INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY CLEARLY FAVORS STATUS QUO IN KARABAGH – ANALYST

news.az, Azerbaijan
March 25 2010

Helge Blakkisrud News.Az interviews Helge Blakkisrud, Visiting Scholar,
Institute for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, University
of California, Berkeley.

There is an opinion that the West after the war between Russia
and Georgia recognize already that the CIS as the area of Russia’s
influence. Do you believe with this?

No, the West will not officially accept the concept of exclusive
spheres of interests in the post-Soviet area.

Is competition between Russia and the West in the post-soviet area
the good for regional countries because it breaks Russia’s monopoly
or it makes more difficult the settlement of regional problems?

I would warn against depicting this as a ‘zero sum game’: what is ‘won’
by the West is not necessarily ‘lost’ by Russia. Such an understanding
is frequently implicit in Russian foreign policy, but should not form
the basis for our understanding of the processes currently taking
place in the post-Soviet area. In addition, it is misleading to
depict ‘the West’ as a unitary actor. The West is a conglomerate of
different states and organizations pursuing different agendas. This
is also the case in its approach to the post-Soviet space. To take
but one example, one can look at the internal discussions in NATO
about Georgian membership in this organization.

Do you think that the Karabagh settlement problem is the matter of
near or far future?

No, I do not see any quick solutions to the stalemate surrounding
the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh. The (partial) international
recognition of Kosovo caused some expectations about breaking the
long-lasting stalemates in the so-called frozen conflicts in Eurasia
(besides Nagorno-Karabakh, these include South Ossetia, Abkhazia
and Transnistria), but this window of opportunity was closed by the
2008 war in Georgia. Currently, both Baku and Stepanakert base their
strategy on an understanding of time working in their favor. As times
goes by, Azerbaijani authorities are getting less worried about the
Kosovo precedent being replicated in the South Caucasus and thus
less willing to consider a compromise, whereas the authorities in
Stepanakert believe that the longer they hold on to their de facto
independence, the harder it will be for Azerbaijani authorities to
reintegrate the territory.

Why the international community is not paying much attention to
this conflict?

The 1994 ceasefire transformed the Karabakh war into a frozen
conflict. Whereas the Minsk process so far has not produced concrete
results, this process is still going on. And in the meantime the
international community clearly favors status quo. The conflict has
also been overshadowed by other, more pressing conflicts, such as
the wars in Chechnya and Georgia.

Do you think real a new war between Azerbaijan and Armenia as it was
between Georgia and Russia in 2008?

I hope the war in Georgia, which in the end resulted in Tbilisi
losing any immediate hope of reintegrating the breakaway regions,
has demonstrated that a military approach to solving the so-called
frozen conflicts may easily backfire.

Aliyah Fridman News.Az