The Directions of Karabakh’s status quo

The influences of foreign visitors on the degree of independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic from the Republic of Armenia

MA Thesis in East European Studies Graduate School for Humanities University of Amsterdam

Rinke van Diermen Student ID: 5927870 Main Supervisor: dhr. dr. C.W.C. Reijnen Second Supervisor: dhr. prof. dr. M.J. Wintle Date: June 30th 2017

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 4

Introduction ...... 5

Part I The Becoming of a Disputed Land ...... 7 I An Introduction to Geographical Karabakh ...... 9 II A Place between Three Empires ...... 10 III Karabakh under Soviet Rule...... 11 IV From Glasnost into Full War ...... 13 V Dealing with a de facto Nagorno Karabakh Republic...... 16 VI Views on Future Scenario’s ...... 18 VII Daily Life Directions in the Diplomatic Freeze ...... 19

Part II The NKR and its International Public ...... 21 I Conventional Tourism ...... 23 II The Involved Diaspora ...... 28 III Guests from the NKR’s near-abroad ...... 35

Part III The Direction of the Impasse ...... 38 I The Tourist Factor ...... 40 II Diaspora cohesion and the All Armenian Fund ...... 42 III The Armenian Caucasus ...... 45

Conclusion ...... 47

Bibliography ...... 49

Primary Sources ...... 56

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Abstract

After the Karabakh War was halted by an OSCE brokered ceasefire in 1994, the territory of the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and some surrounding districts in Azerbaijan stayed under control of the Karabakh Armenians. The non-recognized state of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic does since de facto rule over this area, with help of the strong support by the Republic of Armenia. Since the de facto borders of Nagorno Karabakh with Azerbaijan and Iran are closed, Armenia is the only accessible neighbour. Nagorno Karabakh is to a large extent dependent on the economic and military assistance from their lifeline Armenia. Although Karabakh has an insecure security states because of the ongoing state of war with Azerbaijan, the status qua can be called relatively stable, and daily life continues in the de facto independent status for over two decades now. However isolated Nagorno Karabakh is, foreign visitors do frequent this region for various reasons. Foreigner visit as tourists, being attracted by the history, nature, cultural heritage or the curious unofficial status in which the de facto state finds itself. The Armenian diaspora is particularly interested in the area, and various charity initiatives have invested in the region’s educational, medical and infrastructural systems that were heavily damaged during the Karabakh War. They also form a lobby that achieves relative successes in international recognition of the status quo, particularly in some American states that have recognized the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh. Armenian nationals can be perceived as foreigners to Nagorno Karabakh as well, as the republic considers itself an independent country. The Armenian nationals arriving to Karabakh have economic relations with the region, and form an important military support. These visitors have various influences on the direction of development of the de facto state. Some of these developments help state-building processes and steer towards a higher degree of independency for Karabakh from the Republic of Armenia. Other developments lead to a relationship between Karabakh and Armenia that have an integrational character. Visits that aid Karabakh to gain more independency and legitimacy are for instance the tourists, as they support the Karabakh internal economy and financial independence from Armenia and increase the notoriety of the de facto state abroad, which increases legitimacy for its existence. The Armenian diaspora lobby that advocates the recognition of the Nagorno Karabakh state has the same effects on legitimacy and independency. Visits that generate a further integration of the two ethnic Armenian republics are most of the diaspora charity investments and the Armenian nationals that visit Karabakh. Some of the most influential charity investments have been directed to connecting the Karabakh and Armenian road system. Visitors from the Republic of Armenia aid Karabakh in being part of Armenia’s economic area and integrate it in that manner. Armenians that arrive in Karabakh for military purpose help to integrate the military structure and sense of common responsibility to defend a common border against a common enemy.

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Introduction

A cease fire, signed in May 1994, made an end to the Nagorno-Karabakh War. A conflict between the Azerbaijani central Baku government and a mountainous region with local Armenian majorities seeking independence. In the course of the war, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes in the broader region. Azeri’s and Kurds were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper. Armenians fled from Baku, Nakhchevan and the rest of Azerbaijan, mainly to the Republic of Armenia. Pogroms and ethnic violence made whole villages gather their belongings and flee. The military conflict was limited to the Karabakh region. The cease fire that was signed between the Azerbaijani and the ethnic Armenian forces in 1994 resulted in around 14% of internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan being in control of the self-declared de facto independent Republic of Nagorno- Karabakh (NKR) with Stepanakert as its capital. With regular clashes at the line of contact the ‘frozen conflict’ sees sparks of increased violence from time to time. The most severe clash since the cease fire agreements being only recently, in April 2016, when some dozen of casualties fell on both sides in the course of a three days ‘April War’. But in general, looking at the more than two decades of de facto existence of the NKR, the situation on the ground can be called calm, and even an occasional tourist does visit Stepanakert. This work intends to investigate the effects of daily life going on in the region and slowly reshaping it among lines set by the current controllers. The work will focus on the effects foreign activities have on the directions the region develops in relation to its only accessible neighbour, its supporter and vital ally: the Republic of Armenia. The need for support from this indispensable neighbour makes the Nagorno Karabakh Republic float somewhere between annexed, a satellite state, an autonomous region and independence. The NKR is ruled by its elected government, that allowed the NKR exist, evolve, organize and function for over twenty-five years now. It allowed the rulers to invite the investors and individuals to the area according to their choice and liking, but they are limited by closed borders and the non-official status of the state they created. The core topic of this work, the foreign visitors effects on the regions developments, are aligned along two different possible developments. The one being the emergence of an ever stronger, viable, self- supporting and more independent NKR that gains a wider and international legitimacy for its own existence. The other being the ever further incorporation of the region within Armenia proper, proving the impossibility of this region to sustain an independence from Azerbaijan without being a de facto part of Armenia.

The work consists of three parts which will lead to an overall conclusion. The first part will give a background to the regions history, geo-political situation and ethnic and cultural shape, the second will investigate the different foreign activities in the NKR that can be distinguished, and the third will study

5 these activities among the two recognized possible directions of the NKR’s future and recent development.

The first part starts off with describing the historical context of the conflict, the events of the 1992-1994 Nagorno-Karabakh war itself, and the period after the cease fire agreements where the NKR makes efforts to establish itself like a functioning state. As an acting state, the NKR holds presidential and parliamentary elections, it has a military, all usual ministries, a national ombudsman, a state university, their own postal stamps, and if you wish to visit, you will get an official visa in your passport. And people do visit this region. As isolated as it is, without air-services, the only open border being the one with the itself isolated Republic of Armenia, the little visitors the NKR gets may only be of higher importance. You cannot be a decent country without foreign relations, without international trade, and without the foreign visitors that can prove your very existence to the outside world. This part will find its content in the various works scholars have written on the region. It will have a special focus on the Karabakh historic and contemporary ethnic composition, and on the degree of self-governance it had and currently has compared to the regional powers.

The second part of this work will shine light on several ways in which foreign individuals and organizations deploy activities in the NKR. This in range from a short visit as a passing tourist, to a well- organized multiannual investment by an international charity organization. This work distinguishes three different groups of foreign visitors. There are the individuals that visit the NKR in the score of international tourism, members of the worldwide Armenian diaspora, and the frequenters form close neighbour Armenia that will be investigated respectively. To construct this part, besides the information to be found in literature and internet media, the information collected during a field trip to the NKR and Armenia in March 2017. Various interviews, meetings and personal encounters that have taken place during this visit, will be used to illustrate the scope, nature and motivation of these visitors.

The third part of this work will focus on what these foreign visitors to the NKR effectuate in the republic’s practical functioning. It will analyse the direction the effects of foreign activities is leading the NKR to. Although heavily dependent on Armenia, the Republic presents itself like an independent country deserving international recognition. This part will look at developments since the de facto independence of the NKR as well as future possible directions. The text aims to shine light on the findings in part two, concerning the core issue of the NKR to become an ever stronger separate state, or an gradual integration into the bigger Armenian sphere of the lesser Caucasus.

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Part I

The Becoming of a Disputed Land

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Evening has fallen over the city. It is crowded in the park, where young and old enjoy the cooler summer evening hours. A fountain with colourful lights draws the attention of children, young parents are chatting with each other, older men sit on wooden benches. A group of musicians prepares for a live evening concert at Stepanakert’s central park, while Karabakh’s youth gallivants in circles around the fountain. The lush green grass is being watered, and the whole park is a ‘Free Wi-Fi Area’. The world couldn’t get much more peaceful than here and now. Right across the street stands the Presidential Palace of the Nagorno- Karabakh Republic A picture on Google Maps names this park ‘Mübariz Ibrahimov Park’. Mübariz Ağakərim oğlu Ibrahimov, an Azeri, died in 2010 at the age of 22, while in Azerbaijani army service, at the cease fire line separating the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic from the land under direct control of the Republic of Azerbaijan. This cease fire line (also called ‘Line of Contact’, or LoC) is a series of trenches where Armenian and Azerbaijani military forces have been watching each other for the last 23 years. Every year soldiers from both sides lose their lives at this LoC due to cease fire violations, reported from both sides on an almost daily basis. The relative peace in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and its current purely Armenian culture stands in stark contrast to the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural outlook the region had until recent history. It is of vital importance to understand the region’s history and the contrasts and conflicts that it has faced, and faces still, as everything that happens today, stands in light of that past. It is vital to have an idea of the full background of today’s activities in the region, and the political statements that are in every single movement that is made concerning the area. Therefore I have chosen to take the space and time in this work to give an overview of the events that have created the current situation on the ground, and the powers and peoples that have left their footsteps on what we regard as Karabakh.

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I An Introduction to Geographical Karabakh

Karabakh is a geographic region in the South-Eastern Lesser Caucasus. Its geographical borders are the Murovdag, or Mrav, mountain ridge in the north, from which it stretches south over mountainous lands until the Aras river, and eastwards over the lower plains towards the Kura river. Nagorno or ‘Mountainous’ Karabakh contains alpine landscapes in the northern mountain ridge and high summer grazing fields above the tree line, as well as alpine steppes along the western borders with Armenia. When descending from its higher parts we find coniferous and deciduous forests and fertile slopes, descending into the green undulating landscape fit for agriculture. Below that the more barren ‘lower’ Karabakh is stretching out into the eastern plains. The name Karabakh is believed to be of combined Turkic-Persian origin, with ‘kara’ meaning ‘black’, referring to the dark green forests or the darker rich soils, and ‘bakh’ most often being translated into ‘garden’. The prefix ‘nagorno’ derives from a Russian adjective meaning ‘mountainous’. It is this ‘mountainous’ or ‘upper’ Karabakh where local Armenian majorities have been living for over centuries. They currently prefer to use the Armenian name ‘Artsakh’ for the region, after the ancient Armenian province Artsakh within the Armenian Empire dating back two thousand years. In this work Nagorno-Karabakh and Karabakh will be used indistinctively, as the name Lower Karabakh is hardly used to point out the eastern plains of the region, and the work focusses on the hilly part of the region encompassing the territory currently in control of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (or NKR, in short). The name Artsakh will occasionally be used for Karabakh when in Armenian contexts. Whenever the territory is meant that was under local Armenian administration within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, it will be specified under the name ‘Former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast’. Concerning the names for regions, rivers, towns and cities, in this work the names used by the majority of the local population as during the bigger part of contemporary history will be used. Therefore, it will speak of Stepanakert, not Khankendi, Ağdam, not Akna, Shusha, not Shushi, and Kalbajar, not Karvachar. By means of a referendum on February 20th 2017, the population of the NKR has voted in favour of changes to their constitution. These changes include a change of the official name the republic goes by. In fact the name has been changed from ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (Artsakh Republic)’, into ‘Artsakh Republic (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic)’.1 This can be seen as a symbolic decision for the prevalence of the Armenian name, above the more known but linguistically ‘foreign’ one, but has little to no consequences as the state continues the legal use of both names. This work will use the name Nagorno- Karabakh Republic or NKR to refer to the Artsakh Republic (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic).

