the Human Rights Covenants, exclude war propaganda. However, recurring statements by the statesmen of our neighboring country contain a direct threat of war. Suchlike public addresses by the head of our neighboring state to the population of almost all the regions in Azerbaijan at national events and international meetings, as well as their widespread broadcasting through mass media lead towards a motivation of inevitability of resumption of war in line with the propaganda of war and violence.

Yet by conducting open colonial war propaganda, the official Baku, contrary to the logic of the Minsk process, mobilizes its population to regain Karabakh by force. A concrete evidence of Azerbaijan’s preparation to war is its purposeful excess of limitations, anticipated by the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). Instead of the permitted 220 tanks, Azerbaijan has 579, i.e., exceeding 2.63 times; instead of 220 armored combat vehicles-1174 (exceeding 5.34 times); instead of 285 artillery pieces of 100mm caliber and higher-788 ones (exceeding 2.76 times), instead of 100 battle planes-128 pieces (exceeding 1.28 times). It should be noted that Armenia continues to meet its international commitments according to the CFE Treaty, and the NKR declares its eagerness to become a responsible participant in this treaty which is of such importance for the regional security.

The statements by the statesmen of the neighboring country as a matter of fact are a gross violation of the International Covenants on civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights, and which are difficult not to qualify as incitement of its own people to genocidal actions towards the Armenian population. Unfortunately, an example of such a manifestation of colonial disregard towards their international commitments is given by the head of the neighboring state himself. In his last New Year address to the Azerbaijanis all over the world President Aliyev threatened the Nagorno Karabakh Armenians with ethnic cleansing: “If Armenians residing in Nagorno-Karabakh want to decide their fate, they must do it basing on the principle of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, but if they do not want to do this, they must leave Nagorno-Karabakh and create their second state in another place” (11).

The antidemocratic nature of the Baku authorities’ position on the peoples’ right to self-determination is reflected also upon domestic level regarding the rights of ethnic minorities to internal self-determination. Skepticism towards Baku’s promises to render high-level autonomy to the Armenians is based upon the complete disregard of the Azerbaijani Armenian refugees’ rights while conducting negotiations on fulfilling the rights of refugees and temporarily displaced persons of Azerbaijani nationality. A symptomatic and sobering example of the Aliyev regime’s colonialism and antidemocratism regarding the rights of ethnic minorities to internal self-determination within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan is the routing of the Talysh Mugan Autonomous Republic in 1993 which was accompanied by its leader’s and his ethnopolitical companions’ arrest (12).

The fact of total obfuscation and pressure on accurate information in Azerbaijan is reflected in the assessments by “Freedom House” as one of the key features of the antidemocratic regime of this “not free” country. The official policy of the titular nation’s dominance to the detriment of parity with the native peoples of the neighboring country is reflected in the purposeful reconstruction of the scientific history of the nations of the region, which is targeted at distortion of their identity, as well as at reducing the place and the role the indigenous people in the historical development of the Eastern Transcaucasian culture. In the policy of historical falsifications the grounding of Azerbaijan’s historical right to the possession of territory, which has been populated by millennia-old indigenous Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia, has a special place. As it is known from the text of the President Aliyev’s speech at the anniversary meeting at the National Academy of Sciences, he made a political order on the falsification of the Eastern Transcaucasian history on 14 December, 2005 (13). As a result of the state policy of substitution of scientific history with totalitarian special propaganda, there occurs a break between the reality and the antiscientific history of the nations of Eastern Transcaucasia, framed up in the depths of current authorities.

