Arif Yunusov (Institute for Peace and Democracy): “Dialogue and peace-making Initiatives in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict: The Past, the Present and Future Prospects”

Thursday December 3rd, 2020Friday December 18th, 2020 admin

Implicit Pressures in the 1990s

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the territory of Nagorno Karabakh has been going on for over 30 years. In the relations of both peoples, another process has been developing practically concurrently in the form of multiple meetings, initiatives, and contacts over the peaceful resolution of the conflict. And this is understandable for the conflict started in the USSR where both peoples had lived next to each other within one state, they had a lot in common, and this circumstance significantly facilitated holding such meetings and initiatives, if we are to compare this conflict with many others on the planet Earth. Moreover, the first contacts were largely perceived as the continuation of the new policy of the USSR that was popularly known as “perestroika”, when the initiators and organizers of such meetings were not the leaders of the Communist party and the leaders of republics, but the so-called “nonformals” or human rights defenders.

But the USSR collapsed in 1991 and very soon the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict grew into a large-scale war. But even in these conditions, peace-building meetings continued, even though the changed situation had brought in some adjustments – the majority of the meetings among human rights defenders and the representatives of the newly-emerging civil society had to do with negotiations on releasing hostages, war prisoners, and related to the settlement of a number of humanitarian problems of refugees and displaced persons.

After the ceasefire agreement in 1994 a new stage in the history of such meetings and initiatives was launched. It is exactly at this point that the Azerbaijani society had to face the very acute issue of its attitude to the unrecognized, but factually independent new state in the territory of the republic. Before that Azerbaijanis, too, lived in Karabakh, and at the very beginning, the Azerbaijani society still cherished illusions that the conflict was only temporary, external forces had provoked it and sooner or later it would be successfully resolved, and Karabakh would again be a part of Azerbaijan. But now these illusions are left in the past. The war was lost, and along with the former autonomous territory (ATNK) 7 other regions adhering to Nagorno Karabakh appeared beyond the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan. Moreover, in the former Azerbaijani territory a new statehood formed which bore a new official name (NKR) at that time. Over time Azerbaijanis started to hear a different name – Artsakh – in the stead of the usual “Karabakh” more and more frequently. In fact, there were already no Azerbaijanis in the territory beyond Baku’s control. These people already resided in other regions of the republic as refugees.
A question arose: how should all of this be dealt with? How should the meetings with Karabakh Armenians be perceived? Who are they now for the Azerbaijanis? Former citizens who had temporarily got beyond control and attempts should be made to return them in some way or other under the control of Baku again? Or should they be recognized as citizens of another independent state? And all of this against the background of a dramatic defeat which was perceived by the society as a humiliating fact.

It is exactly at this time when a movement emerged, globally known as “public diplomacy.” This word combination was used to denote contacts between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that were not usual, because the representatives of the conflicting peoples live together in many other countries and first of all in the neighboring Russia and Georgia. Moreover, in the 1990s in Georgia, in the Azerbaijani village Sadakhlo a non-formal Armenian-Azerbaijani market (bazar) emerged that was attended not only by the inhabitants of many other settlements in Georgia, but also by the citizens of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The parties made commercial deals, sold things to one another, and this would bring the goods of the other, enemy country into Armenia and Azerbaijan. And in Russia there were quite a few cases when Azerbaijanis and Armenians jointly led a business.

But this was not perceived negatively, since the matter here was business as well as contacts in the territory of other states and, besides, they did not relate to the Karabakh conflict and the future of the Armenian and Azerbaijani relations. One did not hinder the other.

As for the conflict per se and the Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, a clear frontline already existed and it clearly separated the parties from one another. Crossing that front line was fatally dangerous. No meetings or trips by ordinary citizens across the frontline were possible. And this is what made the Karabakh conflict different from the conflicts in the neighboring Georgia and Moldova. They had peacekeeping forces and checkpoints, but no front. Citizens there could, especially before August 2008, move freely and contact on different levels. There was nothing even close to this in the Armenian and Azerbaijani relations.

There was another important difference between the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and other conflicts in the post-Soviet space – the role of the state in all this. For example, in Georgia the power changed more than once in the last 2 decades, but their attitude to the contacts of Georgian NGOs and other representatives of the civil society with Abkhazians and Ossetians was positive. Even more so, international organizations dealing with all these issues enjoyed significant support. But in the case of Karabakh conflict there was no agreement between the official Baku and the leaders of Armenia, moreover, the leaders of Nagorno Karabkh, on the mandate of the involvement of Armenian and Azerbaijani civil society representatives, as well as the role of international organizations.