1 The Armenian Weekly. “Artsakh Votes for New Constitution, Officially Renames the Republic.”, The Armenian Weekly, February 21st, 2017 9

II A Place between Three Empires

When Armenians refer to Karabakh as ‘Artsakh’, they refer back to the Artsakh province of the Armenian Kingdom that controlled the area in the antiquities. Inhabited by various Caucasian tribes, the area now known as Karabakh has over the course of centuries been part of numerous kingdoms and empires. It subordinated to the Persian Sassanid Empire as the Caucasian Albanian satrapy, later the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, it was the easternmost province of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia, part of the Mongo Il- Khanate and switched several times between the Ottoman empire and the Persian Safavid empire from the late middle ages until the eighteenth century. Whenever under Ottoman or Persian rule, and later under control of the southwards expanding Russian empire, the local administration in Karabakh was under the control of Armenian meliks, or princes (from the Arab word ‘malik’, meaning ‘king’). These meliks enjoyed various degrees of independency, playing out the different empires, maintaining their own juridical and tax systems as well as building fortifications like the strategically placed town of Shusha (Armenian, Shushi).2 These Armenian noble families ruled over multi-ethnic populations, where in the administrative, trade and cultural centres Armenian, Persian and Turkic cultures and languages thrived. It is songs, poems and artefacts created by ethnic Azeri in Karabakh during this period that makes Azerbaijan claim Karabakh is ancient Azerbaijani homeland without which Azerbaijan is not a whole. An example of a poet and musician that shows the interwoven cultures of Transcaucasia of this era is Sayat-Nova, an Armenian born by the name of Harutyan Sayatyan in the early eighteenth century. While born in Tbilisi, now capital of Georgia but at that time a predominantly Armenian town, he wrote his poems and songs in Armenian, Georgian, Azeri Turkish and Persian.3 An ethnic Armenian writing Azeri Turkish songs using Georgian letters; a more Transcaucasian mixture of cultures is hard to find. Though co-existing and inter-mixing on the one hand, mass expulsion and resettling of ethnic groups happened on the other. This when empires had various reasons to believe one group was to be trusted more or less than the other. Changes in control over land between the Persian, Russian and Ottoman empires resulted in different mass-migrations that changed the ethnic composition of Karabakh. These so called ‘migrational strategies’ by resettling or expelling populations was used by Persia long before the famous example of Cossack settlements used by the Russian Empire to control the northern Caucasian plains and slopes.4 The two main events concerning resettlement of ethnic groups in the Karabakh area that helped shaping the ethnic composition of the region in pre-Soviet times are the settlement of Kurds in the Kalbajar and Lachin districts and the settling of Armenians in the Zangezur and Stepanakert regions.

2 Robert H. Hewsen and Christopher C. Salvatico, Armenia: a historical atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 155 3 Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War – 10th-year anniversary edition, revised and updated (New York: New York University Press 2013), p. 324 4 Arthur Tsutsiev, Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus (London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 15 10

Persian Safavids are believed to have resettled Shi’i Kurds in the Kalbajar-Lachin strip of land to strengthen their control over the frontier lands. Resettling of Armenians occurred after the Russo-Persian wars of the beginning of the nineteenth century, resulting in the irrevocable loss of all Persia’s Caucasian territories to the Russian empire. In the aftermath of these wars parts of the Muslim population of nowadays Armenia and Azerbaijan moved out to lands that remained under Persian control, while many Armenians migrated from Persian lands to areas in the Erivan Khanate, Zangezur and Karabakh. This helped increasing the Armenian local majority in the mountainous parts of Karabakh.5 During the course of the nineteenth century migration between the Russian empire and the Persian and Ottoman empires continued in various intensities. Muslim inhabitants left Russian Transcaucasia, and Armenians escaped Muslim rule. Migration intensified during and in the aftermath of the Russian-Turkish wars of 1855-56 and 1877-78. During the forced deportation, expulsion and mass killings of Armenians in Eastern Anatolia, by Enver Pasha’s Young Turks in 1915, some Armenian escape routes lead to lands under Russian control. Most of these Armenians settled in what is now Armenia proper, and these events had little effects on the ethnic composition of Karabakh.6 The effect the iconic traumatic year of 1915 does have, is that the current conflict over Karabakh mobilizes a determined group of Armenian Diaspora in mainly the US, that sees in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict a possibility, a duty even to defend the ‘Armenian motherland’ against ‘the Muslim threat’.

III Karabakh under Soviet Rule

After the October Revolution of 1917, the Caucasus region became a playing field for various empyreal powers once again. This time with the factors of Armenian and Azerbaijani nationalism, communist loyalists and forces loyal to the White Russian empyreal armies increasing complexity. Karabakh was claimed as part of the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic at its foundation in Tbilisi in May 1918, but continuously claimed by the Republic of Armenia (also Dashnak Armenia) at its declaration of independence two days later, also in Tbilisi. While both states could not fully control the region, local Armenians in Karabakh had de facto self-control over the territory, until British forces appointed an Azeri governor over the area. The Armenians of Karabakh, and particularly those of Shusha, who had come to see the town as an Armenian cultural centre, protested Azeri rulership over the multi-ethnic city. An attempt of Armenian forces to dismantle the Azeri military presence in Shusha in the late evening of March 22nd 1920 failed. It was intended to take the Azeri by surprise, but poor planning and coordination made the situation turn a 180 degrees. In the following days the Armenian part of

5 Tim Potier, Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South-Ossetia: A Legal Appraisal (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), p. 2 6 Tsutsiev, Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus, p. 46 11

Shusha was burned down, and an exodus of Armenians down the hill to Stepanakert emerged, making Shusha a predominantly Azeri town overnight.7 While the fragile state of Azerbaijan was concentrating its military around Karabakh, the soviet Red Army stood at its northern borders, ready to start a campaign on the Caucasus. Giving little resistance, Azerbaijan was reincorporated within Moscow’s realm, with Armenia following in the year after. This made the decisions on the future status of the Karabakh regions to the nationalities policies of the Soviet Union, with Josef Stalin appointed to the decisive position of drawing borders and setting regulations for autonomy as Commissar of Nationality Affairs. Decision-making on the statuses of the Nakhchivan, Zangezur and Karabakh regions was extremely messy because of contradictory statements from various soviet officials. Stalin made the final call on Karabakh to be part of soviet Azerbaijan, but it would take two years before the final status would be confirmed. Borders were drafted carefully around the areas of Armenian majority, separating the highlands from the lowlands of historical Karabakh, and creating the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno Karabakh in 1923. An Autonomous Oblast had smaller degrees of autonomy than an Autonomous Republic, as the status Nakhchivan received within the soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Discontent on the loss of Karabakh for Armenia, and the mere relative autonomy Armenian inhabitants of Karabakh was given, resulted in different ways of protests through the years. In 1963, 2.500 Karabakh Armenians signed a petition to Khrushchev asking to be attached to either Armenia or Russia. The demand being ignored by Moscow, later that year demonstrations resulted in clashes in Stepanakert that left eighteen people dead.8 In the Armenian SSR, Karabakh was not forgotten, and when the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide was commemorated in Yerevan in April 1965, an unofficial demonstration with 100.000 people asked for Karabakhs inclusion in soviet Armenia.9 Armenian nationalists in the NKAO claimed that important political-administrative positions were given to Azeri’s, at the cost of Armenians, and that Karabakh received fewer subsidies from the central government in Baku than other regions in the Republic. According to Armenian nationalists, unification with Armenia would prevent deterioration of the situation in the Karabakh region and preserve Armenian identity.10 Protests in the Soviet Union, and especially in Armenia, were becoming more regular in the late 1980’s, under Mikhail Gorbachev and his Glasnost and Perestroika. While first the more ‘non-political’ subjects as environmental issues were pulling people to the streets, the protests became more political in time. Armenian environmental issues like the air pollution over Yerevan caused by the heavy industry in its vicinity, dangerously placed nuclear power plants at geographical fault lines close to major population centres and the poisoned Sevan Lake due to catastrophic ecological planning were seen as threatening the

7 Jonathan D. Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst & Company, 2015), p. 143 8 Tim Potier, Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South-Ossetia, p. 5 9 Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 71 10 Emil Souleimanov, Understanding Ethnopolitical Conflict: Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia Wars Reconsidered (Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), p. 54 12 soul of Armenian existence. This made the environmental movement becoming inseparable from the Armenian national movement.11 A growing and openly expressed national movement and the sense of possible open demonstrations put the demonstrators just one step away of addressing national issues that had remained an open vein throughout the soviet era; Karabakh.

IV From Glasnost into Full War

Gorbachev’s doctrines of Glasnost and Perestroika created an atmosphere that would make open criticism and local restructuring initiatives more likely. Part of the Perestroika idea was it that local governments would take over responsibilities from the central government. This was meant to work as a method of liberalization in economic terms, but soon turned political in the Baltics, as well as in the Caucasus.12 The local government in Stepanakert used this opportunity to speak out their ambitions on 20 February 1988. The local Soviet asked for the NKAO to be transferred from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR. In fact they asked Moscow to change its country’s internal borders, and by that means the Karabakh Armenians were making politics from below for the first time since the 1920’s.13 The political aim to unite Armenia and Karabakh found many supporters, in Stepanakert, but even more in Yerevan, and rally’s in support for this idea were symbolized by the term ‘Miatsum!’, or ‘Unity!’. In the previous week, on 13 February 1988, a small demonstration had taken place in the centre of Stepanakert to advocate the Armenians demand for unification with Armenia. This unsanctioned political rally had grown day by day, and warned the Azeri inhabitants of the NKAO. Azeri from Shusha, a town with a substantial Azeri majority and just uphill from Stepanakert, organized counter protests.14 The events followed with high speed. On 22 February, a crowd of angry Azerbaijani from the Azerbaijani town of Ağdam, 25 kilometres east of Stepanakert, set out to Stepanakert for a confrontation after hearing of two Azeri girls being raped in Stepanakert. At the Armenian village of Askeran they were met by local police and Armenian civilians, some of them armed. There was a clash, wounding around 25 people from both sides, and two Azerbaijani young men were killed. A detachment of the Soviet Army was called in to maintain order. 15 Signs of interethnic tension could now be seen in various places in Armenia and in Azerbaijan. In the mid-80’s around 350.000 Armenians lived in Azerbaijan outside the NKAO, and 200.000 Azeri’s lived

11 Joseph R. Masih, and Robert O. Krikorian, Armenia: at the crossroads (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 2 12 Chris Miller, The struggle to save the Soviet economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 158 13 Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press 2003), p. 11 14 Ibidem, p. 12 15 Ohannes Geukjian, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policies (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), p. 144 13 in Armenia, mainly in the southern areas around Meghri and Kapan; the Zangezur.16 Now a serious move of the minorities to their titular nations had started. But in February 1988 incident upon incident unfolded rapidly, with the Sumgait pogroms between 26 February and March 1st as a tragic nadir so far. Local Armenian minority in Sumgait was targeted by groups of Azeri civilians, armed with knives, clubs and metal rods, determent to make casualties. Official numbers give over two dozen dead in the course of five days.17 Pogroms in Kirovabad (nowadays Ganja) and Baku lead to the expulsion of most Armenians from Azerbaijan in the course of 1988. In the meantime Azeri villagers in rural Armenia were not safe. Azeri’s had been seen arriving in Baku forced to flee from their houses in the Zangezur region since late 1987. The year 1988 saw almost all Azeri’s and Muslim Kurds being expelled from the Armenian SSR. Armenian gangs raided Muslim settlements, forcing its inhabitants to flee on foot, leaving many villages deserted.18 The arrival of homeless, petrified Armenians in Yerevan, and deprived Azeri refugees in Baku created an atmosphere of growing animosity, and washed away the last believes in a possibility of a peaceful coexistence of the two ethnicities in Armenia and Azerbaijan, even in the regions historically multicultural metropoles. On a political level, 1988 was the year of the ‘war of laws’. The Karabakh leadership was offered a compromise in May 1988 that would mean the NKAO would see an upgrade to an Autonomous Republic, with an own constitution, but the proposal was rejected. The Armenian Supreme Soviet supported this decision, and adopted a resolution in June that welcomed Karabakh to join the Armenian SSR. Two days later the Azerbaijan Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution reaffirming Karabakh was part of Azerbaijan. A definitive verdict had to come from the USSR Supreme Soviet in July, that decided Karabakh would remain within Azerbaijan, but be ruled by a ‘special representative’ from Moscow able to overrule Baku19 The ‘special representative’, Arkady Volsky, would stay for eighteen months, in which rule of law and central power declined. There were different authorities Armenian as well as Azeri, expressing power on the ground, and civilians were obtaining weapons. While the situation slowly deteriorated, Karabakh slowly slipped from the Moscow agenda. More serious problems emerged that were threatening to the very existence of the Soviet Union. The Baltic states called for independence, Boris Jeltsin as leader of the Russian SFSR undermined Gorbachev’s power, and in Azerbaijan, the movement Popular Front gained serious support among the population. January 1990 is remembered as ‘Black January’ in Baku. Growing numbers of protesters supporting the National Front against Soviet rule, fuelled by recent developments in Karabakh, turned once more violent against Baku’s Armenian minority. The following pogroms left nearly ninety Armenians dead, and made the authorities to evacuate the last Armenians out of Baku. With the Armenians out of sight, protests continued, and were directed against Soviet rule directly. In fact the city of Baku was taken

