CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 96

TERRITORIAL AUTONOMY AND SECESSION AS STRATEGIES OF CONFLICT …
been steadily growing since Karabakh’s integration into the Azerbaijani
SSR. This tendency may have led to the loss of demographic lead of the
titular ethnicity within the institutional design established out of ethnic
considerations. In the perceptions of the Karabakh Armenians, the fear of
such a scenario was particularly sensitive due to the Nakhichevan
experience, where in the 1980’s Armenians had become almost extinct. The
demographic change can be explained as a combination of several factors,
including emigration of the Armenians due to discriminatory policies, the
high birth rate of Azerbaijani population, and the replacement of those
Armenians in rural areas with Azerbaijani newcomers. 37 This demographic
threat contributed to the rise of tensions between the two polities and
increased the demands of the Armenian elites to unite the region with the
Armenian SSR. On the other hand, some analysts argue that the policies did
not have discriminatory intentions. 38 Nevertheless, regardless of their real
motives, the outcomes of the economic, political and cultural policies of the
NKAO exacerbated the perceptions of discrimination among Karabakh
Armenians.
Considering the above-mentioned conditions, we can deduce that the
autonomous status of Nagorno Karabakh did not serve the objectives for
which such autonomies are granted. Moreover, it is hard to see substantial
advantages granted to the local ethnicity provided by the region’s status.
Instead, its people were subjected to discriminatory policies. Such federal
institutions usually require special group-specific rights in order to
accommodate the local population. In the NKAO, the institutionalization of
the region to a large extent served the opposite goal. In this regard, the
specific rights of NKAO Armenians can be termed as negative group rights
– a condition provided by formal administrative separation based on
arbitrary group criteria that creates ground for informally allocating those
minorities a disadvantageous socio-political role than the notion of equal
citizenship should guarantee. All in all, considering the institutional design
of the NKAO as a self-ruling entity and tracing the roots of secessionism
(see next section) to its formal setting would be misleading. While we agree
that the structure and bodies of the USSR and Soviet Azerbaijan may have
played out during mobilization, we argue that the content and the day-to-day
realizations of negative group rights played a more important role in causing
secessionism rather than the autonomous design of the entity per se. In sum,
the application of half-hearted territorial autonomy as a strategy to resolve
the inter-ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis of Nagorno
Karabakh ultimately did not bring about sustained peace or provide the
means of political, economic and cultural autonomy to the local Armenians.
Even though the strategy as a whole failed, policies of this period intensified
the inter-ethnic strife in the late 1980’s, it is important to note that during the
37
38
Yamskov, “Ethnic Conflict in the Transcausasus”, 646-647.
Ibid, 641.
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