James Sharp, former British Ambassador to Baku, was recently interviewed on Caliber, by Orkhan Amashov. The interview dealt with some similarities between the ‘Northern Ireland’ peace process/1998 Belfast, aka Good Friday Agreement, and the current, stalled Armenia-Azerbaijan peace negotiations. The focus of the interview was on the reluctance of Yerevan to meet Baku’s demand to delete articles of its Constitution that lay claim to parts of Azerbaijan’s territory.

This, of course, was an issue for around 3 decades in ‘Northern Ireland’ before a peace settlement and functional formula was found for a comprehensive political settlement.

The Irish State asserted a Constitutional claim on the 6 Counties that had been included in ‘Northern Ireland’ claiming them as de jure as part of the Irish national territory. Britain had created the statelet of ‘Northern Ireland’, seperated from the Irish State, in 1920 for various political, economic and strategic reasons. The official position was that it reflected a national division on the island between the pro-British Ulster Protestants, who were a two-thirds majority within this area, and the majority Irish Catholic population on the bulk of the island.

Britain largely ignored the Irish Constitutional claim between 1937 and 1969. It wished to preserve an Irish desire to Irish re-unification so that leverage could be exerted on the new Irish State which the British had reluctantly conceded in 1921 and which it did not want to become independent. Ireland had little capacity for military resistance to the British Empire and it was decided to let the Irish have their dreams, which could not become a reality. The Irish Constitutional claim was, however, provocative to the Ulster Protestants of the North-East who saw it as a threat to their continued separate existence.

The main problem for the Ulster Protestants was that one-third of the population of ‘Northern Ireland’ was Catholic and Irish and never wanted to live in ‘Northern Ireland’ under the eternal dominance of people who were very different in character to them. It was the role of the two-thirds Protestants to repress the one-third Catholics through a one-party government and extensive security forces. However, in August 1969 after a campaign for equal rights by the Northern Catholics, the Ulster Unionists went berserk and provoked a 28 year insurrection among the Northern Catholics, generating the Provisional IRA.

It was this insurrection and Britain’s desire to stem it through a political settlement which made the Southern Irish State’s Constitutional claim an issue that had to be addressed from the time of the first attempted settlement in 1973-4.

It should be apparent from this account that there are complexities to the Irish issue which are very different from the situation in the South Caucasus.

The issue of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Republic’s Constitution which, prior to 1998, claimed jurisdiction over the 6 North East Counties which compose ‘Northern Ireland’ were the main issue of Ambassador Sharp’s interview with Orkhan Amashov. The former British Ambassador was very diplomatic on this score, as we expect British diplomats to be. He did not mention that the offending Articles in the Irish Constitution undoubtedly subverted a previous peace deal known as Sunningdale in 1974, when their confirmation in a Dublin court case helped fuel a loyalist strike which brought down the power-sharing executive.

The lack of an Armenian population in Karabakh has somewhat undermined the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement as a model for a peace settlement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Ulster Protestant population never attempted to expel the Catholic population from ‘Northern Ireland’ as the Karabakh Armenians did to the 750,000 Azerbaijanis living in the occupied terrirories during the course of the 1991-94. And now the Karabakh Armenians have voluntarily left the territory rather than submit and live under the jurisdiction of Baku. The 1998 Agreement was mainly aimed at making life liveable for the minority Catholic Irish population in ‘Northern Ireland.’ It has succeeded in this, with the minority now approaching a majority and its main political expression, Sinn Fein, being the biggest political force in the territory, both in the local Assembly and at Westminster.

In 2023, three years after the 2020 liberation war which recovered the bulk of Azerbaijani territory, almost the entire Armenian population up and left what it saw as its historic homeland in the highlands of Karabakh. It is certainly true that Azerbaijan put the seperatist population, who numbered about 65,000 within an Azerbaijan state of 10 million, under a 2 year squeeze in order to encourage them to become normal citizens of the state. However, it appears that a mass exodus, encouraged by their leaders, was preferable to the Armenian population rather than the prospect of becoming equal citizens within Azerbaijan. Whether they will return is an open question.