16 de Waal, Black Garden (2003), p. 18 17 Masih and Krikorian, Armenia, p. 8 18 de Waal, Black Garden (2003), p. 62 19 Ibidem, pp. 60-61 14 in control of the National Front movement. The Ministry of Internal Affair’s MVD troops were not capable of controlling the city. The Soviet army had to come in action to regain control over its own territory as if it was under enemy occupation, leading to some hundred thirty deaths. Control was re- established, but the anti-Soviet independence movement Popular Front only saw its popular support increase. As Soviet authority in Armenia and Azerbaijan declined, the conflicts in Karabakh seized to be a Soviet interior affair, and rushed to be a full military confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In practice, MVD forces were moving out near the end of 1991, leaving their material to the OMON Azerbaijani interior special police forces and Armenian military units in exchange for cash or vodka.20 On the political front, the parliament of the newly created Republic of Azerbaijan takes decisions in November 1991 concerning the status of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan. It abolishes its special status, divides the region over different Azerbaijani provinces and substitutes the name of Stepanakert officially for the Azerbaijani name Khankendi. In Stepanakert, on 10 December, a referendum is held, boycotted by the Azeri inhabitants, resulting in the proclamation of the independence of the Nagorno- Karabakh Republic on 6 January 1992. In the first half of 1992, Stepanakert suffered from heavy shelling by Azerbaijani forces based in Shusha and until late February, Khojaly, a village east of Stepanakert in the direction of Ağdam. When Armenian forces captured the Azeri village of Khojaly on 25 February, civilians were massacred on a large scale. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 161 fleeing Azeri had been killed when coming across an Armenian military post on their way to the Azeri controlled territory of Ağdam.21 The massacre is actively remembered in Azerbaijan since, and commemorated annually as the ‘Khojaly Genocide’ in Baku and other places. In 1992 the Khojaly massacre showed the Azerbaijani leaderships inability to use their military supernumerary to safeguard its own population. The young nation was weakened by political instability when the leadership of Ayaz Mutalibov was held responsible for more losses in the spring of 1992. The strategically town of Shusha was lost to Armenian forces, as well as the town of Lachin, which gave the Armenians of Karabakh a land corridor to Armenia proper. A coup against Mutalibov’s regime by activists of the Azerbaijani Popular Front brought Abulfaz Elchibey in power in Baku. He reorganized the Azerbaijani forces to launch an attack on lost positions in the summer of 1992. The northern Karabakh region of Shahumyan was quickly conquered, and the Armenian population was forcefully expelled from the area. The offensive continued south in the Martakert region, ultimately controlling almost half of the former NKAO territory. Due to the scarcity of resources, both for the isolated Karabakh as well as for the malfunctioning economy of Azerbaijan, the winter months were calm. When the conflict heated up in early 1993 the tides had turned for the Armenian forces. In a few months, Armenian commander Monte Melkonian proved very valuable, and Armenian forces recaptured the Martakert region. Melkonian was an American-born

20 de Waal, Black Garden (2003), p. 167 21 Human Rights Watch World Report 1993 15

Armenian, a diaspora-Armenian who had come to Karabakh to make the Armenian case benefit from his military experience. Disorganization of Azeri military units led to more strategic losses for the Azeri forces in the spring months of 1993. Melkonian managed to capture the Kalbajar and Lachin in the north, and other Armenian forces conquered the regions of Fizuli, Jabrail and Ağdam by August. These new conquered regions had not been inhabited by ethnic Armenians, and made the local Kurdish and Azeri population flee to safer grounds. Especially the loss of Ağdam resulted in a mass exodus. The town, once with a population of over 30.000 people, is a ghost town since. Due to continuing military losses, Elchibey saw growing discontent among his military apparatus as well as the Azerbaijani population. He stepped down from office, leaving the position to the highly respected former leader of Soviet Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, who promised to restore social order. Aliyev, enjoying great authority among Azerbaijani elites and population, did not manage to regain much of the lost territory, but did restore social order in the rest of the country. He cooperated with representatives of Armenia, the NKR and Russia, on behalf of the OSCE Minsk group, to sign a preliminary ceasefire agreement, the Bishkek Protocol, on 5 May 1994.

V Dealing with a de facto Nagorno Karabakh Republic

Since the Bishkek Protocol came into effect in 1994, it has effectively stopped mass military actions between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces. The Protocol was meant only to serve as a preliminary ceasefire agreement and a step to further peace talks. In this regard it has to be mentioned that no progression has been made beyond the Bishkek Protocol. Nevertheless, the ceasefire line, or Line of Contact (LoC), has proven to be more or less static for the last two decades. Both sides have dug themselves in at the ceasefire line creating a line of trenches, heavily armed and manned by tensely vigilant subscripts. Although the ceasefire held, except for some outbursts of violence as in 2008 and the April 2016 fighting, no agreement was made after 1994, and no internationally force was deployed to monitor the front line. The ceasefire is officially overseen by representatives of the OSCE Minsk Group, co-chaired by France, the Russian Federation and the United States. The Minsk Group “…spearheads the OSCE's efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”22 The mandate given to the Minsk Group in March 1995 in Vienna says it was established to make efforts to strengthen the cease-fire, develop a basis for negotiations, compose and operate a multinational OSCE peace-keeping force and visit the region of conflict to maintain contacts with the parties.23 A delegation of the Minsk Group, represented by one of

22 OSCE, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, “OSCE Minsk Group”, accessed March 1st 2017, http://www.osce.org/mg. 23 OSCE Minsk Group Mandate, Vienna, March 23rd 1995 16 the co-chairholders, does regularly visit the LoC, but no serious steps have been accomplished in order to install a multinational peace-keeping mission. It can be argued that no process is made because of the simple fact that the issue of Nagorno- Karabakh has never made it to be of top priority for any of the co-chairing nations that could put more pressure on both sides of the conflict to accept compromises. But over time, different proposals have been made by the Minsk Group, especially in the late 1990’s. However, when talks made it in a direction of a mutual agreed action plan, one of the conflicting parties would step back, frustrating any possible process the OSCE seeks to compose.24 The stances of the two parties are driving any negotiation into a deadlock. The Armenians use the occupied territories of Azerbaijan as a bargaining chip they don’t want to give away until agreements are made on the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh. They demand the right of self-determination of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, and that the surrounding territories remain under their control until. The Azerbaijani don’t want to make any concessions until the Armenian troops retract from the occupied territories and the internally displaced population can go back to their lands. They demand complete territorial integrity.25 An additional problem to the Armenian negotiators is that Baku will not accept representatives of the NKR to be part of the negotiations. They see Yerevan as the only factor in the conflict, and don’t distinguish between Stepanakert and Yerevan.26 The possibility of making any concessions has highly decreased because it would be a hard thing to sell at home. Over the last two decades, lack of communication and human links between the two ethnic groups of Armenians and Azeri have resulted in a growing mistrust and misunderstanding. Especially the younger generations have grown up surrounded with maximalist viewpoint. The impermeable cease-fire line has only entrenched ethnic hatred, negative stereotypes and war rhetoric toward ‘the other’.27 Media outlets like Armenpress.am, News.am, News.az and the Azerbaijan state news agency at Azertag.az, make daily notions of cease-fire violations of the opposite side. The Azeri elite commemorates the atrocities committed by the enemy using a victim discourse and negative stereotypes of Armenian.28 In both countries the political leadership has committed themselves to a non-concessional stance. In both Armenia and Azerbaijan, the political elite fears to lose face whenever agreeing with less than their own maximalist demands. These post-Soviet elites, that Ayunts calls ‘competitive authoritarianism’ in case of Armenia, and ‘fully authoritarian’ in the case of Azerbaijan, know how fragile

24 Fariz Ismailzade, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Current Trends and Future Scenarios”, Istituto Affari Internationali, November 2011, p. 3 25 Artak Ayunts, “Nagorny Karabakh conflict: prospects for conflict transformation”, Nationalities Papers, Vol. 44, No. 4, 2016, p. 545 26 Ceylan Tokluoglu, “The Political Discourse of the Azerbaijani Elite on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict (1991- 2009)”, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 63, No. 7, August 2011, p. 1230 27 Ayunts, “Nagorny Karabakh conflict”, p. 543 28 Tokluoglu, “The Political Discourse of the Azerbaijani Elite on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict (1991-2009)”, p. 1227 17 their legitimacy to power is, and fear losing face is losing power. Making themselves kidnapped by their own viewpoints.29 In the meantime, the Nagorno Karabakh Republic enjoys a de facto existence. It is even recognized by some separate American States like California and Rhode Island with influential Armenian minorities, and by the separatist de facto states of Abkhazia and Transnistria. However, it does not get official recognition from any UN member state, not even Armenia. Despite negligible international recognition, the NKR tries to organize itself like an independent state. It holds parliamentary and presidential elections, established a usual score of ministries, has a national Ombudsman, conducts, according to good old Soviet use, a population census every decade, and prints its own postal stamps and travel visas. Despite the independent and official outlook, the NKR is highly dependent on the Republic of Armenia for security, energy infrastructure. Economically it is not viable, the state depending on funding from Yerevan and the Armenian diaspora, as its population comes by with remittances from relatives working abroad. While Armenia suffers from its isolation and its limited natural resources, the economic outlook of Azerbaijan has changed drastically since 1994. The return of relative stability after the cease-fire agreements has brought investors to Baku that allowed it to use its oil reserves. The Azerbaijani GDP has risen 20-fold since.30 This allows Azerbaijan to purchase Russian weapon on a large scale. Recently, the annual investment in the military apparatus of Azerbaijan transcends Armenia’s total annual budget.31 Although Armenia can buy its military equipment from Russia at cut prices, the power balance shifts in Azerbaijan’s favour. This makes Armenia more dependent on its security deals with Russia. It sees itself forced to allow the presence of Russian military bases in the country in order to guarantee its national security.

VI Views on Future Scenario’s

In the early days of April 2016, Karabakh appeared briefly in the international media, as fights emerged at three different places along the Line of Contact. These were the most intense clashes since the 1994 cease- fire agreement. The fights continued for four consecutive days from April 2nd until April 5th, resulting in minor territory gain for the Azerbaijan army, and an estimated total death toll of 350.32 The decapitation of a killed Armenian serviceman, and the mutilation and killing of civilians in the northern NKR town of Terter, show the intense hatred towards the enemy. They illustrate the very ethnic dimension of this conflict, where the ‘enemy ethnicity’ is targeted, instead of the ‘enemy army’.

29 Ayunts, “Nagorny Karabakh conflict”, p. 548 30 Thomas de Waal, “Nagorny Karabakh: Closer to War than Peace”, Russia and Eurasia Summary, July 25th 2013, p. 2 31 Ismailzade, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict”, p. 8 32 U.S. Department of State, Background Briefing on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, May 16th 2016 18

British academic Thomas de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sees these latest clashes as signs for the end of the period of relative calmness at the LoC, and thinks further military actions will be ever harder to contain.33 Writing in 2013, he saw two possible future scenarios. With a changed self-perception of Azerbaijan, that through economic growth can self- confidently act like a regional power now, De Waal sees a danger in the government’s rhetoric on the Karabakh topic. By focusing so strongly on trauma and injustice done to the Azerbaijani nation by the Armenians, Karabakh could in economic or social insecure times, be the only way of uniting the nation.34 Gathering the nation behind its flag to claim back Karabakh could become the only option left to Azerbaijani leadership to legitimize its power. In order to explain the reasons behind the April 2016 violence, observers point out to falling oil prices that have seriously affected Azerbaijan’s financial room for manoeuvre. By putting Karabakh back on the agenda, attention of regular Azerbaijani’s could be distracted from the recent cuts in the government’s expenditure on the country’s social infrastructure.35 As a second point of risk for escalation De Waal points at a future incident at the LoC that could spiral out of control.36 Fariz Ismailzade, currently connected to the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy University in Baku, recognized this “Gradual, unwanted transition to war”37 as a likely scenario for future developments as well when writing in 2011.