It is true that Heydar Aliyev who came to power in 1993 was not publicly against such contacts at the very beginning. However, along the reinforcement of his personal power in the republic the stance with regard to the expediency of such meetings started to change. In 1999 Heydar Aliyev clearly expressed his position: “Before we have signed a peace treaty with Armenia, there is no need for our NGOs to cooperate with Armenians. When we have this political issue resolved with Kocharyan, this will be a compromise, and many will not agree with it, this is exactly when the NGOs will reconcile the peoples.”(1) In other words, the ruling regime of the Aliyevs in Azerbaijan perceived these contacts of “public diplomacy” as an auxiliary factor in the regulation process.

There was another reason for the negative attitude of the Azerbaijani authorities towards these meetings and initiatives. Heydar Aliyev initially did not want to have a “grassroot” process beyond his control. All the processes in the country had to be the monopoly of the state. Besides, in the 1990s the representatives of the civil society in Azerbaijan were largely dependent on the power and stood close to the political opposition due to their views. This caused an even higher degree of mistrust and the apprehensions of the ruling regime.

This is why since the late 1990s Heydar Aliyev took the course of limiting all these contacts of Azerbaijani NGOs with their Armenian counterparts, especially from Nagorno Karabakh. And if before the representatives of Armenian NGOs, also from Nagorno Karabakh, could arrive in Baku, these trips started to gradually decrease. And the representatives of the Azerbaijani NGOs started to be intimidated.

However, Heydar Aliyev was an experienced politician and understood the role and significance of the West for the region and especially for Azerbaijan. And since Europeans and Americans constantly spoke about “public diplomacy” for the resolution of the Karabh conflict, the pressure by the authorities was not explicit. And hence, even though the contacts of the parties kept shrinking, some work did unfold in this direction.

The Policy of Repressions by Ilham Aliyev

The situation for Azerbaijani NGOs and the representatives of civil society changed noticeably after Ilham Aliyev took office in 2003. Unlike his father who somehow perceived the existence of contacts between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and wished only to keep all this under his control, Ilham Aliyev took a tough and negative position in this issue from the very beginning.

During his term in office, all communication with Armenians was declared to be the job of “the enemies of the Azerbaijani people” and respectively was evaluated as “betrayal of national interests.” All activists of the civil society, who collaborated with colleagues from Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh within the framework of “public diplomacy”, were subjected to very strong pressure explicitly applied by the authorities.

As a result, the authorities of Azerbaijan scared many representatives of local NGOs, and the latter started to refuse from not only trips to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, but also any form of joint projects. Fear crawled into the hearts of many Azerbaijanis. The number of those who wished to play the part of “traitors” and “supporters of Armenian aggressors” was shrinking more and more. This could be accounted for by the fact that besides aggressive campaigns by mass media and on TV, by means of groups of “patriots” fully controlled by the authorities, the latter organized direct attacks on the offices of those NGOs and persons who agreed to collaborate with Armenian colleagues. It was very hard to withstand such a powerful pressure. The already scarce resource was quickly depleting. As a result, even those who agreed to travel to Armenia asked not to promote their participation in conferences and meetings so that they could return to Azerbaijan without any problem. Unlike traditional diplomacy, all measures of “public diplomacy” must be transparent. It is exactly at that time that the ironic term of “secret public diplomacy” started to be applied about these persons’ trips to Armenia.

International organizations immediately readjusted themselves and started to take into account the positions of Azerbaijani authorities. Currently meetings among the representatives of the public started to be held in Georgia, Russia and other countries. For a number of years by the initiative and with the financial support of the American Kettering Foundation and the Russian Center of Strategic and Political Research in Snegiri, meetings among the representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani civil society were held within the framework of Dartmouth conference. For six years (2001 – 2007) they would seriously discuss various models of conflict resolution like diplomats. Later, in 2004 – 2014 it was already the turn of Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly which already in Helsinki (Finland) organized a series of Armenian-Azerbaijani discussions on the so-called “Aland model” of the conflict resolution within the framework of the so-called “Independent Civil Minsk Process on Karabakh Conflict Resolution.” (2)

It would be all right if it were not starkly evident that practically the same small number of people engaged from both parties would travel back and forth from one capital to the other and asked issues related to the resolution. It is even more surprising that often the same participants supported the idea of the meetings and the proposals voiced there when they were not in their motherlands, whereas at home they turned into patriots and spoke categorically against peace-building ideas (3).

