Aravot, Yerevan, in Armenian
17 Nov 04

Karabakh peace process “officially” dead, says Armenian paper

by Tigran Avetisyan’s “The process has died”

It can already be boldly stated that the Karabakh negotiating process
has “officially” failed. Actually the process failed long ago, but if
over recent years the parties to the conflict were trying to create
an illusion of dialogue, now mutual official statements talk about
the inexpedience of continuing the negotiations. Such statements by
different top officials in Baku are not new. But only yesterday did
the Armenian party officially announce the final failure of the
negotiations and Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan talk about
this failure. “If Baku continues asserting that the NKR Nagornyy
Karabakh Republic resolution should be adopted in the UN, and if this
resolution is, nevertheless, adopted, in that case the situation in
the negotiating process will radically change. Actually in that case
Azerbaijan should negotiate with Nagornyy Karabakh,” Vardan Oskanyan
said. In fact he officially announced the death of the negotiating
process, which is in deadlock.

Let us note that Oskanyan’s statement is not thunder in a cloudless
sky and has a “prehistory”. Two days ago at the press conference with
the Estonian president Armenian President Robert Kocharyan expressed
pessimism on the prospects for a settlement, complaining about the
incorrectness of the negotiating format (i.e. the absence of the
Karabakh party) and uncompromising position of Azerbaijan. It is
worth mentioning that this format did not seem wrong to Kocharyan
when, some years ago, he was accepting an award from Jacques Chirac’s
hand in Paris or was enjoying a walk on Key West beach. And if we add
to this Defence Minister Serzh Sarkisyan’s idea that he has already
lost “hope of achieving success” in the negotiations, it becomes
clear that Oskanyan’s statement was simply the final chord of the
political decision, according to which the failure of the
negotiations is officially announced.

It is absurd to think that, listening to Oskanyan, Baku will
immediately withdraw from the UN its application to discuss the
problem of the “occupied territories”. Moreover, recently Azerbaijan
has been more active on the conflict in other international instances
(for instance in the Hague court) and aspires to discuss the problem
in another format, which Azeri Foreign Minister Mammadyarov announced
recently. So what? War? Maybe not immediately and in a slightly
different form?