VII Daily Life Directions in the Diplomatic Freeze

Since the cease-fire agreements have been signed, the NKR has rebuild the region, and deepened its links with Armenia.38 Import and export can only go through Armenia. The NKR uses the Armenia’s national currency, the Armenian Dram as legal coinage, and shares a customs union with its neighbour. In recent years, the infrastructure between Yerevan and Stepanakert has seen some serious investment and improvement. The airport of Stepanakert, near Khojaly, has been undergoing repair work, and could be put in use, was it not for Azerbaijan threatening to shoot down airplanes using Azerbaijani airspace illegally.39 40 Roadworks have improved the Yerevan-Vardenis-Stepanakert connection, with the help of

33 Thomas de Waal, “Prisoners of the Caucasus; Resolving the Karabakh Security Dilemma”, Carnagie Europe, June 16th 2016 34 de Waal, “Nagorno-Karabakh”, p. 5 35 Magdalena Grono, “What’s Behind the Flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh?”, International Crisis Group, April 3rd 2016 36 de Waal, “Nagorno-Karabakh”, p. 5 37 Ismailzade, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict”, p. 8 38 de Waal, “Nagorno-Karabakh”, p. 2 39 Giorgi Lomsadze, “Azerbaijan: Flights to Nagorno Karabakh Will Be Boarding at Gunpoint”, Eurasianet, March 17th 2011 40 Kolter, Christian, “The reopening of the Stepanakert airport (Nagorno-Karabakh): In the crosshair of Azerbaijan”, Eufoa, February 2014 19

Armenian diaspora investors.41 This opens up a second road corridor besides the Yerevan-Goris- Stepanakert connection that had been improved in the 1990’s thanks to likewise diaspora funding.42 As this chapter has shown, history can identify various phases in which multiple empires had some sort of control over the area. When zoomed in into the area of Karabakh, it where for a long time the local Armenians who executed de facto self-rule, in cooperation with the various local ethnicities. Although Armenia is the one lifeline in the current isolated situation, besides the support of the Republic of Armenia, the Armenian diaspora, by Monte Melkonian, have helped to create the de facto independent state of Nagorno-Karabakh. Still, Karabakh has a de facto self-rule, and does not fully belong to either Armenia nor Azerbaijan. Arguments can be found to motivate that Karabakh has in fact never been that much integrated into the rest of Caucasian Armenia. While the NKR proclaims to be an independent state, as cars in the NKR carry Armenian license plates, border passing goes along with just a simple glance at one’s documents, in reality as well as in perception, the NKR can be easily perceived as just another province of Armenia. Svante E. Cornell, Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program in Stockholm, clearly states that Karabakh has been slowly but steadily integrated into Armenia. Cornell: “Armenia has repeatedly asserted that it can neither control nor vouch for Karabakh officials, but the image of free association between Yerevan and Stepanakert has mainly been a fig leaf put in place to ward off international sanctions for occupying another state’s territory.”43

41 Hayastan All Armenian Fund, “Construction of Vardenis - Martakert Highway Project”, accessed May 1st 2017, http://www.himnadram.org/index.php?id=24242. 42 Svante E. Cornell, Azerbaijan since Independence (New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc, 2011) p. 135 43 Cornell, Azerbaijan since Independence, p. 135 20

Part II

The NKR and its International Public

21

As small and isolated as it is, the world is in close contact with the Nagorno Karabakh Republic. The place attracts many, and it awaits its visitors with open arms. They can be interested strangers, whom can be shown what rich culture and nature the ‘black garden’ has, or can be fellow Armenians that want to feel and share their common backgrounds. These visits can diverge from a brief visit from a passing traveller to a multiannual commitment by foreign charity organizations. In this part of this work the various activities of foreign nationals in Karabakh will be put under a magnifying glass. First the scope, characteristics and potential of the tourist business will be treated. Multiple interviews with individuals close to Karabakh tourism and various tourism aimed initiatives will give an idea of the nature of tourism and its effects and future prospects regarding the NKR. The second chapter will shine light upon the extensive Armenian diaspora. Their activities in Karabakh will be examined by their nature, organizational structure, backgrounds and results. Among other sources, an interview with one of the main operating diaspora charity organizations will shine light on these matters. The third chapter tries to grasp the nature of visits the inhabitants of the Republic of Armenia bring to their little brother Karabakh. Visits with the purpose of business and leisure will be treated as far as sources are available. The undeniably meaningful impact of the military commitment Armenian individuals have for the case of Karabakh will be brought to attention, as this might be seen as one of the most powerful elements in the terms of Karabakhi and Armenian interpersonal interactions in the times of the Karabakh war until today.

22

I Conventional Tourism

Although it might not strike the average family to pick Nagorno-Karabakh for a summer holiday destination, what is unattractive to many, can be very attractive to some, and tourists do find their way into the Republic. Not for the usual city-trips, and there are obviously no beach resorts. But as the countries of the Caucasus, with Tbilisi in Georgia as the main tourist gateway to the region, get more known for their natural beauty, cultural richness and soft visa regulations, tourism is growing in both Georgia and Armenia, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Georgia benefits the most. With a tourist infrastructure that expands year by year the country is starting to become an ever more ‘regular destination’ and will soon lose its ‘off the beaten track’ status, to use the language of the Lonely Planet guidebooks. The increasingly western oriented Georgian tourism infrastructure attracts many to its mountains, churches, wine and old city centres. Visitors arrive from western countries, as well as from Eastern Asia. Armenia is less popular, but sees a steady increase as well, as people visit the wider region or particularly choose the country for their travel destination. Besides the usual nationalities, a large amount of these tourists come from its neighbour Iran. Comfortable coaches with Iranian tourists drive back and forth from Tehran and Tabriz, showing the passengers their curious little Christian neighbour country. During the Nowruz holidays in March 2017, Farsi could be heard at every street corner of Yerevan’s city centre. The third Trans-Caucasian country of Azerbaijan is the exception to the rule. This despite their recent efforts to attract international attention. The country hosted the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest and the 2015 European Games, and seized this chance for international publicity with both hands making it prestigious, costly events. It even sponsored the Spanish football team of Atlético Madrid. The team played with the slogan ‘Azerbaijan, Land of Fire’ on their shirts. But as the country comes in the picture, so do claimed human rights violations and suppression of free press. Not such good publicity for Azerbaijan’s tourist sector. Nagorno-Karabakh gets a, although small in actual numbers, wide variety of tourists. Visa regulations are very soft. Visitors do not need a visa on forehand, but register at the Republic’s ‘Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ in Stepanakert. They pay an equivalent of €6,- in Armenian Dram and can stay for up to 21 days on a tourist visa.44 You will be asked whether you wish your visa in your passport or on a separate paper, as a visa in your passport will block you from future visits to Azerbaijan. You are likely to be handed the personal phone number of the young man behind the counter, in case you have any further questions or inconveniences. This personal approach from a Karabakh official institution can be seen as an effluent from the rather limited amount of visitors who come to visit this office, but it is more than that. Visits to Karabakh are met with appreciation from local authorities and residents, as a visit means their ‘state’ is being noticed and worthy a visit from the outside world. In addition to this, it is of the authorities highest interest that tourists return home after visiting Karabakh with a positive story, that will make the NKR live through in the hearts and minds and therefore gain sympathy for its existence.

44 Situation as of May 2017 23

While bureaucratic hassle will not be an obstacle in tourists way, the practical trip could. As Azerbaijan does not allow the Khojaly Airport to be used, there are no direct flights into the NKR. Travelers are forced to undertake a seven hour drive from Yerevan over windy roads, that are for a considerable part in a deplorable state. Visiting the NKR means a detour in any way. Therefore you will not be likely to end up there accidentally. Tourists consciously pick this destination, and will at some level be informed about the uncertain status of the region. Ministries of Foreign affairs will warn their citizens for the ongoing insecure security situation, and will inform their people that their country cannot provide councillor services from Baku in this break-away region of what is officially regarded Azerbaijan. Although the accessibility and the political situation will stop the bigger flow of tourists, it attracts another, limited flow, that feels attracted to a country that in some way does not exist. Therefore a substantial part of the visitors to NKR will stay only briefly, and mainly out of curiosity for the experience and excitement of being in some place particular, some place tricky, some place unusual. The NKR government has been taking tourism rather serious, and has a well-organized tourist information infrastructure for the small region it is and the general development status it has. Permanently opened tourist offices are located in Stepanakert and Shusha, and smaller dependences are to be found at a handful of their main tourist attractions during the summer period. They provide their guests with free maps and booklets on the republic’s main sights in various languages. With a limited number of tourists, upon visiting one of the tourist centres one can expect a very personal approach from the hostess. They have the time. Tourists are kindly informed in Armenian, Russian, and occasionally, English. The tourist office proudly brings to attention what the region has to offer to the common tourist. There is the monasteries, with Gandzasar as the icon for Karabakh Armenian Orthodoxy, and Dadivank, a smaller monastery in the north. Several small museums are located throughout the region, like the one commemorating the important historical figure Nikol Duman in a little house-museum, the national archaeological treasures in the museum at the neatly renovated Tigranakert castle, or the state’s historical museum in Stepanakert itself among others. In the case of the Gandzasar monastery, the government of Nagorno Karabakh has been trying to get the site recognised and listed in the directory of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. This with the objective that it would give one of the main tourist sites of Karabakh international appeal, and might attract more visitors.45 An authority on Armenian historical architecture, Samvel Karapetyan, has little trust the attempt will succeed.46 Armenian businessman Levon Hayrapetyan has funded a ‘renovation’ of the church in the early 2000’s that basically meant that a layer of freshly cut tiles were cemented on the older stones. Clearly an unsophisticated way of treating cultural heritage according to international standards.47 This ‘kitsch’ way of renovating shows what can happen in a place where private initiatives

45 Gandzasar Armenian Apostolic Church monastery, official website, “Pilgrimage and Tourism Nagorno Karabakh”, available at http://www.gandzasar.com/pilgrimage-and-tourism-nagorno-karabakh.htm 46 Aysor, “Karapetyan: UNESCO to refuse including Gandzasar in its list”, Aysor, July 13th 2011 47 Yerkir Media, “SAMVEL KARAPETYAN GANDZASAR”, Yerkir Media, published on Youtube July 13th 2011 24 with a certain amount of funding can surpass well-structured rebuilding programs and knowledge of historical value. All these sites are specifically presented as richness of Karabakh’s history, with a special notion on local Armenian autonomy that would date back a long period. The castle of Tigranakert is an excellent example in this matter, as it is named after an ancient Armenian king. Although they stand in the bigger history of Armenian presence in the wider region, the Karabakhness or Artsakhness of the sites are emphatically underlined. These are signs of a specific Karabakh identity, derived from local Armenian remnants of historic autonomy, that are strengthening a separate Karabakh identity as part of an Armenian identity Not connected to the state of Armenia, but to the Armenian ethnicity. The NKR’s national beauty is brought under attention as well, with the main returning beauties being the Shusha Gorge and the dense green forests. These forests are a rarity in the Armenian realm, where most of the land exists of rocky slopes and barren alpine grazing lands. Since a few years the ‘Janapar’ (meaning ‘voyage’ in Armenian) project provides a signposted walking path touching upon many of the region’s highlights. This Janapar Trail has been set out by two Americans of Armenian descent, who organized a crowdfunding project to build and maintain the track. They intended to open up the area for the hiking nature loving adventurous tourist and created a website to inform future strollers on Karabakh’s paths. Maps and GPS-tracks can be downloaded from the website to prepare for a unique summer hike.48 The website shows images of spring flowers, lush mountains and waterfalls, providing a serene image that would fit to what one would expect from what a hike in the Swiss Alps would look like. With little background information, the serenity of these images and the presented stories of an utter hospitable local population presents the image of an uncomplicated peaceful place. Not to call this presentation intentionally deceiving, but a limited presentation does shape an image to the audience that is aiding to create the image of a stable, independent and legitimate country. The efforts of the trail’s builders have not in the least been in vain. The trail is a notoriety in Karabakh’s tourism world, and many of the visiting tourists walk at least a small part of this trail during their visits. The NKR tourism department actively campaigns for more notoriety as a tourist destination at international tourism fairs. Since nine years there are missions been sent to fairs in various western cities like Berlin, Milano and Paris.49 It also shared a booth with Armenia at the World Travel Market exhibition in London, one of the leading trade shows in the tourist industry. Although it shared a booth with the Armenian National Tourism Organization, Nagorno-Karabakh, was, with this name, represented by a separated part of the booth, campaigning exclusively for Karabakh.50 This tells us something about the way the NKR presents itself to the outside world. Maybe in cooperation with their Armenian counterparts, but the image to the outside is clearly that Karabakh is a separate destination.

