Armenia Facing Dilemma On Karabakh – Paper

Armenian newspaper 168 Zham, Yerevan
20 Jul 06

Text of report by Armen Bagdasaryan in Armenian newspaper 168 Zham
on 20 July headlined "Who is time working for?"

Discussions are under way on the future of the Karabakh settlement.
Two days ago, the leader of the National Democratic Union, Vazgen
Manukyan, said that time is working for Karabakh. Manukyan said that
Karabakh, which has been running its own affairs for 15 years now,
will never agree to be part of Azerbaijan.

In this sense, time is really working for Karabakh. But only in this
sense. It would be wrong to say that time is working for us on the
whole. The point is that there has been almost no growth in Karabakh’s
population over the past 10 years. The liberated territories have
not been populated either.

These are very important issues for us. Nagornyy Karabakh’s economy
has grown. But Karabakh cannot be compared with Azerbaijan in this
sense. If we want to see a more or less realistic picture of the
situation, we should compare Azerbaijan with Armenia, not with
Karabakh.

The pace of Azerbaijan’s economic development is faster than
Armenia’s. From a political point of view, time has not been working
for us either. Karabakh participated in the talks 10 years ago,
but now it does not.

What do we have now? It turned out that neither the Armenian nor
Karabakh population has grown in the past 10 years, no country has
recognized Karabakh’s independence, and Karabakh has been sidelined
from the talks.

In view of all this, can we say that time is working for us?

The point is that such a position is not an assessment of the past,
but is a programme of future steps. In other words, if time has been
working for us up until now, why do we need to resolve the issue as
soon as possible?

Vazgen Manukyan is also in favour of finding a quick settlement to
the conflict.

Obviously, Manukyan’s views are contradictory. He is forced to say
that time is working for us. Otherwise, he will have to admit that
[former Armenian President] Levon Ter-Petrosyan was right in 1997.
But since he is well aware of the conflict, he understands that our
positions are weakening, which is why we need to resolve the conflict
as soon as possible.

Now a few words about the status quo. In fact, our society is confused,
as it thinks that the status quo has been preserved thanks to our
policies.

Why did the 12 years of talks not yield any results? That is because
Azerbaijan has ruled out any option under which Karabakh can secede
from Azerbaijan even in theory. This means that the status quo has
been preserved not as a result of our policy, but that of Azerbaijan.

In a nutshell, Azerbaijan is in favour of preserving the status quo
today. Its number one task is to get Karabakh back. This is possible
only in a military way, and they need time to prepare for war. They
are preparing for war, and are happy to preserve the status quo until
they end their preparations.

As for us, we have to wait for the Azerbaijanis to finish their
preparatory work.

In fact, our authorities and society are facing a dilemma: should
we allow Azerbaijan to preserve the status quo as long as they want
and to better prepare for war, or should we force Azerbaijan to take
a step without preparing well? We think that the authorities and
politicians should consider this issue from this point of view.