ArmInfo. It can be safely said that without taking into account the refugee aspect, all attempts to resolve the Karabakh conflict seem to be incomplete. If we are talking about occupation, then today, according to the UN, Azerbaijan is occupying the homes of 360 thousand Armenian refugees, and Armenia – 250 thousand of Azerbaijani ones. An Israeli public figure, publicist Avigdor Eskin, expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.
<Thus, during the conflict of the late eighties and early nineties, hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and shelters. This situation is completely different from the one when one side holds the territory of the other. All negotiations come down to the boundaries of retreat. While consideration of the topic of refugees reveals completely different ratios, suggesting a rather different balance. And why are humanitarian problems due to war less weighty than territorial ones? They give a new picture of the relationship between deprivation and suffering>, he stressed.
Eskin recalled that the negotiation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the war lasts more than a quarter century. Negotiations, however, did not bring peace to the peoples of the region. The main discussion framework is the schedule and measure of the retreat of the Armenian army from its current positions in favor of establishing Azerbaijan's sovereignty there. At a certain stage, Yerevan agreed to give the adjacent five regions, leaving itself strategically the most important two regions and Artsakh itself. However, a compromise has not been reached to this day.
According to Eskin, international conflict resolution documents are usually based on UN Security Council resolutions. Particularly often a reference is made to the resolution 822 of November 12, 1993. The formulations approved in this document are often used by Baku to manifest its own position. Meanwhile, any simple analysis of negotiation documents of all past years between Azerbaijan and Armenia, demonstrates that the lion's share of the time was devoted to discussing territorial disputes and security issues. At the same time, in his opinion, the answer is still hanging in the air to the question of whether it is possible to resolve the conflict fairly if, in addition to territorial and military aspects, it has also humanitarian one.
''The continued retention with the help of the Armenian army of the territories that were part of Soviet Azerbaijan before the war, is called occupation by Baku, and has become a common topic of discussion. However, is a territorial dispute the only and main topic? Is the fate of disadvantaged and tragically homeless people not a significant topic?>, Eskin wondered.
<Usually the matter concerns the rights and needs of Baku. Moreover, limiting everything only to the issue of territory and security, the current stalemate in the negotiations may become a chronic one. But if you look at the problem more broadly and take into account the factor of human suffering as a result of the war, a place opens up for creative diplomatic efforts. A just resolution of the conflict frozen a quarter century ago cannot be reduced to the formalism of the borders of the Soviet period. The settlement should begin by taking into account the human factor, which we tend to forget about, "concluded Eskin.