Q: Why Nagorno-Karabakh decided to quit Azerbaijani SSR in 1987?
Hello, could you please explain me one thing regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
What do you think about the reasons why Nagorno-Karabakh decided to quit Azerbaijani SSR in 1987 in first place? I mean, did Azerbaijanis treated Armenians from Karabakh badly during Soviet times or there was some other reason?
I'm not affiliated with any of the parties involved and genuinely curious because I don't know a lot about the original causes of the conflict.
Posted Nov 11, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC
09
There were decades of complaints about discrimination in the NKAO. They did not want to be part of Azerbaijan in the first place, it's just that you wouldn't really make an issue out of this during the period of Stalinism. That in addition to deliberate underdevelopment from the government in Baku (in order to make as many Armenians leave as possible) + the deliberate settling of Azerbaijanis and Meshkhetian Turks made it so people there found it was necessary to secede. The people of Nagorno-Karabakh did not want to become the next Nakhichevan, or the next Kars, Igdir etc.
That being said, even if they had zero reason to, they should have had the right to. Just like Scotland, just like Quebec.
its not always easy to leave. see Catalonia, Basque, Chechnya
Yes true, but that does not make it better. People have certain rights, and it is not really comforting when those rights are being violated to know that it happens elsewhere.
Thanks for your opinion, I had no idea about these acts of discrimination!
Hmm, interesting, now I'm wondering why Nakhichevan that has (and had) no land connection with Azerbaijan was subordinated to it...
Well, in 1914 it was 40% Armenian and 60% Azerbaijani. Then, after tensions rose between the two peoples in 1918 following the collapse of the Russian Empire, there were two wide scale massacres of the Armenian populace, killing about 20.000 (10.000 by the Ottomans in 1918 and 10.000 by the Azerbaijani government in 1919) in total and shifting the demographics to 85% Azerbaijani and 15% Armenian.
When Azerbaijan was first conquered by the Soviet Union, Nakhichevan was proclaimed to have ties to the Azerbaijani SSR. Then, to win public support in Armenia, they promised the region along with Karabakh and Syunik to Armenia. The leader of the Azerbaijani Bolsheviks, Nariman Narimanov, also proclaimed Nakhichevan and Zangezur (Syunik) to be part of Armenia, but Lenin decided that the matter was to be solved through a referendum, in which 90% of the people of Nakhichevan voted to be part of the Azerbaijani SSR. Also, the Turkish government pressured the Soviets to give Nakhichevan to the Azerbaijani side, which the Soviets did with the hope of building friendly ties with the new Republic of Turkey.
Thanks for such detailed answer!
It looks like that the neat division of Armenian and Azerbaijani lands, that would not leave any of the parties aggrieved, was impossible; and the administrative system that was imposed by Soviet Union had any chance to work only if both Armenia and Azerbaijan were either parts of the same state (such as USSR- though, please, don't get me wrong - I'm not the advocate of the USSR) or at least parts of some sort of confederation with open borders. And obviously this is impossible nowadays.
Kinda sad situation, I have to admit.