In other words, the phenomenon that was named “public diplomacy” within the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict with great pathos, in fact was a profanation of the idea. The vast majority of the population in Azerbaijan did not know anything about these meetings and issues discussed there at all. Practically, the same can be said with regard to the awareness level of the population in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. An absurd situation emerged; the wide circles of the population in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh had much more information on the closed-door meetings of the Presidents, the Foreign Affairs Ministers of Azerbaijan, and the proposals of the Minsk Group mediators than the results of meetings within “public diplomacy.”
Regardless of repressions and pressure, there were still NGOs in the Azerbaijani society that proposed to collaborate with Armenian colleagues and even traveled to Armenia. This brought about serious frustration among the Azerbaijani authorities who even aggravated the situation with the pressure on independent NGOs in the republic. At the same time, the authorities decided to take “public diplomacy” under their control. The first such attempt came in the form of a meeting between the “representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani intelligentsia” organized jointly by the President of Armenia and the Russian side. In 2007 and 2009 the Ambassadors of these two republics, jointly with a group of the representatives of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia, visited Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia. In the course of these meetings, the parties talked a lot about peace in the future and the need to exclude the forceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict. However, upon the return of the Ambassador of Azerbaijan Polad Bülbüloğlu and other Azerbaijani representatives started to make statements from aggressive positions that could not help but trigger frustration among Armenians. And later this would become recurrent. The same Ambassador Polad Bülbüloğlu who constantly spoke of peace would similarly freely speculate over the necessity of war and the forceful settlement of the Karabkh conflict in 2016 – 2017 (4). The first attempt to monopolize the meetings of the public from 2 peoples failed back then.

Taking into consideration the mistakes of the previous period, the low level of awareness and the involvement of conflicting societies at the beginning, the idea of creating shared web sites was becoming more and more popular. And in January, 2013, Baku and Yerevan witnessed the official presentations of the first and only joint Azerbaijani-Armenian web site – Public Dialogues, created as a result of long-term cooperation of two non-governmental organizations, namely, the Azerbaijani Institute for Peace and Democracy and the Armenian Region Research Center. Articles by Armenian and Azerbaijani authors were published here, Internet discussions with the participation of specialists from other countries, video bridges, online interviews with foreign figures for the Armenian and Azerbaijani mass media, the texts of which were later published in the Armenian and Azerbaijani press, and video materials on various events and processes in Azerbaijan and Armenia were posted.

Smashing the Civil Society in Azerbaijan in 2014

All this was perceived by the authorities of Azerbaijan as an explicit threat. At the beginning, they decided to deal with the Azerbaijani NGOs that were not yet under legal control. In May 2013, a draft law named “On the Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan” was submitted to the Parliament. In particular, it envisaged criminal liability for the employees of non-governmental organizations, as well as individual citizens in Azerbaijan (besides the members of official delegations) for cooperation with Armenia “for the sake of liberation of occupied territories”. However, this legislative initiative could bring about the acutely negative reaction of the West and that is why the authorities not only ceased the preparation to its adoption, but in general, began to deny the existence of such a draft law (5)!
But in 2014 the authorities in Azerbaijan gave up all games with the West and took the course of the final resolution of the issue on the activities of independent NGOs and activists of the civil society. During this year a wave of arrests unfolded in the republic, leading to the arrest of many activists of the civil society who actively cooperated (IPD) or had participated in joint meetings or projects with Armenians. Though with bitterness, it is necessary to admit that the authorities succeeded to solve the issue that was unpleasant to them and to clear the stage from all independent participants of suchlike meetings from the Azerbaijani side. It is true that there was still a political opposition in the republic, journalists and the survived representatives of NGOs are desperately struggling. But there is no more ground to speak about meetings and joint projects with Armenians. This period in the history of post-Soviet Azerbaijan belongs to the past.

Imitated and Propaganda “Public Diplomacy”

Dealing with independent NGOs, the authorities of Azerbaijan moved on to Part 2 of their plan, according to which now “public diplomacy” should be used maximally as a component of the propaganda campaign. Quite a lot of means were allocated from the budget for the organization of this campaign. After that some time was spent on the search for Armenians, who were ready to take part in it. In December 2016 Baku pompously announced of the creation of “Platform for Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan” which not only had a website, but also Armenians who participated in the project started to live in Baku and received salary for it. (6)

However, immediately afterwards it became clear that this “Peace Platform” had no relation to “public diplomacy”. Those who took part in the project from the Armenian side turned out not residents of Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, but Armenians who resided in CIS countries and Sweden who agreed to take part in the project for financial reasons. But very soon disagreements arose among the participants from both sides over money. As a result, one of the founders of the “Peace Platform” Vahan Martirosyan, who before that gave interviews in Azerbaijan on the horrors of life in Armenia, was now fleeing Azerbaijan and in his speeches started to provide thorough description on the reasons of financial machinations that had led to his escape. (7) And though even after this the Azerbaijani authorities continue imitating activity on this “Peace Platform”, in reality it is clear that all this has no relation to the resolution of the Karabakh conflict or “public diplomacy.”

