The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has raised
some important questions about secession and de facto states in the modern international system.
Do countries have the right to retake breakaway territories by force?
As I'll show in this video, the answer isn't perhaps as simple as the two sides would present.
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Hello and welcome. If you're new to the channel, my name is James Ker-Lindsay and here I take a
look at international relations, statehood, secession and the origins of countries.
Around the World, there are a number of territories that have broken away
and established themselves as what we call de facto states; entities that have the attributes
of statehood - a defined territory, settled population, governance and the ability to
enter into international relations - but enjoy little, if any, recognition on the world stage.
In most cases, there's an expectation that the
conflict will eventually be resolved by peaceful means.
Sometimes, this might mean that the territory in question is integrated back into the parent
state - as the country it's broken away from is usually known - perhaps as part
of a new federal constitutional structure or with some degree of considerable autonomy.
Alternatively, and albeit rarely, it may result in negotiated independence for the territory.
Sometimes, though, a secessionist dispute may be resolved by military means.
The parent state will launch an attack to end the territory's existence and reintegrate it by force.
The recent resurgence of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has again focused international attention on this issue.
Although it's still unclear where this conflict is heading, there's a sense that
maybe the Azerbaijan Government has in fact decided to retake the region by armed force.
This in turn raises an important question.
Does it actually have the right to resolve the issue by military means?
As regular viewers will remember, I covered the background on Nagorno-Karabakh
in another recent video and so I won't go into a lot of detail about the case again here.
If you haven't seen it, I've put a link to it above and in the description below.
However, by way of summary, the conflict really emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In January 1992, Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous province of Azerbaijan
predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, unilaterally declared independence.
After Azerbaijan tried to retake the territory by force, Armenia joined the conflict.
In the period that followed, Armenian troops took control of 14 percent of Azerbaijan's territory,
including Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.
Over the course of 1993, four UN Security Council resolutions were passed calling for a ceasefire
and peace talks and reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of Azerbaijan and emphasising that force could not be used to acquire territory.
In May 1994, a ceasefire was finally agreed by the sides.
This in turn led to a peace initiative by the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE,
which eventually secured a set of basic principles for a settlement of the conflict.
These included the return of territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan's
control and the future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh
through a legally binding expression of will.
However, over the past two decades these talks have made very little progress.
Worryingly, in recent years there's been a sense that the war may yet resume.
A dramatic rise in Azerbaijan's defence expenditure sparked fears
that Baku was ultimately considering an attempt to resolve the issue by force.
It's against this backdrop that reports emerged on the 27 September 2020 that
there had been a major outbreak of fighting around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Although there have been serious incidents before, including one a few months earlier,
it soon became clear that this was more than another skirmish.
In the first few weeks of fighting,
there have been many hundreds, if not over a thousand, battlefield deaths.
At the same time, the war - and it should
now be regarded as a war - has also seen civilian casualties.
Both sides have used artillery, missiles and even drones to attack towns and cities; including
Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ganja, the second city of Azerbaijan.
Particularly worryingly, it was claimed that cluster munitions had even been used.
On top of all this, reports suggest that over half the population of Nagorno-Karabakh
has already fled to seek safety in neighbouring Armenia.
Although there have been a number of calls from various parties for the sides to stop
fighting, these have gone ignored.
Likewise, a Russian brokered humanitarian ceasefire
appeared to collapse almost as soon as it was reached.
At the moment, there seems to be little
chance that the fighting will come to an end any time soon.
While the exact cause of the war is still heavily disputed, with both sides blaming the other,
many observers now believe that, regardless of how it started, Azerbaijan may well now have decided
to try to retake Nagorno-Karabakh - or at least some of the territories surrounding it - by force.
If so, this raises important questions the first is whether
legally speaking it's permitted to do so.
In one sense, the answer would seem to be a yes.
Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding regions have been explicitly recognised
as Azerbaijani territory by relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
To this extent, Azerbaijan would argue that it has the right to be able to exert
its effective control over its own sovereign territory.
However, balanced against this, there are Security Council resolutions in
place calling on the sides to reach a peaceful settlement and not to exacerbate the situation.
Even though these resolutions date back almost 30 years, they still stand.
It could therefore be argued that a premeditated resumption of the
conflict represents a deliberate violation of those resolutions.
