Nagorno-Karabakh balances between peace and war
13:47 – 09.07.11
Haykaram Nahapetyan
Despite an agreement among the U.S., Russian and French presidents at
the G-8 summit in Deauville, France, that it is time for a peaceful
settlement to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian President
Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev failed to make
much progress when they met in Kazan, Russia, last week. U.S. State
Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland called the meeting
“disappointing,” though she added, the parties “had improved their
understanding on a number of issues.”
The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh has its roots in Soviet-era
boundaries that located the Armenian-populated enclave as an
autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1921. Since then, the
inhabitants have been demanding secession from Azerbaijan and a union
with neighboring Armenia. However, the modern period of conflict began
in 1988 with the Soviet Union’s democratization and perestroika, and
has escalated in the years since. In 1991, Nagorno-Karabakh declared
independence. One year later, Armenia took control of the Lachin
corridor connecting the province to Armenia geographically. The
majority of military hostilities ended in 1994, with Armenia
controlling the vast majority of the former autonomous enclave and
several adjacent districts referred to as a buffer zone.
Since then, negotiations mediated by the Minsk Group, co-chaired by
Russia, the U.S. and France, have centered on returning several
districts of the buffer zone to Azerbaijan in exchange for a mutually
satisfactory political status for Nagorno-Karabakh. Though Armenia and
Azerbaijan came close in 1997, 1999 and 2001, a final resolution has
never been reached.
“The basis of the negotiations is that nothing is agreed until
everything is agreed,” says Jeff Goldstein of the Open Society
Institute, who has been personally involved in the talks. “At the
Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations, very often agreeing on the first 90-95
percent of terms is not that hard. But there is always a hard core
that remains unresolved.”
And in the absence of a settlement, the standoff has at times flared
into border skirmishes that risk dragging the two sides into a
shooting war. According to the International Crisis Group, last year
Aliyev made at least 10 military threats relating to restarting
military operations in Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 2003, Azerbaijan has
increased its military budget 20-fold. And a few days ago, Aliyev
proclaimed at a military parade, “The war in Karabagh isn’t finished
yet.”
Tom de Waal, of the Carnegie Endowment foundation in Washington,
thinks the chance of war is increasing. “The Kazan meeting was
supposed to be ‘the moment.’ With every year it becomes easier to have
a war,” he said.
Sergey Markedonov, a Russian analyst at the Center for International
and Strategic Studies, does not anticipate military hostilities in
near future, however. Neither does Goldstein, “unless accidental shots
on the frontline unexpectedly rekindle a large-scale hostility,” he
says.
The conflict is complicated by the junction of multibillion-dollar
regional hydrocarbon projects that involve the geopolitical interests
of Russia and, to some extent, Turkey and Iran. Considering the events
of 2008, when Russia took advantage of Georgia’s attacks on South
Ossetia to change the facts on the ground there and in Abkhazia,
Washington-based analysts do not exclude the possibility that a
renewed Armenian-Azerbaijani clash in Nagorno-Karabakh may lead to a
similar scenario. Moscow may back up Yerevan, considering that Russia
has a military base in the country and that both parties are members
of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Though some
analysts argue that the treaty does not refer to Nagorno-Karabakh, but
rather the territory of the Republic of Armenia, there is no
definitive evidence either way.
Meanwhile, Russian Gen. Andrey Tretyak was described as saying that
Russia’s refusal to intervene last summer in Kyrgyzstan, also a CSTO
member, should not be seen as a precedent for Karabakh. This has led
some to conclude that Moscow may step in if war breaks out.
A new Caucasian war would jeopardize not just the existing oil and
natural gas pipelines — Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Erzurum – but
also the European Union’s Nabucco project, which is supposed to
deliver Central Asian and Azerbaijani gas to European markets.
The three Minsk Group co-chairmen have proposed that the resolution of
the conflict be based on three main principles: self-determination,
territorial integrity and the non-use of force. Yerevan and Baku still
have major disagreements about the first two principles. During a June
visit to Washington, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Eldar (Elmar)
Mamedyarov stated in a talk at the Atlantic Council that his country
is ready to acknowledge the right of self-determination of
Nargono-Karabakh’s Armenians without compromising Azerbaijan’s
territorial integrity. However, for Baku, autonomy does not mean
independence. From the Armenian perspective, Nagorno-Karabakh had
already established autonomy during the Communist era. “The
territorial integrity of Azerbaijani Republic has nothing to do with
Nagorno Karabagh, as [it] never was a part of independent Azerbaijan,”
says Robert Avetisyan, the representative of Nagorno-Karabakh to the
U.S.
The Armenian president has, however, offered to concede to the third
principle, relating to the non-use of force. “I propose, through you,
the media, to appeal to Azerbaijan to sign an agreement not to use
force,” Sargsyan said during an interview with Euronews. “And under
these conditions of trust we would begin the negotiations for a
settlement.”
However, with no progress at Kazan even on this proposal,
Nagorno-Karabagh continues to hang in the balance between war and
peace.
Tert.am
From: Baghdasarian