The world academic community has already registered specific attempts on realizing the political order of the neighboring state’s head _­­­– to make primeval the history of densely-populated Turkic peoples residing in the territory of Eastern Transcaucasia, subject to Persia. The scientific fact of Turkic peoples’ habitation for 900 years in the South Caucasus seems an unacceptably small period for the Baku authorities. The falsifiers try to prolong that history for ten thousand years­ – back to the era of creating Mesolithic artifacts of Gobustan by the pre-historic man of the Stone Age Epoch. These distortions of the past, which were ordered from above, are pierced through the manipulations with the Iranian toponym “Azerbaijan” with its antiscientific usage towards Persia’s former Caucasian provinces for the periods. The political application of that term preceded well before the Turkic peoples settled in the territory of the Eastern Transcaucasia. As it is known, the Turkic peoples of Caucasian provinces also were not prominent as “Azerbaijanis” and their settling territory as “Azerbaijan” in the official documentation of the Russian Empire. In a word, the famous joke: “The USSR is a country with an unpredictable past” is fully applicable to Azerbaijan, where by the authorities’ order, a new history of the region is written­­–with a radical change of place and role of settled indigenous peoples and newly arrived nomadic tribes. These are the manipulating positions from which the Baku authorities impute to the Armenians the crimes against the “Azerbaijani people” even in those periods, when Turkic ancestors of contemporary Azerbaijanis didn’t enter the South Caucasus from Central Asia.

Preparing a ground for justifying colonial claims to the territory of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, the Baku authorities, manipulate the repatriation fact of the limited contingent of the Armenians (who had been taken away earlier to Persia by Shah Abbas) in the aftermath of the Russian-Persian War of 1828. Some of academicians politically committed by the Baku authorities try to thrust on the Azerbaijani community the opinion that all the Armenians arrived to the Eastern Transcaucasia. The given “scientifically tailored” propaganda is recently carried out right from President Aliyev’s mouth. Similar authorities’ violence of human rights on free access to the truthful scientific information targets at spoiling Azerbaijani people by the belief that Artsakh is allegedly the fatherland of Turkic peoples, and the Armenians in Karabakh and Armenia are, for the most part, either descendants of re-settlers or are not Armenians at all.

In the policy of demolishing the trust among nations, the Baku authorities spare a special place to conscious distortion of the information on the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. State propaganda of disrespect for the memory of 1.5 million Armenian victims surpasses the boundaries of separate publications, taking the form of sacrilege, directed by the Baku authorities. For examples of coarse falsification of the Eastern Transcaucasian history, we may bring the attempts of politico “balancing” of the genocidal crimes against the Armenian population, which were committed at the beginning of the 20^th century, with “the genocide against the Azerbaijanis”. Based upon these falsifications, the Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan “On the Genocide against the Azerbaijanis” was issued in 1998 (14). The representatives of Baku intelligentsia themselves in the narrow confidential circle are mocking at the dishonest and dangerous way of political “consolidation of the Azerbaijani people” against the Armenian and Russian peoples. They know that as a matter of fact at the beginning of the 20^th century, massacre of Armenians and resistance of Armenians to that massacre took place, as well as later–in response to pogroms of peaceful Armenian population in Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku in 1990.

It should be mentioned that the Baku authorities’ sneering at the pain and human dignity of the millions of Armenian families in the Diaspora together with the propaganda of xenophobia among the Azerbaijani population, play also a diametrically opposite role – it consolidates Armenians all over the world for adequate counteraction to the State defamation of the Armenian Genocide.

The recent campaign of commemorating the “genocide” victims, as if committed by Armenians against the Mountain Jews, serves to confront Armenians and Jews. The historic truth was defied by the manipulators (by means of the informational war) to such an extent of sneer, that excavating mass burials of the Armenians, killed at the beginning of the 20^th century, are presented as “victims” of genocidal actions by the very true victims; that is the Armenians. The goal is to destroy centuries-old good neighborly relations that existed between Shirvan Armenians and the Mountain Jews, aiming to push Israel and Jewish lobby organizations to anti-Armenian positions.

Among similar outcomes of involving scientists in the antiscientific elaboration of the Baku regime’s informational war which is untwisted by special propagandists under the flag of human rights protection, the fact of falsifying the authorship of sneering at the victims’ bodies of the Khojalu tragedy deserves special attention. Details of the given provocation, as a tool for political struggle for power in Baku, are stated by fresh traces in the well-known interview of the Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov to the Czech journalist Dana Mazalova (15). The Armenian party has all the proofs that corpses of those killed were in the responsibility zone of the Azerbaijani authorities and the physical contact of the Armenians with the bodies to abuse them was impossible.

