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THE KARABAKH CONFLICT AND SELF-DETERMINATION OF AZERBAIJANIANS
David BABAIAN
David Babaian, Lecturer on international law, Stepanakert Office of the Russian-Armenian Humanitarian Academy (Stepanakert, Republic of Nagorny Karabakh)
The conflict is usually presented either in the context of the right of nations to self-determination (the position of Nagorny Karabakh) or as a territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan (Azerbaijan’s position). This confrontation, however, brought to the fore one more no less important aspect so far ignored for various reasons. I have in mind here the problem of self-identification of Azerbaijanians. As distinct from the self-identification problem of the people of Nagorny Karabakh that involves the problem of political status, in case of Azerbaijan we are dealing with national self-identification and a quest for ethnic identity and ethnic self-awareness.
Azerbaijan’s Ethnic Specifics
Azerbaijanians are a young nation: as late as the first half of the 19th century the population was an ethnically patchy one; tribes and ethnic (especially Turkic-speaking) groups freely migrated across the country. One of the founders of Azerbaijanian historiography Abas-Kuli-Aga Bakikhanov (1794-1846) wrote in his Giulistan-Iram (one of the first histories of Azerbaijan): “All those living in the magals (uyezds) between the cities of Shemakha and Quba and the entire Baku uyezd, except six villages, use the Tat language, which speaks of their Persian origins… All other Shirvan magals and Sal’ian, six Baku villages and the Sheki uyezd speak the Turki tongue, which points to their origins from the Turks, the Mongols and Tatars who came during the Turko-Persian wars when the Safavids ruled Persia and after them.” This refers to the 17th-18th centuries; sometimes tribes were resettled for far-reaching political aims. Persian Shah Abbas I (1578-1629) moved semi-nomadic Turkic tribes to the Southern Caucasus to strengthen his power there. Late in the 19th century a fairly large migration wave of Turkic-speakers reached the Southern Caucasus. According to far from complete information, starting with 1880 about 30 to 35 thou arrived in the territory of contemporary Azerbaijan from the northwestern provinces of Southern (Iranian) Azerbaijan every year. From this it follows that out of the total one million Turks living there in 1897 about 600 thou (or 60 percent) arrived from the Iranian territory in less than 20 years.
This massive migration of peoples and tribes naturally interfered with national cohesion, no wonder, on many occasions the Turks looked at their towns or magals as their homeland. It was the great Azerbaijanian writer and enlightener Mirza Fatali Akhundov who introduced the concept of the “milliet” (nation) in the 1870s. This was the first attempt at…………………
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