The Rights of Armenian Residents Must Be at the Core of Boundary Determination Processes

The rights of Armenian residents must be the basis for decisions made during the boundary determination process, taking into account all past mistakes and ensuring that no rights are violated or ignored. This was stated by Armenia's Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan on his Facebook page, addressing the delimitation issue in Syunik.

"When (Red) Kurdistan was established in 1923, disputes over the borders with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) particularly escalated. The main concerns raised by the residents of Zangezur at that time were the rights of villagers regarding lands, winter and summer pastures, and gardens. For instance, in a report prepared in October 1925 by the land commission chair A. Yerznkyan concerning the areas west of the border with Meghri and Karyagin (Jabrayil), it was indicated that those lands were predominantly winter pastures used by the residents of villages without grasslands in the regions of Kapan and Meghri. One of the main reasons given was that without these pastures, livestock farming in those villages would be paralyzed.

In another example, the head of the local commission for border demarcation between the Zangezur and Kurdistan provinces, Y. Kochetkov, based his refusal of Azerbaijani proposals regarding the village of Tghut on the fact that it is one of the areas of Shvanidzor, and the lands (gardens and pastures) there are so intertwined that separating these villages from each other would be impossible.

The same disputes regarding the rights of villagers have also occurred between Kapan and Zangelan, and Khuznavor and Azerbaijani villages. The materials from the work of the local and particularly the central commission of the ASSR that resolved border disputes in 1924, 1926, 1929, 1935, and subsequent years show that the rights of ASSR villagers were often inadequately addressed. For example, the scarcity of land in Zangezur and the connections between villages (administrative, economic, etc.) were ignored, and the potential difficulties that could arise regarding the rights of village residents were not taken into account.

Full attention was not given to the security issues of villages (including attacks from bandit groups from the territory of Kurdistan on Armenian villages, thefts, etc.), which directly impacted the use of pastures and other lands by villagers (for instance, in 1929, 21 villages in the basin of the Vojhi and Basut rivers near Kapan were handed over to Azerbaijan's Jabrayil province as per the resolution of the Presidium of the ACP(b) Central Committee).

All of this once again confirms that the rights of Armenian residents must be the basis of the decisions in the boundary determination process, taking into account all past mistakes, learning the necessary lessons, and ensuring that violations or neglect of rights do not occur," Tatoyan wrote.