Armenia and Azerbaijan “pretending” to negotiate on Karabakh – newspaper

Aravot, Yerevan
28 Oct 04

Text of Tigran Avetisyan’s report in Armenian newspaper Aravot on 28
October headlined “We are living in exactly this way”

The so-called new stage of the Karabakh settlement process is acquiring
an interesting hue. Unlike the “Kocharyan-Aliyev Senior” period,
today’s process of negotiations is marked by uncertain, unclear
and semi-mystical hints from the parties and intermediaries. Baku
is always speaking about some reply from Yerevan, whereas here they
often repeat that the meetings of the two presidents have been “free”
till today, that is, with an agenda which obliges nothing.

Here is the “freshest” hint from Baku: “Azerbaijan is waiting for a
reply from Yerevan regarding continuation of the Karabakh settlement
negotiating process.” Yesterday [actually 26 October] Azerbaijan’s
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov made this statement. According to
him, in Astana President Robert Kocharyan took a break “to analyse the
results of the meetings” and now they are waiting for the continuation
of the negotiating process, which in fact at present depends on
Yerevan’s will. By the way, Mammadyarov again emphasized that “the
negotiations are aimed at the liberation of the seven Azerbaijani
districts occupied by Armenia and the return of refugees”. There is no
need to say that, despite the promises made or not made by Kocharyan,
the Armenian foreign minister will immediately reply to his Azerbaijani
counterpart that Kocharyan has nothing to analyse and that the Armenian
party is not at all responsible for continuation of the negotiations.

All this is like a children’s game, in which, let us note, the Russian
co-chairman [of the OSCE Minsk Group] Yuriy Merzlyakov also takes part
with pleasure. By the way, the latter managed to be noticed as giving
contradictory, sometimes even funny interviews, to the press. This is
how the Russian co-chairman commented on Mammadyarov’s statement:
“After the meeting of the presidents in Astana, when they were
telling the co-chairmen of the results of the meeting, the Armenian
president was always speaking. The Azerbaijani president seemed to
nod his head. I do not know how to understand this, every person may
understand this in his own way, as you see.”

The conclusion is the following: everybody is simply pretending
that there is a negotiating process and this strategy seems to be
advantageous to the parties at least at the moment. And we are living
in exactly this way, nodding to each other.