NATO Summit: Armenian president slams Turkish lobbying of
Karabakh-related document
ANALYSIS | 05.09.14 | 10:19
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By NAIRA HAYRUMYAN
ArmeniaNow correspondent
The NATO gathering in Newport, Wales, UK, provided another occasion
for a meeting between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Serzh
Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev. Their meeting on the sidelines of the NATO
summit this time was organized by United States Secretary of State
John Kerry.
Sargsyan’s participation in the summit was confirmed only several
hours before his actual departure to the UK on Wednesday evening.
According to experts, Armenia’s ally Russia could not approve
Sargsyan’s trip to the summit where Russia had not been invited and
where measures were to be worked out to counter Russia’s ambitions.
However, Sargsyan was not going to participate in the actual NATO
summit, where from non-members of the Alliance only the president of
Ukraine Petro Poroshenko had been invited. The Armenian president
instead held a bilateral meeting with French President Francois
Hollande, with whom he discussed the initiative of his French
counterpart of a trilateral meeting, Sargsyan-Aliyev-Hollande. In
addition, he participated in the meeting of heads of State and
government of NATO-member States and nations involved in International
Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan /ISAF/.
At that meeting, Sargsyan delivered a speech in which he noted that
Armenia knows all too well the price of both peace and security.
“Tomorrow in this room a document will be adopted that directly
concerns my people and peace in our region. There are two options –
either the document will adopt the language of the OSCE Minsk Group,
which is the only specialized international structure dealing with the
Nagorno-Karabakh problem … or will again succumb to lobbying by
another member state aimed at saving the face of our dictator neighbor
vis-a-vis his own people,” he said. “Believe me, that would not lead
to any positive results.”
The matter concerns the final declaration of the NATO summit. In 2010
and 2012, Sargsyan shunned attendance of the NATO summits in Lisbon
and Chicago, conditioning it by the fact that there was some wording
undesirable for the Armenian side in the final declarations. In
particular, due to the lobbying of Turkey, on the part of the Karabakh
settlement the declarations only referred to the principle of
territorial integrity, but had nothing about the principle of
self-determination of peoples.
Judging by the fact that Sargsyan agreed to go to the summit this
time, there could be some other formulations in the text of the
declaration. At least, the Armenian president may have received such
assurances from France and the United States.
Before the meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid a
visit to Baku, where he said that together with President Aliyev he
would do everything to include the Karabakh issue in the agenda of the
NATO summit and “urge NATO to fulfill its promises.” He did not
specify what promises he meant, but it is clear that the promise to
Erdogan was to repeat the text of the previous resolution.
It is also remarkable that before the summit, a fifth American state,
California, recognized the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic, and there are speculations that the issue of the recognition
of the Armenian Genocide is being discussed in the United States also
at the federal level.
Nevertheless, the official report on the Sargsyan-Aliyev-Kerry meeting
did not present any specific agreements.
In his statement, Secretary of State Kerry reiterated that a peaceful
settlement of the conflict has no alternative, noting the need to
avoid escalation of the situation and calling on the parties to find
mechanisms to reduce tensions and strengthen confidence-building
measures.
Kerry noted the importance of continuing negotiations within the OSCE
Minsk Group and expressed readiness to support the search for
solutions. The U.S. secretary of state, at the same time, stressed
that the political will of the sides is very important for the
peaceful settlement of the conflict.
The statement about the Minsk Group is important in the sense that on
August 10 Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi invited Sargsyan
and Aliyev and tried to bypass the Minsk Group in taking over the
initiative on settling the problem. This raised concerns with the
other two co-chairs of the Minsk Group, the United States and France,
that would not want to see a Karabakh settlement according to the
Russian scenario.