ARMENIA FACES DELAY TO JOINING MOSCOW-LED UNION
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
IWPR Caucasus Reporting #738
June 6 2014
Experts say that concerns about Nagorny Karabakh are hampering progress
towards accession.
By Tigran Gevorgyan – Caucasus
Armenia rejected closer ties with Europe last year and announced
instead that it was going to join the Moscow-led Customs Union,
but the accession progress is going slower than its leaders hoped.
Analysts say the delay may be linked to sensitivities over the disputed
territory of Nagorny Karabakh.
When President Serzh Sargsyan announced last September that Armenia
was hoping to become a membership of the Customs Union, that put an
end to plans for an Association Agreement with the European Union.
At a summit on May 29, the Customs Union’s three existing members –
Russia, Belarus and Kazakstan – formalised an agreement to build a
more comprehensive association, the Eurasian Economic Union, which
should come into being next year.
On the sidelines, one aspiring Customs Union member, Kyrgyzstan,
got approval to move forward to accession. (See Kyrgyzstan Gets Soft
Terms for Customs Union Entry. The other, Armenia, did not.
Shortly afterwards, Armenian deputy economy minister Karine Minasyan,
who had led the team negotiating entry, resigned. No explanation
was given.
Kazak president Nursultan Nazarbaev, who chaired the meeting in his
capital Astana, promised that Armenia’s membership application would
be considered by July.
Back home, President Sargsyan played down concerns over the deferred
progress towards membership.
“There are no obstacles in the way of Armenia joining the Customs
Union. There are two or three purely technical matters concerning our
trade relations,” Sargsyan told a gathering of his Republican Party
after the summit. He did not specify what these issues were.
Considering how confident officials had been about imminent accession,
Armenians were surprised at the delay.
Officials have now stopped making optimistic predictions about rapid
entry, and analysts have begun to question whether Russia, Belarus
and Kazakstan want Armenia to join at all.
“Moscow set itself the goal of stopping former Soviet republics
– Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia – from moving towards
Euro-Atlantic alliances. Now that it has managed to make Armenia turn
down deeper cooperation with Brussels, there is no need to hurry,”
Stepan Grigoryan, director of the Analytical Centre on Globalisation
and Regional Cooperation, told IWPR.
“The other members of the Customs Union – Kazakstan and Belarus –
are not delighted at the prospect of Armenia joining, since Armenia
will vote however the Kremlin wants it to. Apart from that, Armenia
joining the union would create problems, since it lacks a border with
the union and there is also the Karabakh conflict.”
Nagorny Karabakh has been run by a separate Armenian administration
since the war of the early 1990s, although it is still considered
part of Azerbaijan by the international community.
Although Armenia has not recognised Karabakh as an independent
state, the two share the same currency and banks, and there are no
border checks between them. If Armenia joined the Customs Union,
the distinctions could be so blurred that Karabakh might effectively
function within the trading bloc, too.
At the summit, Nazarbaev made it clear that this must not
happen. He made it clear to told Sargsyan that Karabakh had no
chance of being accepted into the grouping as only states with
internationally-recognised borders could join. Nor, he said, could
goods produced in Karabakh be traded as if they came from within the
common economic area.
He said Armenia should “behave in the way you did when joining the
World Trade Organisation, so as not to anger our friends in Azerbaijan,
along the borders recognised by the United Nations. This is how you
joined the WTO, so a precedent exists”.
Grigoryan, who previously represented Armenia in another Moscow-led
bloc, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, said he suspected
the Kazak leader was speaking for all three members when he expressed
reluctance to embrace Armenia immediately.
On returning to Yerevan, Sargsyan tried to play down the implications
of Nazarbaev’s comments.
“Of course Nazarbaev’s comments were unpleasant,” he said. “But this
does us no harm. And who said we were going to join the Customs
Union together with Karabakh? That won’t happen and can’t happen,
because Karabakh, by our own laws, is not part of Armenia.”
However, there is no sign that Armenia will agree to restrict the
movement of goods from Karabakh, or start treating them as different
from domestically-made ones. Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan said
two weeks before the Astana summit that this was a matter of national
security.
Analysts say that any moves to create divisions between Armenia and
Karabakh would be unpopular.
“This is a very dangerous development. For the first time since 1992,
there has been an attempt to separate Yerevan and Karabakh,” Ruben
Mehrabyan, an expert from the Centre for Political and International
Studies, told IWPR, referring to the year a land corridor was created
between Armenia and Karabakh as the war got under way.
“There is an attempt to change the status quo. This change is not
to our benefit, but it appears that the Armenian government is going
along with it.”
Opposition parties mounted a fierce attack on Sargsyan, with the
Armenian National Congress speaking of a diplomatic fiasco. The
Heritage party called on him to “immediately halt the process of
joining the Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union”.
Tigran Gevorgyan is a freelance journalist in Armenia.
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