International mediators to pressure Armenia over Karabakh – paper
Haykakan Zhamanak, Yerevan
2 Feb 05
Text of unattributed report by Armenian newspaper Haykakan Zhamanak on
2 February headlined “Cat’s game is death for mice”
While the OSCE’s mission is continuing to monitor the
liberated-occupied territories, political analysts are trying to guess
what consequences this may have for Armenia, Karabakh and for the
further settlement of the Karabakh issue on the whole.
There is a wrong approach against this background, according to which
the monitoring mission is conceived as an event. It would be more
correct to say that this is the beginning of a new process in the
Karabakh settlement which may take a long time and whose main purpose
is to gain a new lever to put pressure on the authorities of
Armenia. The fact that the OSCE monitoring mission has refused to
visit Shaumyan and Getashen districts shows that the authorities of
Armenia will be the main target of this pressure. Thus, the mission’s
report on the result of the monitoring will greatly depend on whether
the Armenian authorities will be able to assure the world community
that they are ready to settle the problem.
It is also important that assurances of the Armenian authorities are
not fragmentary and turn into a businesslike process. This logic
prompts that at the first stage the monitoring mission will
demonstrate that it acts solely within its mandate, i.e. it is only
trying to clarify to what extent Armenia has settled the
liberated-occupied territories, but their report could go beyond this
framework.
But due to the political necessity, members of the monitoring mission
will make revelations in their interviews and commentaries on the
topic “What I have seen in the occupied territories”. This will happen
if the OSCE is convinced that Armenia is not in a hurry to make
compromises. But in case Armenia continues to follow its “victorious”
policy, the members of the monitoring mission will make harsher
revelations. This will be followed by the second and third visits of
the mission to the region.
Incidentally, this is not a political complication, as the world
community has already fixed in several documents that the
liberated-occupied territories are an integral part of Azerbaijan.
That is, to return to these areas they only need new monitoring
themes suggested by Azerbaijan. In this case international documents
will contain provisions that will aim not to encourage the Armenian
authorities to be constructive but have quite a different purpose.