Electing Artsakh’s Parliament in 1991: Conditions and Composition

The upcoming general election in Artsakh, scheduled for March 31, will be unprecedented in a number of respects, most obviously in that for the first time presidential and parliamentary elections are held simultaneously. They are also unprecedented when it comes to the level of competitiveness, with a dozen or more campaigns vying both for the presidency and seats in the 33-person National Assembly. None of the campaigns can be called a favorite to win a majority of votes, so a second round in presidential voting and some kind of a coalition in parliament are the most likely outcomes.

In Artsakh’s political history there is only one precedent of an election where an outcome was similarly unpredictable: the first parliamentary election held in two rounds in December 1991 and January 1992. (Office of the president was not established in NKR until years later.)

The election was called four months after first Azerbaijan on August 30, then Nagorno Karabakh on September 2 and Armenia on September 21 declared their independence and just days after the Soviet dissolution on December 8.

The election was taking place in a deteriorating security situation. Surrounded on all sides by Azerbaijani-controlled territory, the newly-declared Nagorno Karabakh Republic was already engaged in fighting with Azerbaijan. Between September and December 1991 Nagorno Karabakh Self-Defense Forces managed to free a number of villages in Shaumyan and Hadrut districts that were captured by the Soviet army and Azerbaijani police during Operation Ring earlier that year. From mid-December Soviet security forces that helped keep Armenians and Azerbaijanis disengaged in and around Stepanakert were pulled out, resulting in escalation of fighting. Artsakh’s towns and villages were shelled during the voting.

The first round of voting was held on December 28 and second on January 4. NKR was organized into 81 electoral districts, of these six were majority Azerbaijani districts held by Azerbaijani forces, where voting did not take place. Of the remaining 75 seats, 25 were apportioned to Stepanakert and others to the districts: 7 – Askeran, 7 – Hadrut, 16 – Mardakert, 9 – Martuni, 4 – Shushi and 7 – Shaumyan.

The Executive Committee led by Leonard Petrosyan, Oleg Yesayan, Serzh Sargsyan and Robert Kocharyan, which was in de-facto control of NKR’s administration at the end of 1991 discovered that as a result of the vote, supporters of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks) won a majority in the newly formed parliament. In several rounds of voting, the local ARF leader Artur Mkrtchyan beat Kocharyan for the post of the president of the parliament. Reflecting disagreements between the two camps, Kocharyan refused to be elected Mkrtchyan’s deputy. Still, while Dashnaks were in charge of parliamentary leadership and effectively Artsakh’s ruling party, they shared power with the Executive Committee and Sargsyan remained the head of Self-Defense Forces.

What made the situation peculiar is that Dashnaks were in opposition to Armenia’s President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who in turn refused to congratulate Mkrtchyan on his election and, when he arrived in Yerevan soon after, even refused to meet with him. The principal disagreement was on policy: since his election as Armenia’s leader in 1990, Ter-Petrosyan agreed to rescind the Armenia-Artsakh union declaration of 1989 and negotiate for an internationally guaranteed Karabakh autonomy within Azerbaijan; ARF opposed this.

Just three months after his election, Mkrthyan died in a firearms accident and was succeeded by fellow ARF member Georgi Petrosyan. Following military setbacks and the loss of Shaumyan and most of Mardakert districts, Petrosyan agreed to delegate war-time powers to the newly-established State Defense Committee, appointing Kocharyan its head and NKR’s de-facto leader in August 1992.

Below is a list of members of NKR Parliament (1991-95):

The table is from NKR’s Central Election Committee web site