Azerbaijan demands from its neighbor the land that had never belonged to him

PanARMENIAN.Net - In 1918 the Musafat party (Equality) first used the term "Azerbaijan" for the area situated on the territory of two Transcaucasian historical areas; Shirvana and Arrana. Before that the place-name "Azerbaijan" only referred to the territories situated to the south of the River Arax, in the area of Tebriz, Ardebil and Lake Urmia. Later the land of Azerbaijan and Eastern Transcaucasia (modern Azerbaijan) were populated with people of almost identical ethnic origins. In 1936 Azerbaijan was integrated into USSR on the bases of the Soviet Republic rights. The Azeri Turks were officially called Azerbaijani; Azerbaijani was also the name of their official language. It was then, when with the decision of the Soviet Government the Azeri written language was translated from Latin to Cyrillic.

This is how the things had been before Heydar Aliyev came to power in Azerbaijan. Taking the control of the country, he immediately decided to "revise" the history of the country. It was then, when Farida Mamedov's notorious work "The Caucasian Albania" appeared, Guliyev's book about medieval architecture of Albania where all the Armenian churches and khachkars were announced to be Albanian, i.e. Azerbaijani. All this enabled Baku to "revise" the belonging of the territories included in Az.USSR. The most interesting part is that the Deputy Minister of the Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan Khalaf Khalafov himself blurted out about the boarders. "In its time the USSR authorities didn't regard the issue of delimitation of the administrative rights among the former Soviet countries, which led to a number of problems in boarder delimitation. According to his words, often different documents referring to the issue of territories of this or that country contradict each other," says Day.az. Historian Jamil Hasanly is sure that, "Many native Azeri territories have gone to the neighboring countries. Today we don't have to squander our territories. We must try to save what has been left to us after giving out Azeri lands, and today we cannot lose a single square meter".

The parties' incapacity of finding a peaceful solution of the controversies concerning the territorial integrity as well as the right of nations' self-determination leads to national conflicts growing into military confrontation. The principle of territorial integrity exclusively works for the protection of the country against external aggression, and this is closely interconnected with its formula in UNO Charter; "All the UN Members in their international relations refrain from force or its implementation against the territorial inviolability or political independence of any country, as well as any other method incompatible with the objectives of the UNO". However the UNO Charter states that the principle of the territorial integrity isn't applicable for the countries which do not secure equal rights for the nations and do not allow freedom of self-determination, and this, perhaps, is the most essential point in the resolution of the Karabakh Conflict. It should be reminded that the nation's right on self-determination is considered to be one of the universally recognized principles of international law. It gained recognition in the process of the colonial system breakdown and was toughened in the Declaration of Independence of the colonial countries and nations (by the Resolution N 1514 XV of the UN General Assembly adopted on December 14, 1960) and the consequent international pacts and declarations of UNO.

Creation of the multinational empires sooner or later brought to their breakdown; the Roman Empire, the Golden Horde, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, USSR. Being one of the most significant features of independence, territorial integrity became one of the weakest points after the USSR breakdown. The main difficulty concerns the change of the administrative bounds in the former Soviet Union into public ones. But if Kosovo falls apart from Serbia why Nagorno-Karabakh can't be proclaimed an independent Republic? Maybe because Serbia is of much less importance to the USA than Azerbaijan, yet for Russia everything is just vise versa. Unfortunately once again Armenia has found itself between two rocks, in spite of all international principles and treaties.