As Security Council resolutions are considered binding on UN members,
this could in fact be seen to be a violation of international law.
But as well as the legal question,
there's also a question of legitimacy of the use of force in this situation.
Here again the picture is also rather less clear than many might think.
There's no doubt that the use of force to resolve secessionist territorial
disputes is now generally opposed by the international community.
Parties are expected to try to reach a peaceful settlement of disputes.
The problem is that there have been a number of cases in recent decades
where countries have decided to resolve a separatist dispute through the use of
military force - and have done so without external opposition, let alone interference.
Two particularly good cases are Croatia and Sri Lanka.
In the former case, an attempt by ethnic Serbs to establish their own
breakaway state was put down by force in 1995..
In Sri Lanka, a decades-long insurgency to create a separate Tamil homeland in
the north and east of the country was militarily suppressed in 2009.
In both these cases,
the international community stepped back and let the governments in question act.
To this extent, Azerbaijan would argue that it too
should be allowed to retake its own territory by force.
I won't go into any more detail about the cases of Sri Lanka and Croatia here.
But I do hope to cover them both in future videos.
But regardless of where the sides stand on the rights and wrongs of the use of force,
there's also an important third element that needs to be considered.
It's not so much whether a country has the right to retake territory
as it's increasingly a case of how it does it.
There are now a number of treaties and conventions regarding the respect
for human rights and governing the use of force in conflict.
And it's noticeable that this is becoming a central focus for many observers,
especially as there are growing fears of a humanitarian crisis around Nagorno-Karabakh.
There have been calls for both sides to respect civilians
and allow the free and safe passage of aid to affected areas.
The sides have also been asked to refrain from using banned weapons,
such as cluster bombs - although, interestingly, neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan have joined the
hundred or so countries that have signed the 2008 Convention on cluster weapons,
which bans the use of this type of armament.
In a broader sense, if the war can't be stopped
then at the very least it must be conducted by both sides with due respect for prevailing norms.
As Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted in her statement on the
conflict: "I also remind all states, particularly those with influence over the parties to the
conflict, that they are required by international law to do everything within their power to ensure
respect for international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians."
This is especially important to bear in mind as the level of scrutiny placed on
the conduct of conflict has increased in recent decades.
Indeed, even in those cases where countries have resorted to force to end a secessionist conflict,
their actions have later come under scrutiny.
In the case of Croatia, leading figures have been put on trials for war crimes for their conduct.
In Sri Lanka, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for those suspected
of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity to be prosecuted - although, admittedly,
the Sri Lankan Government is resisting pressure to initiate any prosecutions at the moment.
Therefore, the manner in which the conflict now unfolds will be closely watched.
Grave human rights violations could well be brought before the European Court of Human
Rights as both Armenia and Azerbaijan are members of the Council of Europe.
Moreover, political leaders and military commanders may well find themselves named,
shamed and even investigated if they're seen to be committing war crimes in the process.
The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh
has long been seen by many observers as ripe for a return to fighting.
Aalthough there's a long-standing call for the parties to reach a peaceful settlement, in recent
years there's been a sense that Azerbaijan was potentially looking to resolve the issue by force.
The recent return to fighting has raised questions as to whether this is now happening.
On the question of whether Azerbaijan has the right to retake these territories using force,
as I've shown it's not perhaps as straightforward
as it may seem and as the way that the two sides would present it.
While Azerbaijan would argue that it does have the right
the sovereign right to do so, this is not absolutely the case.
As a broad principle, the answer may be 'yes'.
Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding regions are recognised as Azerbaijani sovereign territory,
as confirmed by relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
However, those same resolutions have called for the sides to respect the ceasefire
and pursue a peaceful settlement of the dispute.
And, equally, while the international community will argue that the issue
should be resolved peacefully, Azerbaijan will draw attention to prominent cases where the
international community has turned a blind eye to decisions to reassert sovereignty by force.
Still, however this plays out, there's an important human rights dimension
that can't be ignored.
Regardless of whether any country has a legal or legitimate right to retake territory by force,
it's increasingly understood that it has a responsibility to act with due regard
to human rights and the protection of civilians.
Regardless of the legality or legitimacy of this conflict,
the way it's conducted by both sides will nevertheless be closely watched.
I hope you found that interesting. If so, here are some more videos that you might find useful.
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Thanks so much for watching and see you in the next video.