Chained to the Caucasus: Peacemaking in Karabakh, 1987–2012 Philip Remler Chained to the Caucasus: Peacemaking in Karabakh, 1987–2012 Philip Remler International Peace Institute, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017 www.ipinst.org © 2016 by International Peace Institute All rights reserved. Published 2016. About the Author: Philip Remler is a retired US diplomat who served with the US Department of State and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). His overseas posts included Ankara, Baku, Chi in u, Groznyy, Iraqi Kurdist an, Moscow, and Tbilisi. In addition to hisş extendedă involvement with the Karabakh conflict and with OSCE-led efforts to mediate it, he reported on and/or participated in peace negotiations on the Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Transdniestria conflicts. Cover Photo: Armenian and Karabakh armed forces hold joint military exercises at a training ground near the town of Tigranakert in Karabakh, November 14, 2014. Getty Images/Karen Minasyan. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper represent those of the author and not necessarily those of the International Peace Institute (IPI). IPI welcomes consideration of a wide range of perspectives in the pursuit of a well-informed debate on critical policies and issues in international affairs. IPI owes a debt of gratitude to its many generous donors, whose contributions make publications like this one possible. In particular, IPI would like to thank the government of Switzerland. ISBN: 0-937722-81-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-937722-81-7 CONTENTS Foreword . v Acknowledgements . vii Acronyms . viii Introduction. 1 1. The Social and Political Origins of the Karabakh Conflict . 6 2. The Outbreak of the Conflict in Context (1987–1988) . 19 3. Peacemaking at the End of the Soviet Era (1988–1991) . 31 4. The Beginnings of International Peacemaking (1991-1994) . 37 5. The Minsk Group as Mediator (1994–1998) . 61 6. Aliyev and Kocharyan (1998–2001) . 76 7. Treading Water (2001–2005) . 86 8. The Madrid Principles (2005–2008). 91 9. The Medvedev Initiative (2008–2012) . 99 Conclusion: Lessons Learned and Recommendations . 112 Selected Bibliography and Additional Resources . 124 Endnotes. 127 v Foreword The simmering conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the mountainous region of Karabakh that has dragged on for more than twenty years has been referred to as a “frozen conflict.” But there is shooting across the line of contact, and every year people on both sides—including civilians—are killed. Therefore, it is more accurate to say that the settlement process, rather than the conflict, is frozen. Two decades since efforts to find a settlement began in what is known as the Minsk Process, peace remains elusive. Even the personal involvement of presidents of three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—namely France, the United States, and the Russian Federation, the three co-chair countries of the Minsk Process—has had little impact. The settlement process has been rather opaque, either because the negotiators have advocated quiet diplomacy, or because the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan have hammered out deals behind closed doors that their constituents may not be ready to accept. Indeed, as Philip Remler points out in Chained to the Caucasus, peace can only be made when the people are ready to accept it. Since Nagorno-Karabakh is so closely associated with the history and identity of both parties, anyone who negotiates peace may be seen as betraying the nation. To break these chains, negotiators and their backers in the international community need to create both incentives and public policy that can make a peace agreement palatable rather than a risk to leaders’ political futures, or lives. The International Peace Institute (IPI) commissioned thi s study as part of its efforts to promote new approaches to the protracted conflicts in Europe. With years of experience working in the South Caucasus and with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Philip Remler combines the knowledge of an insider with the critical eye of an outsider to make a cogent assessment of why it has been so hard to resolve the Karabakh conflict. While his conclu- sions are sobering, they can hopefully help all parties to better vi understand the motivations and limitations of the actors, and stimulate new approaches to resolving this long-running conflict. Walter Kemp Vice President, IPI vii Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the International Peace Institute and especially Walter Kemp for initiating this project and seeing it through to completion. Thanks as well to Tom de Waal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with whom I have shared many experiences in difficult places over the last twenty years or so, for kindly giving permission to use the map from his masterpiece, Black Garden. The author would like to acknowledge the valuable comments of friends and experts who read early drafts: thanks to Audrey Altstadt, Thierry Béchet, John Kunstadter, Wayne Merry, Michael Ochs, and of course my wife Delphine Nougayrède. The author thanks the many people who over the years spoke to him frankly and in confidence, and whose invaluable contributions must therefore rem ain anonymous. Most of all, the author wishes to acknowledge those who, over the past decades, have made genuine efforts to achieve peace in this small part of the world: mediators primarily from the OSCE, especially the Americans, Finns, French, Russians, and Swedes who served as co-chairs of the Minsk Group; but also from the Soviet Union, Turkey and Iran; and that small group of leaders and officials from the parties to the conflict who on rare occasions defied the popular belligerence to seek peace. Sadly, we have just lost one of these, Vafa Guluzade, an old friend, who died on May 1, 2015; it is to his memory—and in appreciation of Gerard Libaridian, his brilliant Armenian interlocutor—that this book is dedicated. viii Acronyms ASALA Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia ASSR Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic CIS Commonwealth of Independent States CSCE Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe EU European Union G8 Group of Eight JCAG Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NKAO Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast’ OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operationn i Europe SSR Soviet Socialist Republic UN United Nations US United States 1 Introduction1 Why has peacemaking in the Karabakh conflict failed?2 To answer that question, we will need to examine aspects of the roots of the conflict, the context in which it arose, and the factors—the politics, countries, societies, and ideologies—that have kept it going for over a genera- tion.3 This study offers some frank evaluations of the efforts made over many years to resolve the conflict, some of which have not been discussed publicly except as narratives of one side or the other. The Karabakh conflict is not unique. Though it has a number of distinct aspects, it fits well within the continuum of ethnic or quasi- ethnic conflicts that broke out in Europe and Eurasia toward the end of the last century, and the lessons of the efforts to achieve peace in the Karabakh conflict are of value to peace and mediation efforts elsewhere. Karabakh is usually lumped together with the other so- called “frozen conflicts” that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union: Transdniestria in Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. But parallels also exist with other conflicts such as Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and we see echoes of the same issues in Ukraine today. Karabakh was the ear liest eruption of armed nationalism in the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It predated by a year the national movements in the Baltic republics and Ukraine. The descent into nationalist armed hostilities was perhaps predictable. Azerbaijanis and Armenians had fought a bloody war after they declared independence from the collapsing Russian Empire in 1918, and the nationalism of the Armenian Diaspora, a poten t and heady ideology, later filled the vacuum left by popular rejection of hollowed-out late-Soviet Leninist cant. Although there may be little mystery why nationalist animosities turned violent, it remains a puzzle why that happened as early as it did in Karabakh. Once started, the conflict resisted all efforts to find a political solution, and the reasons for the failure to find a resolution are the 2 CHAINED TO THE CAUCASUS focus of this report. From the beginning, many and varied mediators have tried to reach a settlement. Senior statesmen from major powers, and international organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations Security Council tried to mediate and encouraged the parties to reach a settle- ment. All these efforts failed. In some cases, the would-be med iator was feckless. In others, promising initiatives were nipped in the bud by sudden military offensives. These include the Iranian mediation of 1992, which was aborted by the Armenian seizure of the town of Shusha in May of that year. Similarly, the serious initiative of Mario Sica (who as representative of the Conference on Security and Co- operation in Europe, the predecessor to the OSCE, coordinated the efforts of Russian, Turkish, and American mediators) was undone by the Kelbajar offensive of March 1993. No one was more persistent in mediation efforts than Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev, who labored intensively for more than three years, abandoning long-held Russian goals and ulterior motives for the sake of achieving peace. He tried in vain to persuade both sides to accept a set of principles. When that proved impossible, he tried to get them to agree to just a few of the principles.