The fact that the analytical community in Azerbaijan, as well as in Armenia, is represented by sufficiently wide spectrum of views on security realities and perspectives of our South Caucasian division of the European Neighborhood raises hopes. I was honored to know praiseworthy Azerbaijanis in the multinational professional environment, together with the impartial and worthy representatives of different states and organizations. I am sure that there are specialists in our neighboring country, who realize the counter-productivity of restoring the colonialism towards the Nagorno Karabakh’s people in the process of the European Neighborhood formation. The given problem could become a subject of an unbiased study for Azerbaijan’s politically non-committed scientists, who are preoccupied with perspectives of secure democratic development of the region, as well as for the co-chairs of the Minsk Group and international analytical community.

1. “National Security Strategy of the RA”. Yerevan, 2007, Special issue of defense-academic quarterly “Haikakan banak” MoD, RA. Freedom House. Map of Freedom in the World. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (2007) (http://www.freedom house.org/template.cfm?page=363&year=2007&country=7129)

2. See Ilham Aliyev, “My Universities”, 24 December, 2007 (http://azerbaijan.news.az/index.php?Lng=aze&Pid=19934); Ilham Aliyev, excerpts from his direct address: “In the contemporary world the transition of power from one member of a family to another in itself isn’t considered as an antidemocratic fact”. “Moreover, I’d like to mention that the true heir of Heydar Aliyev is my younger son, Heydar Aliyev, the youngest member of our family”.

3. Act on the referendum results on the independence of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, 10 December, 1991, Stepanakert, Nagorno Karabakh Republic, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (http://www.nkr.am/rus/facts/referendum.html).

4. Constitutional Act “On the state independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan”, 18 October 1991, No 19-20.

5. See USSR Law “On procedure of settling issues related to withdrawal of a Soviet Republic from the USSR” No 1410-1 of 3 April 1990." USSR Supreme Council (www.bestpravo.ru/ussr/data01/text10973.html).

6. AzR Law “On abolition NKAO AzR”, 26 November 1991. Registers of AzR SC, 1991, No 24.

7. See “Journal”. League of Nations, Geneva, No 17, p. 130: among the arguments lying in the basis of the resolution by the League of Nations on non-recognition of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, the fact of “impossibility of precise identification of the Azerbaijani real borders in connection with its territorial disputes with its neighbors” was mentioned.

8. See Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Chapter II. “Basis of the State”, Chapter III. “Basic Rights and Liberties of a Person and Citizen” (http://www.azerbaijan.az/GeneralInfo/Constitution/constitution 01 r.html).

9. See CSCE. Helsinki Final Act, 1 August, 1975. Principle VIII. OSCE website (www.osce.org/documents/msc/1975/08/4044 ru.pdf); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. UN GA Resolution 2200 A (XXI), 16 December, 1966. UN Centre for Human Rights: International Treaty Collection; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. UN GA Resolution 2200 A (XXI), 16 December, 1966, UN Centre for Human Rights. Human Rights: International Treaty Collection.

10. President Ilham Aliyev’s congratulations to the people of Azerbaijan on the occasion of the Solidarity Day of all the Azerbaijanis all over the world and New Year. 31 December, 2007 23:59. President Aliyev Heydar oglu Aliyev. Official website of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Documents/Addresses (http://www.president.az/articles.php/item_id=20080101020429299&sec_id=135).

11. See Farmoni Fakhraddin Aboszoda (Abbasov). The History of Our Republic. CentrAsia. 2003, (http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php4?st=1056939900).

12. See President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the ceremonial assembly, dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences (14-12-2005 14:15), www.president.az, the President of Azerbaijan, official website (http://www.president.az/print.php?item id=20070810125435235&sec id=11)

13. Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan “On the Genocide against the Azerbaijanis”. Heydar Aliyev, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Baku, 26 March, 1998 (http://www.human.gov.az/?sehife=etrafli&dil=ru&sid=MTMyMjMzMTA4MTMyNjE1) or (http://www.azembassy.kz/data/file/31marth.pdf)

14. Interview of the AzR President Ayaz Mutalibov to the Czech journalist Dana Mazalova, “I am a humanist at heart”, “Nezavisimaya Gazeta”, 2 April, 1992.