48 For more information: http://www.janapar.org/wiki/Main_Page 49 Sergey Shahverdyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 17th 2017 25

These activities do not pass unnoticed by the Azerbaijani authorities. When Karabakh shared a pavilion with Armenia at the ITB Tourism fair in 2016 in Berlin, spokesperson of Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hikmat Hajiyev reacted to say Armenia is abusing tourism in order to annex occupied Azerbaijani territories. On a previous edition of the ITB, Azerbaijan had successfully blocked Karabakhs participation with an own booth. The ITB fair had in that time chosen to follow the standards of the United Nations World Tourism Organization and not to facilitate the promotion of tourism in occupied territories. According to the Azerbaijani official Hajiyev, Armenia and Karabakh had now been deceiving the organizing committee of the tourism fair.51 Azerbaijan shows to have a close watch on these matters by protesting at a similar case at the Madrid tourism fair early 2017.52 The presentation of Karabakh as a tourist destination clearly feels threatening to Azerbaijan, that fears a decreasing legitimacy for reclaiming Karabakh in the public eye. Special attention of the Nagorno-Karabakh Tourism Organisation goes to the Russian market, where various tour operators and journalists enjoyed a presentation on tourist potential of the region. In Moscow, the Karabakh mission was aided by the Ministry of Economy of Armenia. Although the support of the organizational infrastructure Armenia enjoys seems to be of high importance to the presentation of Karabakh on these events abroad, the focus of the event in Moscow was explicitly on Karabakh. With the name of the presentation being ‘The Artsakhian days in Moscow’.53 The NKR government opened all possibilities for Armenian tour operators to include Karabakh in their tour packages. Hovhannes Kandilyan, product manager of Nueva Vista, one of the major tour operators in Armenia and Karabakh, says he meets no restrictions at all to deliver services in the NKR, without any arrangements with the local authorities. The tour organizer only has to present a list of passport details of the travellers, which can sent in advance, shortening waiting time in getting the visas arranged in Stepanakert. Kandilyan’s package tours that cover Karabakh all start and end in Yerevan, and the guides are not locals, but Armenians who accompany the group from start to end. Nueva Vista does not see the advantage in local guides, as it is easy to cover Armenia and Karabakh as one region.54 As all visitors to the NKR travel through Armenia, it is of high importance for the Karabakh tourism industry that there to be no hindrance for Armenian based tour operators to include Karabakh as a main or sub- destination in their package tours. The number of foreign visitors to the Karabakh has in general been slowly increasing over the years. Figures presented by the NKR government show the amount of visitors increased by 15,5% in 201555, resulting in a 13% growth of the tourist industry. It was a welcome growth, as 2014 had shown a

50 News.am, “Karabakh presented at World Travel Market exhibition in London”, News.am, November 2nd 2012 51 Daily Karabakh, “Armenia abuses tourism in order to strengthen results of occupation”, Daily Karabakh, March 10th, 2016 52 Azernews, “Armenia’s provocation at Madrid tourism fair prevented”, Azernews, January 24th, 2017 53 Karabakh Travel, ‘Artsakh tourism potential has been presented to Russian market’, November 18th 2015 54 Hovhannes Kandilyan, interviewed in Yerevan, March 21st 2017 55 Asbarez Newspaper, “An overview of Tourism in Artsakh in 2015”, Asbarez Newspaper, February 12th 2016 26

11% decrease compared to the previous year.56 In actual numbers, international tourism has grown from around 5.000 visitors in 2007, to 14.375 in 2014, and 16.366 in 2015.57 As the NKR shares a customs union with Armenia, Armenians are not obliged to obtain a visa upon arrival in Karabakh, and therefore are not included in these numbers. Diaspora Armenians with Republic of Armenia passports as well as citizens of Armenia are not counted as foreign visitors.58 There is a strong correlation between the success of the NKR’s tourism sector and the military situation at the front lines. The Four-day-war in April 2016 had a very negative influence on tourism. Susanna Petrosyan, living and working in Stepanakert, has been active in Karabakh’s tourist sector for the last 20 years, arranging lodging and tours. She saw a very steep decline of tourism after the April 2016 war. While she in general experiences a steady rise of tourism since she began her activities in 1997, last year she saw herself forced to downscale her office. She currently works alone, and has sufficient work only for a part-time occupation.59 Mister Sergey Shahverdyan, head of the Department of Tourism of the NKR, informed me, during an interview in his office in northern Stepanakert, that the tourist industry is currently responsible for a share of around 3 % of the republic’s GDP, and has been creating a considerable amount of jobs.60 With tourists spending over $6 million annually in Karabakh, it is a major source of income.61 Although of considerable economic importance to the NKR, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims these numbers are ‘ridiculous’, as “About $4 million a year is spent only for participation of the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in international tourism exhibitions in Armenia's pavilion.”62 According to the head of their press service Hikmet Hajiyev. The tourist information centre in Stepanakert informed me on the nationalities visiting their information centres, which gives an idea on what origins the visitors have. These figures, transmitted by Anusha Vanesyan, working for the NKR Tourism Organization, show that as much as 44% are from Russia, with visitors from the USA (11%) and Iran (5%) being second and third numerous. In the rest of the top-15 nationalities we see almost exclusively Western European countries, with Lebanon, China and Ukraine as exceptions.63 With Ukraine and Lebanon being countries with considerable Armenian diaspora concentrations. As a remark to these figures it is necessary to note that visitors from Armenia or the recently emigrated diaspora might not visit the centres as much as the tourist with lesser familiarity with the region would.

56 Karabakh Travel, ‘Tourism is growing rapidly in Karabakh’ 57 Asbarez Newspaper, “Tourism in Karabakh increases”, Asbarez Newspaper, December 28th, 2015 58 Arka News Agency, “The number of tourists visiting Nagorno-Karabakh Republic growing annually”, Arka News Agency, March 21st, 2016 59 Susanna Petrosyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 16th 2017 60 Sergey Shahverdyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 17th 2017 61 PanArmenian, “Artsakh posts tourism income of $6.4 million in 2014”, PanArmenian, March 5th 2015 62 Virtual Karabakh, “ ‘Tourism statistics’ in Armenia-occupied Azerbaijani territories ridiculous – ministry”, Virtual Karabakh, March 10th, 2015 63 Anusha Vanesyan, NKR Tourism Information Center 27

Although this shines light on the main national origins of tourists, it does not inform us on the ethnic background of these individuals. For instance, there is no information available on the ethnic background of the Russians visitors. It is to be expected that a large share of these Russian visitors are members of the Armenian diaspora living in Russia. Petrosyan claims a clear majority of all visitors is of Armenian descent. Which could explain the relatively high quantity of visits from wealthy Armenian diaspora countries like the United States, France and Germany. Petrosyan adds to say these ethnic Armenian visitors often insist to visit the troops at the Line of Contact. A visit can be arranged, but has to be planned well in advance, and is accompanied by the military of the NKR. For these visitors the troops on duty here are incarnating the safeguard of Armenian culture where it is indigenous, and therefore want to visit and thank them, handing over flowers, food and other presents. Fulfilling their sense of duty to do what they can to support this endeavour. 64

II The Involved Diaspora

With an estimated 5 million strong Armenian Diaspora, nearly two times as many Armenians are living abroad as do live in Armenia and the NKR combined.65 This diaspora is and has been, through various periods of recent history, of high influence on the two Armenian states in the Caucasus. This influence has been financially, by tourism, in the form of the hundreds of thousands of visits every year, by the remittances, sent back from Moscow and Krasnodar among other popular working places for Armenian nationals. And last, the not to be underestimated financial aid from the US government alone that would have never been as high as it has been without the influential California-based Armenian Americans.66 Second, the influence was morally and even militarily as during the 1990’s the Armenians could enjoy support in various ways from the highly motivated Armenians abroad that in some cases, like the example of Monte Melkonian, have been of extraordinary importance to the military cause of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. And the influence is materially, since the ‘awakening’ of the diaspora in reaction to the 1988 Spitak earthquake, when the Soviet Union opened up for international aid to rebuild the affected areas. Non-governmental charity organizations like the Hayastan All Armenian Fund have since invested in roads, schools, community centres and medical equipment. This chapter wants to shine light on how the diaspora is getting involved with the NKR, through non-governmental as well as through governmental means via Armenian diaspora lobbying efforts. Understanding the nature and effects of the influence of the diaspora on Karabakh can shine light on their role in the developments in the area. The Armenian diaspora is a potentially powerful body that could

64 Susanna Petrosyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 16th 2017 65 David Carment and Ariane Sadjed, Diaspora as Cultures of Cooperation (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), p. 118 66 Khachig Tölölyan, The Armenian diaspora and the Karabagh conflict since 1988 (United Nations University Press, 2007), p. 106 28 help Karabakh to move towards a stronger independence or a practical integration of Karabakh into the Armenian Republic’s institutions and infrastructure.

During the time Armenia was part of the Soviet Union, there was little contact between the Armenian diaspora in the west and the Armenians in the Caucasus. The limited possibilities for contacts and information exchange between the east and the west resulted in a period where Armenia and the diaspora Armenians in Europe and Northern America lived relatively isolated from each other. The Armenian diaspora in Russia was still of limited size before the end of the Soviet Union. Armenia was a relatively rich Soviet Republic with a high degree of industrialization. Its inhabitants had little incentive to move to other parts of the Union for better living conditions. The diaspora factor became to be meaningful for the Armenian Republic only after the dramatic 1988 earthquake in the region around the north-western Armenian town of Spitak. Just before midnight on December 7th 1988 an earthquake of 6.9 on the Richter magnitude scale devastated the region, leaving over 30.000 dead and many more wounded. The damage to houses and the industrial infrastructure was immense. At the time of the earthquake Gorbachev was visiting American president George H.W. Bush in New York for a meeting that confirmed mutual desire for better contacts between the two nations. Gorbachev, who had travelled to the Caucasus as soon as the scope of the earthquake was evident, decided to officially ask for international aid. A deluge of governmental aid was sent from the US, Europe, Latin-America and the Middle-East. Tons of medical equipment were delivered and international teams of specialists with their rescue-dogs looked for survivors in the remains of destroyed buildings. Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms made information spread more openly to the outside world and the Armenian diaspora became well aware of the living conditions of their fellow Armenians in the Soviet Union. The Spitak earthquake had awoken an international diaspora of Armenians willing to assist and connect with those living in ‘the homeland’. Charity organizations were founded in many countries, some of them merging into worldwide networks. While international aid decreased in the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake, the Armenian diaspora stayed closely connected to the Armenian causes of the time. The war over Nagorno-Karabakh united many behind what became a pan-Armenian cause. Sustaining the Armenians of Karabakh and rebuilding the region after the signing of a cease fire agreement with Azerbaijan became one of the main issues for these diaspora organizations. The biggest player among the diaspora charity organizations is the Hayastan All Armenian Fund. It was founded in 1992 by an Armenian presidential decree as a ‘semi-non-governmental’ organization. The organization is not run by the state of Armenia, but the president of Armenia is the president of its board of trustees. The rest of the board is made up by the most influential Armenians, from the patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church, leaders of the most important political parties, the president of the NKR and the prime-ministers of both Armenia and the NKR to the chairman of Armenia’s Central Bank.

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The Organization’s main reason d’être is ‘…to unite Armenians in Armenia and overseas to overcome the country’s difficulties and to help establish sustainable development in Armenia and Artsakh.’67 During an interview with Vardan Partamyan, head of the Projects and External Relations Department of the Hayastan All Armenian Fund, at his office in Yerevan, he formulates the core goal of the foundation was “… to channel the resources and the goodwill, available in the diaspora, to solve the big issues of the two independent Armenian states.”68 He emphasizes that it was a time of hardship, when the foundation came into being. There was an energy blockade as a result of the war over Karabakh, where gas supplies from Azerbaijan to Armenia had stopped and the limited possibilities of importing gas from Georgia were repeatedly sabotaged. There was the hyperinflation of the Armenian Dram and an economic collapse. Where aid dried up when events leading towards the collapse of the Soviet Union averted international attention from reconstructing the Spitak region after the earthquake, the Fund step in. It provided humanitarian aid by delivering food and fuel to the Armenian and Karabakhi population, when most needed during the harsh 1993-94 winter. Hospitals would not have been able to stay operational throughout that period without the material help from the fund.69 According to Partamyan the All Armenian Fund has invested around $330 million over the last 25 years, from which 55% has been spent in Nagorno-Karabakh, and 45% in Armenia. The annual telethon, organized by the fund and broadcasted internationally to attract recourses by drawing attention to a specific projected plan, sees a majority of these plans to be focused on the Karabakh region as well. From drinking water and irrigation systems for Karabakh’s villages to the reconstruction of the old town of Shusha.70 “It is difficult to find a village in Karabakh where the All Armenian Fund has not been active”, Partamyan claims. Considering the small size of Karabakh, it is remarkable that a small majority of the funds are being invested in this area. Although the former war zone clearly needed considerable repair works to its basic infrastructure. Partamyan justifies the unequal distribution of funds by stating that they are practically the only bigger organization active in the area. The UN is not present, while they have presence in all conflict areas over the globe, so if they wouldn’t do it, nobody would, he says. Upon informing about the political power of the All Armenian Fund, as it invests a considerable amount of funds in the NKR as compared the republic’s state budged, Partamyan emphasizes that the foundation is a non- political organization. “Is it political to get food to a region under blockade?”71 is his rhetorical question. The general policy is agreed upon in the annual meeting, and cannot be turned in a personally preferred direction by any individual Minister, he says. Over the total period of the Fund’s existence, around 30% of its budget has been spend on road construction. This includes the North-South route in the NKR, and its first road construction project, the Goris-Stepanakert highway through the Laçın corridor, the main connection between Armenia and

67 Official Website of the Hayastan All Armenian Fund, accessible at http://www.himnadram.org/index.php?id=2 68 Vardan Partamyan, interviewed in Yerevan, March 23rd 2017 69 Ibidem 70 Official Website of the Hayastan All Armenian Fund, accessible at http://www.himnadram.org/index.php?id=78 71 Vardan Partamyan, interviewed in Yerevan, March 23rd 2017 30