Eric Hacopian of the California-based Armenian media station CivilNet recently conducted an interview with the US/Armenian historian Ronald Grigor Suny. Suny is a thoughtful man with a good and wide-ranging understanding of world affairs.

During the course of the interview Hacopian referred to the “recent ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by Azerbaijan” against Karabakh Armenians. Suny, however, objected to Hacopian’s use of the term genocide in relation to the recent conflict. There “had been no mass killing of Armenians” by Azerbaijan he logically stated. And he respectfully told Hacopian that if he wanted to find genocide he should look elsewhere in the world:

“Look at American foreign policy in the Gaza War – which is a genocide right before our eyes. That’s what a genocide looks like, you know, with tens of thousands of women and children killed by Israel so that the society of Palestine cannot reproduce itself. And the Americans are complicit in that!”

Where Suny was on less solid ground was in describing what happened last year in Karabakh as “ethnic cleansing” and “a crime against humanity” on the basis that Azerbaijan had conducted “the elimination of a place, an entity, where Armenians had lived for millennia”. But in doing so he said something very interesting about the West’s and Russia’s response to the Azerbaijani military operation that was followed by the Armenian exodus:

“We see that the West has not seriously condemned it. OK, France has sent some weapons to Armenia but where is the U.S.? When an autocratic state destroyed Karabakh in a war against a democratic state and ethnically cleansed that enclave the United States did nothing. Right, so we’re fighting a war in Ukraine for democracy, we’re going to defend democracy within the international rule-based order, which is the rules-based order invented by the Americans based on the idea that no one should do anything unless the Americans let you do it and Americans can do whatever they want, when they want, invading different countries whenever they want. So it’s not particularly rules-based for everybody, but the fact that we, the West, didn’t act more strongly and both great powers, Russia and the United States, did nothing and Russia betrayed one of its most loyal allies, Armenia, and the United States looked the other way… means that Armenia is in a very difficult position now.”

While this statement is generally factual it has one fatal flaw: While Suny is correct to point to the hypocrisy inherent in the US “rules based international order” it is undeniable that Karabakh is universally recognised as part of Azerbaijan – by the West, Russia and indeed by all of Yerevan’s governments from 1991 to the present day. Therefore, it would have been very difficult for the US to have made war on Azerbaijan, on behalf of an unrecognised, illegal separatist regime, when Baku was simply imposing its internationally-recognised sovereignty on its own territory.

The only possible scenario in which a US intervention might have occurred would have been in a situation where large numbers of Karabakh Armenians were being killed and Armenian propaganda suceeded in making this a cause celebre in the West. And the Azerbaijan Government was very careful to avoid such a situation. The West, therefore, whilst it issued some condemnatory statements to pacify the Armenian diaspora, which is important in some areas of the US and France, did not consider what Azerbaijan did either ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It was seen to be in the Western interest that Nagorno-Karabakh should disappear. It was a Russian creation after all, and a possible source of Moscow influence in the region and had no lawful legitimacy. There was no reason for the West to defend it.

As for Russia – it also was keen not to offend against international law, particularly after its reluctant intervention in Ukraine, where full-blown war was disguised and attempted to be avoided through a limited “special military intervention.” Putin judged the breaking of international law and his challenge to the US “rules based international order” as an unfortunate necessity for Russian national security. Despite what Western propaganda might say, he knew of the dire implications of doing this but judged that by not doing it there would ultimately develop an existential crisis for the Russian state from a heavily armed Ukraine within NATO.

Putin was not likely to repeat such a thing merely to play the balance of power in the South Caucasus, and Baku judged this perfectly when it moved against the last separatist remnant in 2023, with Moscow’s co-operation. Armenians did not understand this, and they have been crying their eyes out ever since about the betrayal of their “historic Russian ally” – forgetting the old maxim that states have interests rather than friends, of the forever kind.

In the preamble of Armenia’s Constitution, it states:

“The Armenian people, based on the fundamental principles of Armenian statehood and national goals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of Armenia, having fulfilled the sacred covenant of their freedom-loving ancestors for the restoration of sovereign statehood, committed to the cause of strengthening and developing the Homeland in order to ensure freedom, common prosperity, and civil harmony for future generations, affirming their commitment to universal human values, adopt the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia.”

