Nagorno Karabakh: Polls Closed
Polls in today’s presidential election in the self-declared Republic of Nagorno Karabakh closed some four hours ago and those interested in the result will have to wait until tomorrow before the outcome is known. Actually, most people are expecting Bako Sahakian, the candidate favored by the outgoing president, to have won, but the main issue for most election-watchers is how clean was the vote?
Compared to Armenia and Azerbaijan, I think most people believe it was quite clean in former Soviet terms, although that is not to say that problems didn’t occur. According to PanArmenian.net, 76.25 percent of voters took part which sounds a little too high to me given what most analysts think the real population of Karabakh is, but anyway, nobody is saying anything to the contrary yet.
RFE/RL has more on the conduct of today’s vote.
Polls closed across Nagorno-Karabakh late Thursday in a presidential election which is widely expected to formalize the handover of power from the unrecognized republic’s outgoing President Arkady Ghukasian to his preferred successor backed by some of his political opponents.
According to the local Central Election Commission (CEC), almost two-thirds of Karabakh’s 90,000 eligible voters cast their ballots as of 5 p.m. local time. The CEC is due to release the preliminary vote results within 24 hours by Friday evening.
“Once again the people of Nagorno-Karabakh have confirmed their support for democratic values,” Bako Sahakian, the presumed election frontrunner backed by Ghukasian and the main local political parties, told reporters at a polling station in Stepanakert. “For us, elections are a way of forming civil society.”
However, Sahakian’s main challenger, Masis Mayilian, already alleged vote irregularities after casting his ballot in another Stepanakert precinct in the morning. His campaign headquarters lodged more than a dozen written complaints detailing alleged irregularities to the CEC by the time voting drew to close at 8 p.m.
Both Ghukasian and Sahakian were quick to reject the allegations as “black PR,” saying that the elections are free and fair. “I regret that black PR, dirty political techniques have been brought to Karabakh from Armenia,” said Ghukasian. “I am convinced that the vast majority of those complaints do not correspond to reality.”
But as Sergey Nasibian, the CEC chairman, said later in the day, some of the alleged irregularities, including an attempt at multiple voting in one polling station, were found to have taken place. Nasibian said the CEC will closely look into the other claims made by the Mayilian camp.
Not surprisingly, along with the OSCE, European Union and NATO, Moslem countries, have condemned the vote and it’s not hard to understand why. Karabakh is a disputed territory populated by Christian ethnic Armenians which broke away from Moslem Azerbaijan and declared independence in the early 1990s. In the blogosphere, it is western criticism of the election that concerns Observer more.
Not going into further discussion about the quality of elections held in NKR I can say that the general perception so far is, that they are at least better then those held in Armenia or Azerbaijan - the two neighboring countries. However, even before the elections are completed, various countries and international organizations have already declared, that they do not recognize the elections.
[…]
There are people living in the territory called Nagorno-Karabakh, and even if the world doesn’t recognize it as a state, there has to be some kind of authority over those people. Isn’t it better, when this authority is elected democratically? Why would the champions of democracy in the world: US and NATO be so negative about democracy? The stakes are too high, so we leave the sweet words about freedom and support our interests only, right? Isn’t that what their negative announcements have just demonstrated? And isn’t this hypocrisy in the words and actions of the US foreign policy, that turns even the good friends into enemies across the world?
According to RFE/RL’s Press Review, the same theme is picked up by some of Armenia’s newspapers although there is some disagreement on the issue.
“Hayots Ashkhar” slams the international community for its criticism of the Karabakh presidential election. “The impression is that the entire world is fixated on a small people who have won their freedom on their own,” writes the paper. “The reason for all this is not Azerbaijan’s increased international prestige or petrodollars. The NKR presidential elections have simply coincided with a historic moment, becoming a temporary hostage of the Western community’s efforts to grant Kosovo independence.” The paper says international recognition of Kosovo’s secession from Serbia will automatically eliminate the “legal grounds” for the non-recognition of the legitimacy of the Karabakh vote.
According to “168 Zham,” for all its criticism, the international community does care about the freedom and fairness of the Karabakh election. “And that is why many international observers have arrived in Karabakh to monitor the course of the election on the spot,” says the paper.
So far, I can’t find any Azerbaijani bloggers covering the election, with Global Voices saying that coverage is mainly restricted to the Armenian blogosphere. Regardless, nobody is expecting much fallout from this vote, and few are suspecting any internal dissent in Karabakh itself. By all accounts so far, the conduct of the vote appears to be once again much cleaner than in the immediate region.
Remember, I’m talking in relative terms. For example, evolving democracies need an opposition, and there was none in Karabakh for this election so to speak. In fact, you could probably argue that the two main candidates were pro-government, or at least from the same political camp, even if the authorities decided to back one of them. EurasiaNet has more on this aspect to the vote.
The contest has been depicted by some Western analysts as yet another regional show-down between relatively conservative, pro-Russian forces and relatively liberal, pro-Western forces. The concept of such a rivalry is largely rejected within Karabakh itself, however. “Russia is very far from Nagorno-Karabakh,” commented de facto President Ghukassian said in an interview July 18. Most people interviewed in Karabakh characterized the race as a test of the territory’s ability to show the outside world that it possessed the democratic credentials to fend for itself.
The Mailian camp argues that this election was actually damaging to Karabakh’s democratic image, pointing out that all four parties represented in Nagorno-Karabakh’s National Assembly – including the opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutiun and Movement 88 –endorsed Saakian. The incumbent president, Ghukassian, also backed Saakian to be his successor. In addition, Mailian supporters have complained that so-called administrative resources were deployed to promote Saakian’s candidacy. The alleged election violations on behalf of Saakian included phone tapping, biased television coverage and intimidation tactics.
De facto President Ghukassian, however, rejects the allegations, insisting that his endorsement was made “as a citizen, not as a president” and was driven by Saakian’s “unique organizational capabilities,” his “sense of responsibility” and his unchanging “principles.”
“Even those opposition forces that were fighting against me have united around Bako Saakian, and it’s doubtful that my word could be decisive for them,” he said with a smile. “The process itself went on outside of my influence.”
Artur Mosian, chairman of the opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation in Karabakh, maintained there was nothing illogical about the opposition’s decision to side with the two pro-government parties, the Democratic Party of Artsakh and the Azat Hayrenik Party. The move was sparked, he said, by the realization that “many of our worst internal and external problems” could be solved together with Saakian.
“What are we in opposition to? The new president hasn’t been elected yet, the government hasn’t been formed,” Mosian said. “If you think that [Saakian’s] a pro-government candidate, well, they’re all pro-government candidates.”
Incidentally, while we wait for the results of the vote to be declared, EurasiaNet has a photo story from today’s election here.
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