Karabakh. An important project that has been worked on over the last years, and is now in its completion phase, is the Vardenis-Martakert highway. Online new website News.am reported that the Armenian government has assigned around $3 million to the project, as the fund was not capable of securing the necessary funding for this project.72 The Vardenis-Martakert route is a second connection between Armenia and Karabakh, considerably shortening the travel distance between Yerevan and the northern half of the NKR. These two connecting roads could have said to help an incorporation of Karabakh within Armenia’s infrastructure. Partamyan does not wish to speak of the fund stimulating integration, he states the objective of the fund is merely to improve cooperation between the two states. There are several smaller foundations that are focusing on both Armenia and Karabakh, or exclusively on Karabakh. The short-lived Shushi Revival Fund has been focusing on the reconstruction of several iconic buildings in Shusha, but is currently defunct. It is hard to say whether these funds have had more difficulties to attract benefactors over the last years, in comparison to the early years of Armenian and Karabakh independence, as has been implied to be the case for the All Armenian Fund lately in the before mentioned News.am article. It is to say that the recent four-day April 2016 war has created a new sense of vulnerability among the Karabakh inhabitants, and it triggered the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) to open a fundraising for the families of the injured and fallen soldiers among the NKR’s ranks.73 The AGBU is a charity organization that focusses on the upholding of Armenian heritage among the diaspora and Armenia and Karabakh itself. The organization has offices in over a dozen countries all over the world where there is an active Armenian diaspora, and holds youth camps on several continents to make the diaspora value their ancestral background. An annual trip with Armenian youngsters passes through Karabakh on a combined cultural heritage trip through Armenia and Karabakh. Further activities in Karabakh comprise of building and renovating schools, apartment buildings and roads. A special project focusing entirely on Karabakh was the 2004-2009 Karabakh Repopulation Project. There have been several, generally ineffective, attempts by the Karabakh government to attract people to settle in the rural parts of Karabakh. These attempts often focused on settling Armenians in former Muslim majority centres like Laçın, currently bearing the Armenian name Berdzor and the scarcely populated Kalbajar region. In the Karabakh Repopulation Project the AGBU has focused on creating possibilities for Armenians to settle in the southern Karabakh region of Hadrut. An educational and a medical centre were build, and several housing blocks have been constructed.74 These are projects that aim to make the Karabakh countryside more viable, more populated, to make it a stronger and healthy state. If there would be more sustainable schooling and working opportunities in the area’s that people are being attracted to, it could even have been working. Nevertheless, often the project does not have a multi-annual future plan that would create a sustainable community. It has proven to be hard to convince people to move to these

72 News.am, “Newspaper: Armenia government to continue funding ‘Hayastan’ Fund”, News.am, November 5th, 2015 73 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), “The AGBU #Help Artsakh Campaign Raises $325,000 and Counting”, June 6th, 2016, available at https://agbu.org/news-item/the-agbu-help-artsakh-campaign-raises-325000-and- counting/ 74 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), official website, available at https://agbu.org/armenia/karabakh/ 31 places, as they prefer a penniless life in one of the bigger population centres above that of a penniless life in a scarcely populated area. These charity projects are potentially creating a stronger and more populated Karabakh, that would give it more independency, but are until now failing. There are numeral personal initiatives of charity nature as well. Individual benefactors or diaspora volunteers who want to make their contribution to the Karabakh case. Many initiatives deal with the resurrection of religious buildings or new housing facilities in the less inhabited regions of the republic, with the before mentioned, poor degrees of success. One of the main individual benefactor is Russian- Armenian businessman Levon Hayrapetyan, native to the town of Vank in central Karabakh. Vank, meaning ‘church’, hosts Karabakh’s main Armenian Orthodox religious centre, Gandzasar. In the first decade of Karabakh’s independence, Hayrapetyan has financed, as mentioned before, the renovation of the Gandzasar complex, and build the tourist infrastructure present. Among them a hotel in the shape of a ship and a restaurant enjoying fame around Karabakh. In October 2008 Hayrepatyan sponsored an event where 560 couples from all over Karabakh married at the same time in the stadium of Stepanakert. Every couple was sponsored with $2.000, and was promised further financial aid per future child. Hayrepatyan envisioned to create a baby-boom that would give a boost to Karabakh’s ever diminishing population.75 Another example of private initiatives that aid Nagorno Karabakh is the work of Eli and Julia Burakian in creating a signposted walking route throughout the country passing many sights on the way. The American couple of Armenian descent intended to boost eco-tourism in Karabakh, and to open up the natural beauty of the area to a wider audience of international tourists. They launched a crowdfunding campaign in June 2011 and managed to raise almost $7.000 in a month to undertake the trip in that very summer to get the trails signposted and GPS-tracked.76 The Janapar Trail is one of the wider known tourist activities in the region since. According to Anusha Vanesyan from the NKR Tourism Organization, who increasingly works as a tourist guide in her free days, guests are regularly asking her to include the hiking of a part of the trail into the itinerary.77 The trail is also being used in June 2017 by another American of Armenian descent, Telma Ghazarian-Altoon, who performs an ultra-run covering the little over 300 km of hiking trail that runs from Vardenis, just over the border with Armenia, to Hadrut, in southern Karabakh. She is running the trail to fundraise for the Armenian Hikers Association, that maintains the signposted hiking tracks in both Armenia and Karabakh. Ghazarian-Altoon and her companions hope to boost the development of ecotourism in the region just as they have experienced it in the United States. They hope the additional economic benefits will come like in the US: “This initiative can do the same for Armenia and Artsakh.”78

75 Eurasianet.org, “Nagorno-Karabakh: Mass Wedding Hopes to Spark Baby Boom in Separatist Territory”, Eurasianet.org, October 23rd, 2008 76 Kickstarter.com, Janapar Trail Project, “Janapar Trail, a journey through Nagorno Karabakh”, available at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/256905182/janapar-trail-a-journey-through-nagorno-karabakh 77 Anusha Vanesyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 18th 2017 78 The Armenian Weekly, “Ultramarathoner Telma Altoon to Run the Janapar Trail to Raise Funds for AHA- Armenia”, The Armenian Weekly, May 15th, 2017 32

This private initiative of the Burakians has therefore been one of the successful ones in enriching Karabakh with its own hiking trail. The trail has successfully been noted and helps in that way to put the region on the map as an area that has something to offer for its visitors. In various countries the Armenian diaspora is active on the political arena of their home- countries, states or cities in order to support the Armenian case and build international connections with the Armenians in Armenia and Karabakh. In various American States and in some European countries too, this ‘Armenian lobby’ is very present and partially successful. The most influential American based Armenian diaspora organisation is the Armenian National Committee of America. The organization spent $120.000 on lobbying activities in the year 2015.79 The Armenian lobby in the United States advocates the recognition of the ‘Armenian Genocide’, the recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic’s independence, and aims to convince national and international aid programs and charity organizations to deploy their funding to Armenia and Karabakh. While none of the UN-member states have recognized the state of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic on a national level, some American states and counties do, as well as the Caucasus break-away states of South-Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the case of the NKR’s fellow Caucasus break-away states the motivation is to support the effort of gaining international recognition for the disputed ex-soviet ‘quasi-states’. Although there is a considerable Armenian minority present in Abkhazia, the support is not of an ethnic Armenian or diaspora nature. The seven American states that recognize the NKR as an independent country, with among them Massachusetts, Maine, Georgia and California, have a solid section of ethnic Armenians living in their state. From the starting of the 20th century, California has been a main receiver of Armenian immigrants. First they were mostly Armenians fleeing the atrocities in Ottoman Turkey, followed by Armenians fleeing unrest and increasing Arab nationalism in the Middle East in the 1950’s and Armenians from the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.80 Certain areas with a high concentration of Armenians are on the frontline of advocating Armenian cases. The town of Highland, Fresno County and the Los Angeles city council had recognized the NKR before the state of California had in May 2014. The towns of Highland and Montebello have even established a sister city relationship with Laçın (renamed to Berdzor after Armenian control over the town had been established) and Stepanakert respectively.81 82 These local initiates have led to small scale donations of, as an example, a fire fighters truck by the city of Montebello to Stepanakert.83 The city council of Los Angeles did not lag behind, and decided by motion to add a 500

79 Anrew C. Kuchins, Jeffrey Mankoff and Oliver Backes, Armenia in a Reconnecting Eurasia (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 18 80 John Powell, Encyclopedia of North American Immigration (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2005), p. 17 81 Sputnik International, “Azerbaijan Protests California Town’s Recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh”, Sputnik International, December 6th, 2013 82 Armenian Diaspora, “Montebello-Stepenakert Sister-City Inaugural Reception”, Armenian Diaspora, September 29th, 2005 83 Asbarez Newspaper, “Montebello-Stepanakert Relations Discussed in Artsakh”, Asbarez Newspaper, November 15th, 2015 33 meter fire hose to the truck.84 These are obviously very small contributions when compared to what benevolent organizations sometimes manage to gather at a fundraising event. But the fact that the ethnic Armenian sections of various American communities manage to get local councils to make direct contributions to an internationally non-recognized disputed area is telling. After treating different types of soft power initiatives by the Armenian diaspora in aiding the Karabakh cause directly, strait to the NKR, or indirectly, with aiding the NKR via Armenia, in the final part of this chapter will be dealt with the borders of soft and hard power volunteers. The military component of the NKR is very obviously present in everyday life. You can easily stumble upon a military complex while making a little walk in the surrounding of Stepanakert, and men in military outfit are very common to walk the street, take a bus or buy a bread in any Karabakh town. Military uniforms are everywhere and subscripts function as role models. While visiting Stepanakert in March 2017, the local bookstore was even promoting its books by showcasing close-up portraits of a soldier reading a book. The Karabakh case is an attractive matter to get involved with as a committed diaspora Armenian, as the region is small and big steps can be made by contributing to the lacking basic infrastructure. The Karabakh war between 1988 and 1994 was an attractive cause to anyone committed to the Armenian cause who was ready to get involved into militarily activities. The Armenian troops were reinforced with a certain amount of foreign fighters. Among them a small number of mercenaries, and a bigger number of volunteers from the diaspora communities with military backgrounds. The most notorious and successful example are the actions of the California-born Monte Melkonian in the Karabakh War. Melkonian became inspired by the Armenian cause at a very young age, moving to the Middle East in his early twenties, were he acquired fighting skills through experience during the Lebanese Civil War.85 Melkonian, along with a number of other militants, formed the ASAL-RM (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia – Revolutionary Movement), which carried out various attacks on Turkish diplomats.86 87 The centre focus of Armenian militants at that time was western Armenia, with the Armenian Genocide as a historical wrongdoing that asked for an Armenian reaction. Loose, small groups of Armenian militants plotted and carried out terror attacks on Turkish targets, from Portugal to Lebanon, with limited success. Although the groups had severe internal disagreements and competition, there were many disagreements on the tactics and strategy to be followed, and most of the plots did not go following plan, it did bring the Armenian cause back on the international agenda. After being released from a short French detention for carrying illegal weapons, Melkonian went to what was still Soviet Armenia in the autumn of 1990. The Karabakh Movement had shifted the focus of international Armenian revolutionaries to Eastern Armenia, with the Karabakh War attracting those Armenians ready to fight. Melkonian’s extensive military experience made him of huge value to the military organization of the

84 News.am, “Los Angeles to donate hose for Stepanakert fire department”, News.am, May 21st, 2014 85 Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 130 86 Cheterian, Open Wounds, p. 130-1 87 Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 151 34

Armenian troops in Karabakh.88 He was soon to be put in a commanding position, and was the chief planner of successful operations that brought the region of Kalbajar under Armenian control in 1993. He died soon after the battle over Kalbajar, in action, and was commemorated with great respect, with tenths of thousands of people gathering for his funeral in Yerevan.

III Guests from the NKR’s near-abroad

If the NKR considers itself an independent country, the Republic of Armenia should be seen as ‘abroad’. This, however invisible the border may seem in reality. From the Azerbaijani point of view, as well as that of international law, on paper this border is an utter clear line between a recognized country and an illegal separatist state. In this chapter some examples of Armenian individuals visiting the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh, will be presented. They may not feel like crossing an international border, but they do feel the sense of Karabakh being a separate region, a region with a deviant state of being, a different history and identity, however much that identity is part of the bigger sense of an Armenian identity. The lack of a visible border between the two Armenian republics, and the lack of specific information on numbers of Armenians crossing the border to Karabakh, makes it hard to make a balanced overview on this phenomenon of Armenians visiting Karabakh. Nevertheless, it is very important to include a chapter dealing with these international visitors to the NKR. While relying on the limited sources and some personal encounters and experiences, this chapter hopes to approach a realistic representation of the nature of these visits. During the Karabakh war, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London estimated the amount of Armenians from the Republic of Armenia who offered their services as volunteers in one of the militias active in Karabakh in 1993 to be 8.000.89 These highly motivated and determined ‘fedayee’ units (literally: ‘those who sacrifice’) stood in the tradition of the irregular forces of the Armenian nationalist movement that came up in the 19th and early 20th century to defend the Armenian communities in Eastern Anatolia against persecution. For Armenian nationals who wanted to actively join the fight for the Karabakh cause in the early 1990’s, joining a fedayee unit was the way to do so. Levon Ter Petrosian, Armenia’s president at the time, repeatedly withheld from officially detaching Armenian troops in Karabakh during the war. He even dismissed his Defence Minister Vazgen Manukian in 1993, when Manukian was lobbying for increased military support and diplomatic recognition for Karabakh.90 But officially or unofficially, Armenian nationals fought in Karabakh.