What is Next? Are There any Prospects?

As it can be seen from the brief overview of the past and present of the Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, the situation today is very dramatic. In fact, now we cannot speak about a real opportunity of organizing such meetings of the parties in the territories of Azerbaijan or Armenia. This happened largely because of the authorities of Azerbaijan who did everything to destroy the civil society and to take all processes in peacebuilding sector under full control.
The noticeable fatigue of the Armenian and Azerbaijani societies with the fruitlessness of the negotiations process and the peace-building meetings of the parties was an additional factor. And all this happened against the background of hostilities on the front line that have become more and more frequent in the recent years, especially after the fights in April 2016, which significantly radicalized both societies, making the arena for peace-building projects even smaller.

However, the aspirations of the Azerbaijani authorities to monopolize “public diplomacy” and turning the quite common lack of trust in the societies into the efficiency of these meetings are in fact subjective in their nature. On the one hand, no such meetings and initiatives within the frames of “public diplomacy” lead to the resolution of the conflict. They cannot substitute for real players in the person of authorities (Presidents and Ministers) and mediators as leading political players. This toolkit has a different task – to help to prevent the further radicalization in the relations of the peoples, reduce stereotypes and negative views, inevitably arising in the course of any conflict in the opponent country.

At the same time it is worthy to note that the Karabkh conflict is in its initial stage. It is even hard to assume how much time it will take to have the conflict regulated. Consequently, both illusions on such meetings as a chance to settle peaceful relations and the disbelief in their necessity are equally dangerous. Time has come to realize that even though the resolution of the conflict is still far and light may appear at the end of the tunnel due to the efforts of a new generation of politicians and the representatives of the civil society, the foundations for all this need to be laid today. The former failures should not lead to pessimism and it is necessary to start reviving these meetings and initiatives. For the start, in social networks and on the Internet. And to understand, that the distance can be covered by the one who walks.

Notes

1. Avaz Hasanov, Armine Iskanyan. Building Bridges: the Peace-Building Initiatives of the Civil Society. – Accord Series. Limits of Leaders’ Capacity: Elites and Societies in the Peaceful Process of Nagorno Karabakh. – London, 2005, p.47.

2. It Happened in Snegiri. – The Golos Armenii of March 18, 2004. During the meetings of the representatives of the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Karabakh public, regression was noted. – https://regnum.ru/news/polit/932590.html; The Aland Model is practically inapplicable to Nagorno Karabakh – https://regnum.ru/news/514112.html; Human rights defenders propose their own solution for Karabakh- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/in_depth/newsid_3906000/3906993.stm; A Statement on the Nagorno Karabakh Conflict – http://www.aravot-ru.am/2014/11/13/184697/

3. See: The Aland Model: possibilities for citizens and non-governmental organizations to promote models of Karabakh Conflict Resolution Models – http://www.southcaucasus.com/index.php?p=tekali12; Zardusht Alizadeh: “The application of the Aland model in Karabakh will lead to a point when we will spoil Armenians” – http://vesti.az/news/32010

4. Mustafayev R. “Public Diplomacy”: Attempt N2. The Azerbaijani Delegation Arrived in Khankendy and Yerevan – the Caspian, July 4, 2009, Polad Bülbüloğlu, Farhad Badalbeyli and Kamal Abdulla Visited Occupied Shusha – https://news.day.az/politics/84262.html; Polad Bülbüloğlu: “We will solve the Karabakh conflict by military means.” – https://regnum.ru/news/2110410.html and so on

5. The Law on The Occupied Territories of the Azerbaijani Republic must be adopted in the near future, MP Zahid Oruj declares. The Echo (Baku), May 16, 2013. The Parliament rejected the preparation of the law on occupied territories. http://www.contact.az/ext/news/2013/5/free/politics%20news/ru/11225.htm

6. A Platform for Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is created. – http://ru.apa.az/nagornyj_karabakh/sozdana-platforma-dlya-mira-mezhdu-ar… The Civil Platform of Peace Between Armenia and Azerbaijan. – http://arm-azpeace.com/index.php?lang=ru

7. The Armenian Opposition Figure Vahan Martirosyan who Fled to Baku Speaks about Armenia. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_-8yE8wOpM; An interview by the Armenian human rights defender Vahan Martirosyan APA TV. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgSnYNSGD_s; Ваан Мартиросян: Time has come to disclose another lie of the Azerbaijani propaganda – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEAghGHBFAE and so on.