The Declaration of Independence of Armenia, adopted on August 23, 1990, contains a direct territorial claim on the territory of Azerbaijan. The first paragraph of the aforementioned Declaration is as follows:

“The Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR, expressing the unified will of the Armenian people, acknowledging its responsibility for the fate of the Armenian people in fulfilling the aspirations of all Armenians and restoring historical justice, based on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and universally recognized norms of international law, implementing the right of nations to free self-determination, based on the joint Resolution of the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR and the National Council of Nagorno-Karabakh of December 1, 1989, ‘On the Reunification of the Armenian SSR and Nagorno-Karabakh,’ developing democratic traditions of the independent Republic of Armenia, formed on May 28, 1918, with the aim of creating a democratic, legal society, proclaims: The beginning of the process of affirming independent statehood.”

Suny made an informative comment about the current position of Pashinyan:

“There is a neccessity for peace, particularly for Armenia. There is less of a motivation, or neccesity, for Baku, to make peace… If peace is necessary for the Armenian Government we will see it making concessions of all kinds – whatever concessions can be made without destroying its own sovereignty. That’s a very delicate and difficult line to manoeuvre along and I think the Pashinyan Government is trying to do that but every step it takes – even though it was re-elected after losing a war, which is an amazing thing – can create trouble in Armenian civil society… Pashinyan faces a dillemma. If Pashinyan wants to try to move and make the concessions he feels are necessary with Azerbaijan he is thwarting this civil society, and the popular movement that doesn’t want him to make those concessions and wants to get rid of him. So Pashinyan is in a difficult position. But I don’t see an alternative for a state that has been defeated. Defeat, just like the victory of 1994, has consequences which we will have to deal with.”

Suny went on to say how the victory of 1994 had been squandered by Armenia. It had territorial consequences that needed to be addressed in the extravagence of the victory and Armenia failed to deal with Azerbaijan when it had an advantage of securing something like negotiated autonomy for the Karabakh Armenians. In forcing a war on Azerbaijan to recover its lost territory Armenia had played for all or nothing and ended with nothing.

Mr Pashinyan now certainly needs a deal that gives something positive to Armenia in terms of peace, trade and prosperity and would ideally prefer it before carring out any alteration to the Armenian Constitution. But the Armenian Constitution is provocative and outdated, and an offence to international law and Azerbaijan’s sovereignty, so that makes this unlikely. Pashinyan has indicated on a number of occasions he desires a new Constitution for Armenia, but his problem lies in bringing this about. To copperfasten and make for an enduring treaty settlement with Azerbaijan the Armenian public does need to be brought along with an all-encompassing deal, with a validating referendum.

In 1998 the Irish Government agreed to amend the Republic’s Constitution as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The claim was turned into an aspiration. The sequencing, as Mr Sharp noted, was very important. Basically a referendum was held in the aftermath of the publication of the Agreement, in which 90 percent of the Irish Republic’s population agreed to the amending of the Constitution.

Peace was brought to ‘Northern Ireland’ with great difficulty. It took the best part of 30 years, with the peace process itself stretching over a decade! The ‘Northern Ireland’ example suggests that an agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia has to run in parallel and be carefully synchronised with the deletion of the Armenian Constitutional claim over Azerbaijani territory.

This might involve Pashinyan making a formal public declaration that he was in favour of the deletion of the Constitutional claim and setting a time period for a referendum to be held after the details of an agreement were agreed and made public, but prior to its formal signing and ratification. This would give Pashinyan leverage domestically and particularly against the hardline diaspora. At this point, in my opinion, he needs to be helped. There is a point at which the tough approach, which has undoubtedly paid dividends up to the present, has to give way to a collaborative effort for peace.

The situation, therefore, confronting the Armenian people would be to accept a final settlement that promises them peace, security and economic prosperity or reject it in favour of failed irredentism that has got them nowhere over the course of a century. It would be a take it or leave it moment that concentrated minds. If such a deal was agreed and legitimised through referendum, with international guarantors – ideally the US, EU, Turkiye and Russia – it would undoubtedly be all but impervious to die-hard opposition.

While there are important differences between the ‘Northern Ireland’ peace process and that in the South Caucasus there are also some things that can be learnt from the Irish experience.