88 Joseph R. Masih and Robert O. Krikorian, Armenia: At the Crossroads (London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2005), p. 44 89 The International Institution for Strategic Studies, “The Military Balance 1993-1994”, 1993 90 Chorbajian, Levon, The Caucasian Knot: The History & Geopolitics of Nagorno-Karabagh (London: Zed books, 1994), p. 13 35

Nowadays, Armenian military is obviously present in Karabakh. They help the NKR forces to guard the Line of Contact. Armenia has an obligatory military service of two years for all males. Many serve at least a part of this time in territory controlled by the NKR. Like for example Felix Haruyunyan, a 20-year old Armenian I met in Stepanavan, Armenia, in March 2017. He had just returned from military service and was about to pick up with his study. He told me he has been through a six months training period in Armenia before being deployed at the NKR-Azerbaijan front near Martakert. He was serving at this front during the April 2016 war, that has claimed most of its victims in that very area. The period at the NKR front had been very tense.91 While responsibilities at the front have now been more institutionalized, and cooperation between the Karabakh forces and the Armenian military are of more structural manor, the times of fedayee units are not completely over yet. This proves the story of 62-year old hunter Samvel Bagdasaryan from Vanadzor, Armenia. As soon as he and his friends heard of renewed fighting flaring up in April 2016, at the Line of Contact, they gathered and drove to Karabakh on their personal initiative. He showed pictures of himself in the southern Karabakh area of Hadrut. After having fought in the Karabakh war in the 1990’s, for them it was a bluntly logical reaction to pick up their weapons and head for Karabakh in case their support could be of any use once again.92 Various sources reported on lethal casualties among Armenian volunteers who joined Karabakh forces in the April 2016 fighting. At least five where killed in the north-eastern Martuni area by a drone attack on the third day of the short ‘April 2016 War’.93 94 Al Jazeera has put the amount of Armenian volunteers who came to Stepanakert in early April 2016 at several hundreds.95 But nowadays, most of the Armenians coming to Karabakh don’t come to fight. The situation at the border is fragile but stable, and Armenians visit Karabakh for many reasons. It is hard to get a good view on the amount of Armenian visitors to the NKR. The NKR does not count the amount of Armenian nationals that frequent their territory, and therefore detailed information is not available. Obviously there is a lively economic activity between the two republics. Wood and metals are transported out of Karabakh, while there is not much that the isolated Karabakh does not import from Armenia, via the two asphalted lifelines. Armenians that visit Karabakh in their free time seem to see Karabakh as an exotic, but eminently Armenian destination. It is the one success story. The land that has been secured from the enemy, successfully defended. It is an interesting destination, certainly not a place where everybody has been. Organized trips that aim to realize cultural exchanges take place. In this light I met a group of young adolescents from a dancing school in Dilijan, Armenia, in the summer of 2014. They were making a trip to discover Karabakh for themselves, and visit various dancing schools in the region to give

91 Felix Harutyunyan, interviewed in Stepanavan, March 13th 2017 92 Samvel Bagdasaryan, interviewed in Vanadzor, March 14th 2017 93 Reuters, “Armenia warns Nagorno-Karabakh clashes could turn into all-out war”, Reuters, April 4th 2016, 94 Armenia Now, “Karabakh: Five killed as Armenian volunteers’ bus comes under Azeri fire”, Armenia Now, April 4th 2016 95 Al Jazeera, “Armenia and Azerbaijan call Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire”, Al Jazeera, April 5th 2016 36 performances and get to know the Armenians from ‘over the mountains’. These kind of trips are clearly providing children from both sides the idea that Armenianness above all is something that connects them. It makes them familiar with fellow Armenians from another province or region of the area that the Armenians live and have control over. An area that comprises Armenia and Karabakh, and does therefore in sense of culture and nation-building integrate these two culturally into a single entity.

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Part III

The Direction of the Impasse

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All visitors leave behind their footprints, willingly or unwillingly, casually of deliberately. Whether this trip is longer or shorter, the interaction, socially or economically, is bigger or smaller, determines the influence of these footprints on the place that they have left behind. The place that was visited leaves its prints behind as well, in the mind of the visitor. A part of this place will travel on with this visitor via the stories and memories that are shared when traveling on or whenever returning home. It is these stories that leave their traces in the minds of the listeners, and like this the trip can travel by itself. When the second part has dealt with the question of in what ways, motivation and quantity footprints of visitors are brought to Karabakh, this third part will examine these footprints. This part will try to explain in what ways these prints are bringing the NKR opportunities for and situations of an increased sense of independency, and in what ways these prints might in fact be steering towards a stronger practical integration of the NKR into the Republic of Armenia. The findings of part two will be seen and examined in that light; independency against incorporation and integration.

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I The Tourist Factor

Tourism is a serious thing in Nagorno Karabakh. To attract people to visit a place that is not recognized by any state, and officially still at war, is challenging. A visit to Karabakh in itself is, in the light of its geopolitical position, always a political statement. Entries into the region from the Republic of Armenia are illegal according to Azerbaijan. As entering via Armenian roads is the only way possible at this point, all visits could be seen as a statement against the Azerbaijani position in the conflict. A visitor finds the place worthwhile to make a detour, as the region is not at any main travelled route, and by entering, acknowledges and supports in fact the existence of the de facto independent Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. The claim can also be made that the visitor in fact supports the incorporation of Karabakh into Armenia, as a visit of Karabakh is inevitably part of a trip that combines both republics. This chapter will focus further on elements in Karabakh’s tourism that could motivate one of these previous claims. The NKR officials have a clear approach to this matter. Sergey Shahverdyan, head of the Department of Tourism of the NKR, told the Arka News Agency in 2016 that “Tourism in Karabakh is developing at a fast pace, as evidenced by indicators of recent years. However, it is clear that tourism in Karabakh is part of Armenia's tourism.”96 However he acknowledges the fact that the tourism in both republics is closely linked, he sees tourism as a tool par excellence to make steps on a road to independence.97 Of course here he is alluding to a possible independence from Azerbaijan, but achieving independence from Azerbaijan would directly mean a possibility for a full independence. An independence without a forced or voluntarily incorporation within Armenia. While interviewing mister Shahverdyan in March 2017, he said that, besides the economic side, making Karabakh known around the world is one of the important thing tourism does. He added to say that Karabakh likes to present itself as a separate destination in the Armenian world. A world that goes beyond international boundaries.98 The NKR’s presidential spokesman, David Babayan, stands by Shahverdyan. Babayan reacted on international publications that recommend Karabakh as a travel destination with saying that these kind of publications increase his country’s recognizability.99 More publications bring more visitors, and the visitor will be presented the Armenian side of the story. An AFP correspondent reports, after a visit to Karabakh, that it is inevitably the Armenian side of the story that tourists hear.100 This is an obvious result of the polarized stands of the two parts of the conflict, and can be confirmed by my own experience. It can be said that the NKR sees tourism as a way of getting the world to know about Karabakh and sympathize with its existence. A significant sign of this is that the tourism department of the NKR represents itself at international Tourism fairs independently from Armenia. It designs, develops and rents

96 Arka News Agency, ‘The number of tourists visiting Nagorno-Karabakh Republic growing annually’, March 21st, 2016 97 Sergey Shahverdyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 17th 2017 98 Ibidem 99 Tert.am, ‘Gaining recognition slowly – Nagorno-Karabakh’s inclusion in The Guardian tourism list inspires positive hopes’, January 14th 2015 40 a stand by itself, and only resorts to cooperation with the Armenian delegation when protests have been made on the fact that the tourist fair should not be promoting separatist non-recognized states.101 The design of the stand, tourist maps and other information that is provided to the tourist at the various tourist offices in Karabakh, are created independently from the Armenian tourism organization. The layout is unique, and all sights are recommended in the form of little cartons that look like cards out of a game. A game that makes you visit all Karabakh’s sights, to complete the level of visiting all places that this ‘unique and independent region’ has to offer. Another signs of independence is the required administration at the Ministry of Foreign affairs in Stepanakert, and the visa all tourists, except the Armenian nationals, have to obtain there. Issuing a visa for your visitors, that, unless requested otherwise by those who wish to travel Azerbaijan on the same passport, is glued in your passport, makes the passport owner feel to have entered a new territory. A new country has been visited, issuing your own visa shows self-governance and the air of independence. Besides these examples that are mostly on the side of public diplomacy and image-making, there is a financial side to tourism that Karabakh benefits from. The most direct income for the NKR is the fact that visitors do obtain the visa. Depending on whether this is a student, working, journalist or tourist visa, this brings the NKR government a revenue of at least €6 per issued visa. As the number of visitors is low, and the price for a visa is very reasonable, this income is not expected to be more than €150.000 on a yearly basis, but it flows directly in the NKR’s bank accounts. The indirect tax income arrives via the hotels, restaurants and tour operators who are taxable. These incomes are expected to be higher, and the business gives an opportunity for hundreds of Karabakh’s inhabitants to make a living in an economically very challenging working market. The NKR is a very small exporter. It’s export is limited to some agricultural products, limited amounts of wood, and a more profitable industry of metal products concentrated around the Base Metal company. Income via tourism is an interesting addition for the NKR state that has little recourses to rely on. The NKR is military almost fully relying on Armenia. Economically it is relying on the investment loans Armenia gave the NKR in the last 8 years that made it possible to reopen the mining business in Kashen, install hydro-power stations to lower the dependency on energy imports, and boost the Karabakh agriculture by acquiring new machinery.102 These investments made it possible for the NKR show an average of 10% economic growth in GDP per annum for nearly a decade now.103 The republic has achieved to maintain that pace of growth even during the troublesome year of 2016.104 The tourism market, that has been showing an interesting growth potential, can for the NKR mean a source of income that is not relying on Armenia’s loans. It can therefore prove to be a more independent branch of the state’s economy, that gives the state a certain higher degree of independence.

100 Horizon Weekly, ‘Unrecognised, disputed territory becomes tourist hit’, August 1st 2013 101 Daily Karabakh, ‘Armenia abuses tourism in order to strengthen results of occupation’, March 10th, 2016 102 Aravot.am, ‘Karen Karapetyan. “Artsakh is the “driver” of the economy of Armenia. The GDP in NKR has grown by 9.1 % in 2015’, November 8th 2016 103 Asbarez, ‘Strong Economic Growth Reported in Artsakh’, December 26th 2014 104 Arka News Agency, ‘Artsakh economy grew by 9.2 percent in 2016’, April 12th 2017 41

To conclude, the NKR will stay highly dependent on Armenian loans in the foreseeable future, but with an increasing national income it could operate more independently. The tourism industry is a significant factor to the NKR’s financial freedom of movement. Tourism is therefore beneficiary to increasing independence in both the public’s eye as well as in its financial policies. The tourists will perceive the Nagorno Karabakh Republic more like an existing country after a visit. The Karabakh population get the sense of being taken serious by seeing international visitors to come to their home- country, as they are apparently worth a visit. And the NKR as a state gains more financial freedom. The overall effects of tourism can therefore be seen as a factor that increases independence, instead of integrating Karabakh into Armenia.

