NOT TO HAVE MORE VICTIMS
HAKOB BADALYAN

mments&pid=14997
13:46:51 – 27/08/2009

In Armenia the mindset has formed that those who are against ceding
territories in Karabakh are against the settlement, and those who speak
about the necessity of compromise and concession of the liberated
territories to Azerbaijan in return for the status of Karabakh or
the choice of it, are considered as supporters of settlement. Due to
this mindset there is a division between people who are reluctant to
resolve the Karabakh issue and people who want to resolve.

This division is obviously artificial, at least because the honesty
of the political forces adhering to one viewpoint or the other is
highly relative, and the public opinion is a secret because in Armenia
and Karabakh no serious and independent survey has been carried out
to understand finally what the society thinks about the process of
settlement of the Karabakh conflict, to know what the society wants,
why, how, what is a settlement in their vision, and so on. In this
sense, the division of the Armenian political sphere into those who
want settlement and those who do not want settlement is artificial,
and generally it is not known what Armenia wants.

It is not distinct what settlement of conflict means to Armenia
and Karabakh, the timing, the scale, the prospect, the purpose, the
meaning of settlement, whether the status quo is not a resolution
and why. After all, decades ago the issue had been solved when
Nagorno-Karabakh joined Azerbaijan with the status of an autonomous
region. At that time, not many seemed to protest, and even the
Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side for decades. But we know
what happened in 1988 or a little earlier. At that time the autonomous
region of Nagorno-Karabakh seemed to be protected by the Constitution
and legislation of the Soviet Union. But in the end there was a need
to protect the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh and to guarantee
the security of the people of Karabakh by weapon.

Maybe the international law is higher that the Soviet law by one degree
or several degrees. However, high or low, they have an essential
similarity, in both cases they are written on paper. Consequently,
there is no confidence that years after the present settlement of
the Karabakh conflict no serious threat to the security of the people
of Karabakh will occur, and the only guarantee of security will not
be weapon. Which is romanticism then? To trust paper and lay down
the "weapon", that is the liberated territories, or to keep that
strategic resource later not to have to guarantee security at the
cost of new victims?