FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTER BERNARD KOUCHNER ON NKR
Nikolay Hovanisian

Azat Artsakh Daily, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh [NKR]
04 June 07

In 1995 the Center for International Development and Conflict
Management at the University of Maryland, U.S. started to work
out a program entitled " Partners in Conflict: Building Bridges to
Peace in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia.". The participants were
from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the United States and Israel. I
represented Armenia. In fact, the discussions were in the focus and
framework of interests of the U.S. Department of State, sometimes in
collaboration with the experts of Mason and Hopkins Universities. A
special thing about those discussions was that the American side
provided each participant with valuable documents and materials
in accordance with our profession and responsibility regarding the
program, which otherwise were then unavailable for experts outside
the United States. It was an opportunity to get some highly important
documents on the onset of the Karabakh conflict, the policies and
standpoints of other states on the conflict over Karabakh and its
resolution. One of the documents provided to me, a working document for
the UN Economic and Social Council drafted by human rights defenders
in Geneva in 1994, contained important facts, evidence, opinions on
the Karabakh issue. It holds that Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent
territories were part of Armenia for over 2000 years, and Azerbaijan
first claimed to this region in 1918 when it appeared as an independent
state. It is followed by a statement by Bernard Kouchner, the minister
of humanitarian affairs of France then, now the minister of foreign
affairs of France, he made in a news conference on March 8, 1992 in
Paris. He described the 6 km Lachin corridor separating Karabakh and
Armenia as nonsense, a political and geographic blunder. Apparently,
Kouchner knows the history of the Karabakh issue, the deal between
the Russian bolshevists and the Azerbaijani nationalists to divide
the Armenian territories.

Otherwise, he would not describe this deal due to which Karabakh
and Armenia lost direct border as nonsense and a political
blunder. Kouchner said this blunder should be corrected. He goes on
to state it is better to agree to change the borders than to kill
people. He made this statement during the military operation Koltso
by the Soviet and Azerbaijani military units, when thousands of
Armenians were killed and displaced, devastating a number of Armenian
villages. This important statement by the French minister was rare then
and suited with his theses on humanitarian intervention and sometimes
law should be eliminated to change law. He rejects arbitrary drawing of
borders and causing the death of people for the sake of these arbitrary
borders. He maintains that the territorial integrity stops being a
reasonable and fair law as soon as it becomes a law of slaughter of
people. Our findings were included in a collaboration published by the
University of Maryland in 1997 entitled "Ethnic Political Conflicts in
Transcaucasia. Their origins and ways of resolution". In the same year
we published a Russian book in Yerevan entitled "Karabakh Conflict:
Stages, Approaches, Ways of Resolution" and in 2004 we published a
book in English entitled "The Karabakh Problem: Through Hardship to
Freedom and Independence" which include the abovementioned materials
and contain Bernard Kouchner’s statements. 15 years have passes since
these statements, but he remains loyal to his abovementioned theses.