ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of 1988, a conflict has endured between the South Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. The conflict has led to over 20,000 deaths and almost 1.5 million refugees and internally displaced persons, a refugee flow which has resulted in a considerable crisis especially in Azerbaijan, where the number of displaced persons is close to 1 million, roughly 12-15 per cent of the population of the country consists of displaced persons. Over 14 per cent of Azerbaijan’s territory (that is, the NagornoKarabakh area and an additional 10 per cent of the country’s territory) remains occupied, territories which have been ethnically cleansed of their Azeri population in the course of warfare by Armenian Forces. The conflict was initially regarded as an internal conflict by the major powers and international organizations, and consequently the efforts of the international community to bring an end to the war that raged between 1992 and 1994 were half-hearted at best and exiguous at worst. However, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, while
clearly possessing an internal dimension as the struggle for independence on the part of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, is also since the end of 1991, an internationalized conflict between two sovereign states: Armenia and Azerbaijan. The existence of three parties to the conflict, the governments of the two sovereign states as well as of the unrecognized ‘Republic of NagornoKarabakh’ is a factor which has made finding a solution to the conflict all the more difficult. An important but puzzling fact is that while not openly branding Armenia as a party to the conflict, the international mediation efforts have concentrated on bilateral talks between the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan, while according considerably less importance to the government of the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. In this chapter, an attempt is made at a comprehensive analysis of the conflict. Chronologically, the history of the conflict can be divided into five phases: first, the background to the conflict in the late nineteenth century and the hostilities between 1905 and the incorporation of the two states into the Soviet Union in 1921; secondly, the suppression of the conflict during the Soviet era between 1921 and 1987; third, the re-emergence of the conflict in the Perestroika period, 1987-91; fourth, the war, 1992-94; and finally the search for solution, 1994 to the present.
