98.6% of Nagorno Karabakh's voters choose independence

The government of Nagorno-Karabakh has been de facto independent for more than 15 years, with U.S. and Armenian support

STEPANAKERT (Tiraspol Times) - The population of Nagorno-Karabakh has overwhelmingly approved a new pro-independence constitution, returns from a Sunday referendum showed. According to official preliminary figures released on Monday, 98.6 percent of voters approved the constitution, which describes Karabakh as a sovereign state. Turnout was 87.2 percent.

" - The constitution is adopted and December 10 from now can be declared as a Constitution Day," election commission chief Sergey Nasibyan told Reuters by telephone.

The vote was held on the 15th anniversary of a referendum in which Karabakh, which split from Azerbaijan in a 1990s war that killed 35,000 people, declared independence.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous territory about half the size of Cyprus, is still unresolved. The majority of people in Nagorno-Karabakh are Christian ethnic Armenians who associate themselves with neighboring Armenia rather than Azerbaijan, a majority Muslim state.

The new plebiscite sends an important signal to the rest of the world of a commitment to continued de facto independence by the young country. A political expert explains that its "Soviet-style" result of nearly 100% approval is not surprising, in view of the animosity between the two sides in the conflict and the lives that were lost in the war for independence.

The Nagorno Karabakh vote echoes a similar referendum where Pridnestrovie voted 97% in favor of independence on 17 September. In that vote, more than 94% also rejected unification with Moldova, making it clear to the world that future talks of a joint state are fruitless and that the wounds from the Moldovan 1992 invasion of Pridnestrovie have not yet healed.

Like Moldova, Azerbaijan calls a basic human right "illegitimate"

Azerbaijan and the so-called "international community" do not recognize the right of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh's to live in independence. Azerbaijan is determined to restore its control over the country, whose population has repeatedly said that it does not accept to live under Azerbaijan. An official statement from Azerbaijan said that the referendum was illegitimate, copying a phrase which Moldova a few days earlier had used to describe the peaceful democratic election in neighboring Pridnestrovie.

" - But how can it be illegitimate for us to simply express our vote, peacefully and democratically?" asked a resident as she went to the polls. "It is not as if we are killing anyone, which is what they do when they want to impose their rule on a people that doesn't want it. Democracy can never be illegitimate. It is a basic human rights."

The fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh was the bloodiest of the independence wars that broke out when the Soviet Union disintegrated. A fragile ceasefire has been in force since 1994 but there are still occasional exchanges of gunfire.

Ethnic clashes in the late 1980s escalated after the collapse of the Soviet Union into full-scale fighting. Though Azerbaijan lost that war, it is now threatening a new military campaign to crush the dream of freedom of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh if stalled peace talks do not soon produce the results that Azerbaijan wants.

Nagorno-Karabakh differs from other "frozen conflicts" in the ex-Soviet Union in that it has repeatedly received funding from the United States Congress. Throughout the 1990s, NKR's independence leaders collaborated with other unrecognized countries but at the advice of American consultants, they withdrew their close ties. Washington felt that it was not beneficial for NKR to be lumped with Abkhazia and Pridnestrovie (Transdniester), and the consultants held out the promise of quick international independence recognition if Nagorno-Karabakh would seek its own way.

No such promise materialized, and Nagorno-Karabakh is now again inching closer to the other unrecognized countries in the region.

Pridnestrovie had representatives at the vote

Representatives from Pridnestrovie, or Transnistria as some call it, were on the scene in NKR during Sunday's vote.

" - We have come here, first of all, in order to support the people of Nagorno Karabakh, who came to the referendum to express their thirst for freedom. The result of the referendum is already known: the people of Nagorno Karabakh confirmed their desire to live independently and freely, and we congratulate them for that,” one of the representatives of Tiraspol, the PMR Member of Parliament Lubomir Rybyak, told reporters in Stepanakert.

" - We visited a small Karabakh village not far from the Iranian border. I went up to two elderly women and introduced myself. One of the women hugged me and said: ‘You are our brothers.’ I was amazed and touched that in such a remote village they know about Pridnestrovie,” Lubomir Rybyak said. In his opinion, the national referendum for approving and adopting the new Nagorno Karabakh Constitution was held in accordance with international norms.

Few countries in the world use the figure of a nationwide democratic referendum to approve a Constitution. Pridnestrovie did so in 1995, as one of the first of its time. Venezuela did it in 1998, and now, in 2006, Nagorno Karabakh has successfully done it, too. (With information from Reuters; Regnum)

See also:
» Nagorno Karabakh seeks common cause with Pridnestrovie