KARABAKH CONFLICT BELONGS TO "WORLD POLITICAL ELITE"

ARKA News Agency, Armenia
July 17 2007

YEREVAN, July 17. /ARKA/. The Karabakh conflict has stopped being a
conflict between the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) and Azerbaijan
and now belongs to "the world political elite", said Armen Ashotian,
member of the Board of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), member
of the RA Parliament.

Ashotian believes Karabakh is a front of a big geopolitical war being
waged by the superpowers.

He says "the world political elite" has a multilayered structure and
has various aims and tasks and it will neither intentionally aggravate,
nor resolve the conflict. Ashotian forecasts that the status quo will
be preserved.

Therefore, he considers it necessary to treat the NKR conflict as a
derivative of a range of problems.

Ashotian believes that the conflict cannot be solved in isolation
from a chain of problems that the superpowers have.

According to him, the geopolitical struggle of those countries for
influence is directly connected with the Karabakh conflict, as well
as with other ones.

The Karabakh conflict broke out in 1988 when Nagorno Karabakh, mainly
populated by Armenians, declared its independence from Azerbaijan.

On December 10, 1991, a few days after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, a referendum took place in Nagorno Karabakh, and the majority
of the population (99.89%) voted for independence from Azerbaijan.

Afterwards, large-scale military operations began, as a result of
which Azerbaijan lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven
regions adjacent to it.

On May 12, 1994 after the signing of the Bishkek cease-fire
agreement, the military operations, which took 15,000 human lives,
were stopped.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress