Forced Displacement in the Nagorny Karabakh Conflict: Return and Its Alternatives
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Forced displacement in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict: return and its alternatives August 2011 conciliation resources Place-names in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict are contested. Place-names within Nagorny Karabakh itself have been contested throughout the conflict. Place-names in the adjacent occupied territories have become increasingly contested over time in some, but not all (and not official), Armenian sources. Contributors have used their preferred terms without editorial restrictions. Variant spellings of the same name (e.g., Nagorny Karabakh vs Nagorno-Karabakh, Sumgait vs Sumqayit) have also been used in this publication according to authors’ preferences. Terminology used in the contributors’ biographies reflects their choices, not those of Conciliation Resources or the European Union. For the map at the end of the publication, Conciliation Resources has used the place-names current in 1988; where appropriate, alternative names are given in brackets in the text at first usage. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of Conciliation Resources or the European Union. Altered street sign in Shusha (known as Shushi to Armenians). Source: bbcrussian.com Contents Executive summary and introduction to the Karabakh Contact Group 5 The Contact Group papers 1 Return and its alternatives: international law, norms and practices, and dilemmas of ethnocratic power, implementation, justice and development 7 Gerard Toal 2 Return and its alternatives: perspectives from Armenia 23 Artak Ayunts 3 Return and its alternatives: a case study on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict 33 Tabib Huseynov 4 The return of refugees and internally displaced people to their homeland: a view from Azerbaijan 47 Azer Allahveranov 5 Part 1 Reflections on return and its alternatives in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic – Azerbaijani conflict 59 Masis Mayilian Part 2 Return and its alternatives in the Karabakh conflict: opinions and comments from Nagorny Karabakh 69 Ashot Beglaryan 6 Return, restitution and rights: addressing legacies of forced displacement in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict 75 Laurence Broers 7 Biographies 86 8 Map 88 Forced displacement in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict: return and its alternatives • 3 An Azerbaijani grandmother displaced from Shusha in Nagorny Karabakh, now living in Baku. Source: bbcrussian.com Girls in an Armenian family originally from Baku, now living in Shusha. Executive Summary Introduction This publication addresses policy-related issues arising from displacement as a result of the Nagorny Karabakh (NK) conflict. Its purpose is to promote awareness of possible societal responses to Track 1 outcomes on this issue, to discuss broadly possible modalities and likely obstacles, and to shape policy to make it more responsive to on-the-ground realities. The forced displacement of some one million people is a key legacy of the NK conflict. Although a universal right of return will be central to legitimating any eventual Armenian-Azerbaijani framework agreement, after 20 years of protracted Masis Mayilian (right) and Tabib Huseynov displacement refugees and internally displaced present their findings at Columbia University, persons are likely to exercise a range of choices. New York. This reflects a paradox at the heart of debates on return, which lies in the fact that no return process can recreate or restore the pre-conflict research papers. Four regional participants in demography and settlement pattern, yet any this first paper met in Tbilisi in October 2010, peace agreement that fails to create a realistic where they were briefed on current international basis for some degree of return is unlikely to be thinking and practice on displacement, and given seen as legitimate by all conflict parties, or by the a number of perspectives on how experience in international community. other contexts could be relevant for the Karabakh conflict. They then prepared their research papers This publication addresses this paradox by and exchanged them for mutual commentary bringing an overview of international thinking in late 2010-early 2011. The resulting research and experience on forced displacement together papers, together with an overview of international with a selection of local perspectives by Armenian and Azerbaijani authors. Together, these papers practice on forced displacement, are published in provide evidence of significant gaps between this volume, and their main findings discussed in emerging international standards and local the remainder of this introduction. rhetoric on return, of the wide distance between the different conflict parties’ entry points into The Contact Group papers – main these debates, and yet also of how international findings experience can provide, should the conflict parties Gerard Toal’s overview draws on thinking and accept the challenge, models for a broad range of experience of addressing displacement across approaches addressing the justice issues posed by the world, and in particular Bosnia. He shows that forced displacement. while international practice is increasingly guided by the aspiration to reverse mass displacement, The Karabakh Contact Group in practice, often the most that can be achieved In mid-2010 Conciliation Resources (CR) initiated is to offer individuals the choices to return or the Karabakh Contact Group (KCG), as part of the convert pre-war property into resources for lives European Partnership for the Peaceful Resolution in displacement. While the Bosnian experience of the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh (EPNK), a offers useful parallels, however, there are also series of measures funded by the European Union marked differences with the Karabakh context, supporting the Karabakh peace process. The KCG not least the geographies of displacement and aims to provide a safe space for Armenian and current territorial control, and the fact that there Azerbaijani analysts to think through, with each was no clear winner in the Bosnian wars. There was other and with international expertise, alternative also significantly more international presence and approaches to key policy dilemmas in the Karabakh influence on the ground in post-war Bosnia than is peace process. likely in a post-settlement NK. The format for this paper was to bring a small Nevertheless, Toal’s Bosnia-Karabakh comparison group of Armenian and Azerbaijani analysts suggests a number of alternative perspectives in together with an international expert on the issue terms of how the end of forced displacement can of forced displacement to produce policy-oriented be conceived and implemented. These alternatives Forced displacement in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict: return and its alternatives • 5 redefine ‘return’ in broad terms to mean the • Conceptualization of return as a unilateral return of decision-making powers to the displaced process with no consideration of reciprocal individual to make choices about where to live. obligations to accept returnees; What this approach underlines is that it should not • Popular understandings and historical narratives be assumed that displaced people want to return of population movements as tools of invidious to their former homes, or to do so permanently. policies of ‘ethnic engineering’; Instead, they are likely to consider a range of options, including: • Currently low capacities of Armenian and Azerbaijani states and societies to address • The reclamation of former property as a issues of legal redress, historical justice and means of generating financial resources for reconciliation. a new life elsewhere; In more oblique ways, the papers highlight some of • Temporary or experimental return; the obstacles to constructive discussion of how to • Partial return, in the form of reclaiming former resolve forced displacement: homes for eventual use as secondary homes • The deceptive and contentious games of with the primary place of residence remaining numbers and conflicting definitions of who that in “displacement”. qualifies as a refugee and who as an internally These perspectives prioritize the rights of the displaced person; individual rather than their assumed role in a • The extent to which views and opinions are national project of return and reclamation of assumed of refugees and IDPs, or projected territory. There is an emphatic shift from seeing onto them; displaced people as passive pawns being moved physically from one location to another, to seeing • The absence of dispassionate empirical data on displaced people as rational individuals with displaced Armenians’ and Azerbaijanis’ attitudes multiple motivations and the choice of which to act on key conflict issues; on. Such an approach may sit uncomfortably with • Ways in which the issue of displacement is broader narratives of the loss of national territory enfolded into intractable political agendas. and the imperative to repopulate, but is more In manifold ways and from different starting likely to be compatible with the life-choices and points, all of the papers indicate considerable rights of long-term displaced people. It also offers problems. Yet an approach consistent with entry points to address historical justice issues, emerging international practice offers mechanisms discussion of which is controversial today, yet placing individual choice at the centre of processes without which no process of Armenian-Azerbaijani addressing forced displacement. This points to reconciliation will be possible. the centrality of the individual’s