V. KAZIMIROV: SERIOUS GROUNDS FOR COMPROMISES CAN BE CREATED ONLY IN
CASE OF EXCLUSION OF DANGER OF NEW WAR
YEREVAN, JANUARY 15, NOYAN TAPAN. An international conference under the
title Wider Black Sea Region: Prospects of International and Regional
Security is being held on January 14-15 in Yerevan. The conference has
been organized by the group of Armenian international economic
researches. Experts from the U.S., Europe and regional countries,
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey take part in the conference. Peter Semneby,
the Special Representative of the European Union (EU) for the South
Caucasus, made a greeting speech at the event. Matthew Bryza, the U.S.
Co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group, will make a speech on January 15.
Vladimir Kazimirov, a former Russian Co-chairman, said in his speech
that the unsettled Nagorno Karabakh problem, the state of "neither war
nor peace" is a serious threat to the Black Sea region’s security and
stability.
According to him, among the conflict parties, for Armenians, the
priority is the NKR status, for Azeris the return of territories and
refugees, while the international community’s priority is not to permit
a new war. And there are many bases for it, two of which are peculiar
to the very conflict: the necessity to stop the bloodshed chain between
Azeris and Armenians and Baku’s voiced striving for war and revenge.
According to Kazimirov, official Baku’s bellicose statements and sowing
of hatred to Armenians, abrupt increase of the military budget,
double-faced attitude to incidents happening on the contact-line and
turning down any contacts with Armenians are worthy of not only
discussion, but also condemnation. Kazimirov said that the presidential
elections in Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and the United States, as
well as the Kosovo problem exclude a real shift in the Nagorno Karabakh
settlement, but the international community and first of all OSCE
should use this "window" to oppose the above mentioned negative
phenomena.
V. Kazimirov said that OSCE should roughly counteract to everything,
which hampers its mission of peaceful settlement of the conflict, which
the organization has assumed with the consent of the conflict parties.
He affirmed that serious grounds can be created for compromises only
after excluding the danger of resuming military operations. For this
purpose, according to him, the parties should be suggested signing an
agreement on the lack of an alternative to the peaceful settlement.
According to V. Kazimirov, the Armenian party should be more full of
initiative. According to him, this also concerns Stepanakert, which de
facto has a possibility of becoming a negotiations party.