INTRODUCTION [1]

"The democratic movement for the re-unification of Armenia with Nagorno Karabakh was not motivated by religious issues or pursued territorial goals. Rather, it was a spontaneous, brave yet desperate attempt to salvage a tiny fraction of a torn-apart homeland from a new cycle of anti-Armenian hysteria and ethnic purges initiated by the government of Azerbaijan. After the genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, we are responsible for not allowing another genocide to take place."

(Arkady Ghukasian, President of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic  >> )

The crisis in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo has had a profound impact on international relations and created new realities in the post-World War II framework of international security. NATO's humanitarian intervention, the purpose of which was to protect Kosovar Albanians from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's policy of ethnic cleansing, has created several precedents which have already begun playing their own role in international politics. It is noteworthy that from the start of Operation Allied Force, a small number of countries have lined up at NATO's doorstep, hoping to have their own territorial problems solved by posing loyal to the mighty North Atlantic Alliance.

One of these countries is Azerbaijan, a republic in the South Caucasus that proposed to host NATO bases on its territory. Azerbaijan is convinced that such bases are important to the West in order to guarantee the security of offshore oil fields in the Caspian Sea. However, Azerbaijan has been locked in a decade-long conflict with the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, formerly a region within Soviet Azerbaijan but now a de-facto independent state. The Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh won the ensuing war in the name of gaining freedom from Azerbaijani rule.

The NATO intervention in Kosovo offers a geopolitical precedent that would be highly unfavorable to Azerbaijan if directly applied to the case of Nagorno Karabakh. That would highlight the similar campaign of ethnic cleansing that Azerbaijan is guilty of perpetrating in its attempts to negate the autonomy of Nagorno Karabakh, seize that territory entirely and expel its Armenian population. It is noteworthy that the term ethnic cleansing was used in relation to Azerbaijan's policies before it became familiar to the world in the context of events in the former Yugoslavia. The Azerbaijani onslaught against the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh proved that the phrase "Never again!" — much repeated after 1945 — has been empty rhetoric. Nevertheless, today, Azerbaijan is engaged in a an attempt of historical revisionism seeking to rewrite the actual course of the Karabakh conflict, by propagating a distorted, ex-post account of the conflict to validate its position vis-à-vis international public opinion.

In a larger sense, comparative analyses of the conflicts in Nagorno Karabakh and Kosovo transcend the evaluation of current political developments in the Caucasus and the Balkans.  Insights into the structure and the dynamics of these two crises could provide a theoretical basis for early identification and prevention of international conflicts that have the potential of escalating into large-scale humanitarian catastrophes, as has already occurred with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and Nagorno Karabakh's ethnic Armenians. For an ethno-political minority, which is suffering from the genocidal policies of a dominant ethnic group, acquiring the status of an international legal party in some cases could be the only long-term guarantee for that minority's political rights and security. Similar comparative studies of ethnic conflicts may provide valuable insights into the evaluation of foreign policy. They can also serve the purpose of preventing the manipulation and exploitation of economic, political and military resources of NATO countries and international organizations engaged in humanitarian operations abroad.