Azerbaijan abolishes NKAO autonomy
Azerbaijani parliament’s abolition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast on 26 November 1991. The act tried to remove Karabakh’s Soviet autonomy just as the USSR was collapsing and was answered by the Karabakh Armenian independence referendum of 10 December.
Account
Background
The NKAO was the Soviet legal form through which Karabakh Armenians had made their 1988 transfer demand. As Azerbaijan moved toward independence in 1991, Baku treated that autonomy as a separatist platform rather than a legitimate compromise.
Abolition
On 26 November 1991, Azerbaijan abolished the autonomous status of NKAO and renamed Stepanakert as Khankendi in its administrative framework. The move asserted republican sovereignty at the moment Soviet authority was collapsing. Karabakh Armenians answered with the 10 December 1991 independence referendum, boycotted by Azerbaijanis and rejected by Baku.
Meaning
The abolition is one of the clearest legal contradictions in the conflict. Azerbaijan insisted on territorial integrity as it left the USSR, but removed the autonomy that had been the Soviet compromise for Karabakh's Armenian majority. Armenians insisted on self-determination, but did so in a process that Azerbaijanis in the territory did not accept contested.
The act helped convert a constitutional dispute into war. Once autonomy was abolished and independence proclaimed, there was no shared institutional forum left inside which the parties could bargain editorial.
Further reading
- Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, 2003
- Arsène Saparov, From Conflict to Autonomy in the Caucasus: The Soviet Union and the Making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh, 2014
- Svante E. Cornell, Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus, 2001