II Diaspora cohesion and the All Armenian Fund

The Armenian diaspora is undeniably of high importance for, and has a high influence on the two Armenian republics in the Caucasus. We can divide this diaspora roughly into two different groups. First, there is the diaspora that developed as a result on the persecutions in the late 19th and early 20th century that found place mainly in Eastern Anatolia. This diaspora arrived, in various waves, in countries like Syria, Lebanon, multiple European countries with highest concentrations in France, South- America and the US. Of this diaspora the American and European Armenians are most focused on worldwide Armenian connections, and therefore have the most influence on Armenia and the NKR. The Los Angeles region in California forms the de facto centre of international Armenian diaspora organizations. Second, there is a younger Armenian diaspora that spreads through the former Soviet Union. This diaspora started to grow exponentially in the 1990’s, when severe economic hardship drew a significant share of the Armenian workforce to Russia. Although the Russian labour market was not in its best condition during the 1990’s, the situation improved during the 2000’s, and many Armenians now work, or even live permanently in Russia’s. They have mainly settled in the Moscow and Krasnodar regions. These two groups of Diaspora relate very differently to the Armenians in Armenia and Karabakh. The Armenians working in Russia often have strong family ties with the towns they once left in Armenia or Karabakh. Many of them only do seasonal work in Russia, and live with their families in the Armenian Caucasus for the other parts of the year. They send remittances directly to their families at home, and therefore their influences are mainly local. These remittances have a limited effect on the Armenia- Karabakh relations. Remittances arrive where local job opportunities are scarce, and this phenomenon is more or less equally divided over the two republics. The wider and older Armenian diaspora has rarely traceable family ties with those Armenians living in Armenia or Karabakh. Their connection to them is the sense of a shared ethnicity, identity and history. As these diaspora Armenians have no direct interpersonal

42 connection with Armenians in the Caucasus, they who want to aid the Armenians tend to organize themselves into charity organisations. Some of these organizations have a considerable budget, and have a potentially higher effect on the two republics in the sense of developments that make Karabakh either more independent or more connected to the republic of Armenia. Therefore, this chapter will focus mainly on this part of the Armenian diaspora, with the charity organizations in particular. After Glasnost opened the window, the Spitak earthquake drew the attention and made the eyes of the diaspora Armenians look through that window to the small autonomous Armenian Republic within the immense Soviet Union. At around the same time, the war over Karabakh came into his most violent years. The diaspora had the eyes focussed on this region, and found a conquered but devastated Karabakh when fighting had stopped after the 1994 cease-fire agreements. Rebuilding Karabakh soon turned out to be the excellent project for the diaspora Armenian committed to the Armenian cause in the historical homelands. From their point of view, a successful military campaign had secured Armenian land, and now these steadfast but poor fellow Armenians could use some help to build up and secure this region for the Armenian people. Karabakh became a likeable project that called upon the living trauma of losing ground to a Turkish enemy during the times of the ‘Armenian Genocide’, that forced their ancestors into exile. It is against this background that the biggest charity organization, the All Armenian Fund, invested over half of its funds in the Karabakh region since the organization’s founding days in 1992. This is slightly more than it allocated to the Republic of Armenia, while it is several times bigger and has 20- fold the population of that of the NKR. When we take a closer look at the nature of the projects the All Armenian Fund has completed or are in their completing phase, the road construction works are a real eye-catcher. We should not overestimate the share of attention and funding that went to the reconstruction of these basic transportation infrastructural projects. The All Armenian Fund has invested around 30% of its budget in the construction of roads since its foundation in 1992.105 The schools and medical facilities that the All Armenian Fund has invested in might just not be that visible for the traveller’s eye as they often lie off the main road. But the reconstruction of these roads is very interesting for the improvement it makes in the possibilities to make a connection between Armenia and Karabakh. The two main transport corridors, the Goris-Stepanakert and the Vardenis-Stepanakert highways, make most places in Karabakh more accessible from Yerevan than their own southern-Armenian Syunik province. With all borders closed for Karabakh except the one with Armenia, the road constructions that have been co-financed by the diaspora have successfully integrated Karabakh into Armenia’s road system. According to Charles King, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University, the Armenian diaspora is the sine qua non for Karabakh’s existence, and is a vital external dimension in terms of state building for the NKR.106 While many basic government services like schooling and health care would not have been at their current standards without the diaspora’s aid, it is not difficult to speak of a state building success by the diaspora. The diaspora investments have ensured some of the essential social

105 Vardan Partamyan, interviewed in Yerevan, March 23rd 2017 106 Charles King, Extreme Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 118 43 services, and secured the transportation lifeline with Armenia. While this made the NKR stronger as a de facto state, there are more convincing arguments to state that the diaspora charity investment projects in the region has helped over the years to integrate the Karabakh region into Armenia as a kind of semi- autonomous region. It is along the United States’ south-eastern coast again where the most visible and effective international Armenian lobbying takes place. Besides some other states, it is in California where the NKR is politically recognized, and some towns have close ties to communities in Karabakh. The success of this lobbying is reflected on a material and a diplomatic level. Materially, the US funds that are being allocated to aid Armenia exceed those that are allocated to countries of similar size and international importance. The Trump administration has plans for severe retrenchments in the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).107 This results in a nearly 70% cut in aid to Armenia from the fiscal year of 2017 to that of 2018 to an amount little under $10 million, as shows the unveiled budget proposals.108 Nevertheless, in recent history Armenia has enjoyed a stable average of around $50 million per annum in U.S. aid. A part of this budget has been invested in the NKR. In 2015, a mine clearance program in Karabakh was the most well-funded active program with $2 million assigned to the project by USAID.109 As the central American government does not recognize the NKR, all of these funding will go through the Armenian branch off USAID. In this respect the effects of these funding will be an incorporation of Karabakh into the Armenian structure of development programs, and therefore does not assist Karabakh in gaining more de facto independence. The diplomatic successes of the Armenian lobby in the US do the very opposite. By recognizing the independence of the NKR, some American states give the NKR exposure and confidence in their road to broader recognition. This will aid the NKR government in strengthen their claims on a legitimate independence for the NKR as a full state. The military aspect of diaspora interference with Karabakh is almost entirely concentrated around the 1988-1994 Karabakh War. Although small in number, the volunteers from the Armenian diaspora who fought along the Karabakh troops were highly influential. As the exemplary case of Monte Melkonian, the Karabakh War became an opportunity for trained men who had been members of Armenian terror groups to fight a real war after years of limited success and internal conflicts. As Melkonian, these mercenaries have helped the Karabakh forces to control the areas that are now de facto governed by the NKR, and were therefore very efficacious powers that made Karabakh gain independence. For them, Armenia was not the centre of their Armenian world where Karabakh had to be attached to. Their presence was meant to make the Armenians of Karabakh to secure their piece of land for the sake of the Armenian people. In fact they integrated a local struggle between Armenians and Azeri in a small province of the Soviet Union to become part of a Middle East or even world-wide Armenian

107 Reuters, ‘Trump plans 28 percent cut in budget for diplomacy, foreign aid’, March 16th 2017 108 Asbarez, ‘Trump’s Budget Cuts Armenia Assistance by Almost 70 Percent’, May 24th 2017 109 USAID official website, “US Foreign Aid by Country: Armenia”, accessed June 18th 2017 https://explorer.usaid.gov/ cd/ARM?fiscal_year=2015&measure=Obligations&implementing_agency_id=1 44 struggle. Integration of Karabakh into Armenia was neither a purpose nor an effect of their cooperation with the Caucasus-Armenians. They helped Karabakh to become a focus point of the whole Armenian diaspora, and to gain ground for the Armenians of Karabakh to control their lands. In this way the military assistance of the Armenian Diaspora to the Karabakh conflict can be seen as a phenomenon that brought more independence to the NKR in the end. If it had some integrational effects, it did Karabakh integrate in the Armenian world beyond the Caucasus in general, not with the Republic of Armenia in particular.

III The Armenian Caucasus

In the sense of economic activity and cross-border traffic, there are literally no obstacles between Armenia and Karabakh other than the road’s length and condition. Armenian nationals are free to enter the NKR without a visa, and it is completely open for Armenian companies to do business in Karabakh. The Armenian national currency, the Dram, is used on both sides of the border, that many Armenians do cross without noticing. In economic terms, an almost complete integration has been established, like in a single internal market. Trips without economic incentive, like visiting relatives, cultural trips or tourism, have the same integrational side-effects, although here the integration is not that advanced as that of the economic ties. Like Sergey Shahverdyan mentioned when talking about the position of Karabakh with respect to Armenia, Karabakh is seen as a ‘separate destination’ in the broader Armenian world.110 Karabakh is clearly perceived as Armenian, but with different local cultural differences where the local people speak a different Armenian dialect. Those Armenians that come to Karabakh for militarily reasons also blur the borders between the two republics. The thousands of Armenians who joined the Karabakh forces during the Karabakh War came to fight with the very motive of connecting the two areas. Within the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast demands to be united with the Armenian Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union was an appeal for a more secured Armenian autonomy over the Armenian parts of Karabakh. They preferred to be under Yerevan’s protection above a situation where they had to fear the loss of their autonomy to Baku. The security of Stepanakert was their incentive, not the love for Yerevan. The Armenian voluntary forces that came to Karabakh during the Karabakh War had a different background. The calls for a unification between Karabakh and Armenia that hundreds of thousands of protesters made in 1988 on the streets of Yerevan were calls for pure integration. It is with this motivation that the

110 Sergey Shahverdyan, interviewed in Stepanakert, March 17th 2017 45

Armenian volunteers came to Karabakh, and it is in military aspects what they worked on to achieve, the integration of Armenian and Karabakh forces. With the later capture of the Kalbajar and Laçın regions, in terms of military control this objective had been served as well, but the Armenian government did not want to take the international reactions and the inevitable political responsibilities that would have followed after the annexation of de jure Azerbaijani territory. While serving Armenian military by conscription, it would be an exception not to serve part of the 24 months compulsory military service in the NKR. Thousands of young Armenian men have served with their Karabakh counterparts at the NKR’s Line of Contact. By strengthening the connection, interaction and the sense of common responsibility, in military terms the integration of Armenia and Karabakh could be said to be the most far-reaching. Armenian and Karabakhi forces defend a common border, a common ground.

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Conclusion

This thesis focused on the effects of international visitors on the degree of independence of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic towards the Republic of Armenia. In order to lead to a weighed answer to this main query this thesis consists of three parts that close in on the issues that it investigates. The first part shows a political and ethnic history of the Karabakh region from Roman times to the contemporary ones. It showed that the region we know as Karabakh is perceived by Armenians as part of the ancient kingdom of Armenia, but has a history of co-existence different cultures and ethnicities. Azeri, Armenian and Persian merged and exchanged in a certain degree, where the Armenian local majority in Nagorno Karabakh developed an own Armenian identity and history of relative self- governance by the Melikdoms. To be positioned in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan as an Autonomous Oblast was perceived as a historical wrongdoing and a threat to local Armenian autonomy that escalated in a full war in the political insecure times of Glasnost and increasing identification along nationalist lines. Due to the poor state of Azerbaijani military organization and Armenian and ex-Soviet aid to the Karabakh case, ethnic Armenians controlled an area much wider than the originally Armenian inhabited territories at the time the cease fire was signed in 1994. Since then, a de facto independent Nagorno Karabakh Republic is acting as the legal governance over the area, with broad existential support from the Republic of Armenia. From the second part it can be concluded that international visitors are of importance to the NKR, and those interested, either on a personal basis or as part of a charity organization, leave their footprints on the area. Tourism is taken very serious in Karabakh, and the government in Stepanakert puts considerable resources in attracting and guiding international tourists. Although the area fails to attract the bigger flow of tourists because of its isolation and insecure status, the tourists that do visit the area are of economic importance to the relatively small population. The Armenian diaspora is the second distinguished group of visitors and interested parties, and are surprisingly active in the NKR, when compared to the Republic of Armenia. Special focus is directed to the reconstruction and development of Karabakhs schooling, medical, tourism and infrastructure. The group or Armenian nationals that head for Karabakh meet hardly any barriers to undertake business and leisure trips to the area. In respect to the thesis main question, the third part makes clear tourism is an extremely important factor to the NKr in the sense of independency. Tourism is a phenomenon with many facets. In an economical way it brings in foreign currency, creates jobs and the government can expect revenue in the sense of an increased tax income. In the sense of public diplomacy it can export a view of a country or region, and will by this spread the notoriety and image of that place. For a self-declared independent nation as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is brings another sense, that of self-confidence. There is little more self-assuring about independency than to be able to invite somebody over to your own place. For the Karabakh-Armenian this too is what tourism does, it makes them confident about the fact that this is their land, and they can host strangers, showing them what that land looks like and how it breathes their

47 culture. Tourism is therefore one of the main possibilities of gaining increased independence. The diaspora activities in Karabakh seem to be important in the development of the core structure of the country in the sense of schooling and medical care. Investments that make Karabakh less dependent on Yerevan, hence increasingly independent and viable. But other diaspora activities in fact integrate Karabakh into Armenia by linking road connections between the two Republics. The Armenian nationals who arrive to Karabakh, whether it be army conscripts serving their time in the mandatory military units, drivers doing small scale business by transporting goods between Stepanakert and Yerevan or it be interested Armenians who want to see the historic land of Artsakh at the other side of the mountains, they are all aiding the integration of the two republics with their movements. Visits that strengthen independence are reserved merely to a part of the effects of tourism. Tourism is the one possibility of the NKR to present and act as an independent state. Therefore it does not come as a surprise that tourism is taken very seriously by the NKR government. However welcome the diaspora attention and investments are, and indispensable the trade and military connections are with the Republic of Armenia, these phenomena have effects of integration between Armenia and the Nagorno Karabakh Republic.

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Harutyunyan, Felix. Interview by Rinke van Diermen. Personal interview. Yerevan, March 13th, 2017

Kandilyan, Hovhannes. Interview by Rinke van Diermen. Personal interview. Yerevan, March 21st, 2017

Partamyan, Vardan. Interview by Rinke van Diermen. Personal interview. Yerevan, March 23rd, 2017

Petrosyan, Susanna. Interview by Rinke van Diermen. Personal interview. Stepanakert, March 16th, 2017

Shahverdyan, Sergey. Interview by Rinke van Diermen. Personal interview. Stepanakert, March 17th, 2017

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