KARABAKH PEACE PROCESS: CLUTCHING AT STRAWS?
Institute for War & Peace Reporting, UK
IWPR Caucasus Reporting #728
March 20 2014
The resumption of high-level Azerbaijan-Armenian meetings is seen as
positive, but experts doubt 2014 will bring even incremental progress
in the long-running negotiations.
By Yekaterina Poghosyan, Shahin Rzayev – Caucasus
After a two-year lull, the prospect of a second meeting within four
months between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan looks like
progress, even if no one believes a breakthrough in the dispute over
Nagorny Karabakh is in sight.
Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan
met in Vienna in mid-November, and this was followed by a January
meeting between their foreign ministers in Paris. The two presidents
had not held face-to-face talks since January 2012.
Mediators from the OSCE’s Minsk Group then set about persuading
the two leaders to meet again, this time at a nuclear security event
taking place in The Hague on March 23-25. The Armenian website News.am
reported this week that the secretary of Armenia’s National Security
Council, Arthur Baghdasaryan, had confirmed the meeting was set to
take place.
A bitterly-fought war in the early 1990s ended with Nagorny
Karabakh and some adjoining territories under the control of an
Armenian administration, which continues to reject anything short of
self-determination and de jure separation from Azerbaijan in any final
settlement. The government in Baku insists that it must ultimately
regain control over its sovereign territory. It refuses to deal with
the Karabakh leaders, so the talks process involves only the state
of Armenia.
The Minsk Group, chaired by United States, Russian and French
diplomats, has tried to keep the two governments talking about ways
towards a possible settlement. But since the Azerbaijani and Armenian
views of what that might entail remain poles apart, little progress
has been made over the 20 years since a ceasefire brought full-scale
warfare to a close.
Predictably, the November summit between Sargsyan and Aliev did
not point to a new way forward, but nor did it generate the kind of
recriminations that would have killed the chances of further diplomatic
moves. (SeeAzerbaijan-Armenia: No Meeting of Minds.)
Some experts have suggested that 2014 might offer a rare window of
opportunity for the two governments to engage in dialogue. Neither
Azerbaijan nor Armenia has an election coming up, so political leaders
on either side could conceivably mull possible concessions without
being denounced as unpatriotic.
According to Masis Mayilyan, head of the Civic Council for Foreign
Policy and Security in Nagorny Karabakh, “One might anticipate that,
now that the major electoral cycle has ended and serious domestic
political issues have been resolved, the [Minsk Group] co-chairs and
the two heads of state will be forced to address the resolution of
this conflict in a more active manner.”
In Azerbaijan, Kenan Guluzade, editor-in-chief of the Baku Post
newspaper, remained sceptical about the chances of even limited
progress this year.
“There have been plenty of these windows. This is not about
windows; it’s about a lack of any will to resolve things,” he told
IWPR. “I think that in the run-up to 2015, when Armenia will mark the
anniversary of the tragic events in the Ottoman Empire, the likelihood
of a compromise on Karabakh is going to be very slim.”
While the consensus among both Azerbaijani and Armenian experts is
that substantive progress remains highly unlikely, Sergei Minasyan,
deputy head of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, sees the dynamic
of negotiations as essential.
“We won’t see any clear results based on actual compromises, since
the two sides’ positions are too far apart. But the talks continue
because they are the only way for the two sides to support the fragile
ceasefire on the line of contact,” he said.
Dennis Sammut, director of the London-based organisation LINKS,
which has worked on Karabakh peace-building and conciliation over many
years, describes the November meeting between Aliev and Sargsyan as a
“positive and useful development”, but cautions that talks for the
sake of talks are not enough.
“There is a difference between talking and negotiating. You can
talk around in circles for decades without actually being engaged
in a constructive process of negotiation to resolve a problem,” he
told IWPR. “Certainly, now is the time not only to talk but also to
negotiate in good faith.”
The ceasefire both on the “line of contact” around Karabakh and along
the state border between Armenia and Azerbaijan is indeed tenuous,
with sporadic shootings that occasionally escalate to a point where
many fear a slide back to war. The most recent bout took place in the
second half of January (see this IWPR video debateon the implications).
For the duration of the Sochi Winter Olympics, there was a commitment
for Armenian and Azerbaijan to hold fire.
“Good news. The Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan re-committed to
respecting the NK ceasefire esp during Olympics,” Ambassador James
Warlick, the US co-chair of the Minsk Group, wrote on his Twitter
account on February 5.
On February 26, Azerbaijani media reported that an Armenian sniper
had killed Sergeant Kerem Nokhbaliyev.
“Media report the death of an Azerbaijan soldier along the border
with Armenia. What happened to the Olympic truce?” Ambassador Warlick
tweeted.
The Armenians, too, reported that gunfire from Azerbaijani positions
caused death and injury.
It has often been suggested that withdrawing dedicated snipers from
front-line positions would reduce casualties on both sides and thus
prevent sudden escalations in tensions. But the proposal is blocked
by profound mutual mistrust.
“Removing snipers is not a solution,” Farhad Mammadov, director of the
Azerbaijani president’s Centre of Strategic Studies, told IWPR. “It
would benefit the Armenians, since they want to freeze the conflict
and maintain the status quo.”
Over the years, upsurges in violence along the front lines have
generally subsided into the “normal” level of tension. But Dennis
Sammut warns against complacency.
“The situation around the Karabakh conflict remains volatile and we
must not underestimate the potential of an incident triggering more
serious consequences,” he said. “The year has not started well. There
have been too many incidents on the line of contact.”
Yekaterina Poghosyan is a reporter for the Mediamax news agency in
Yerevan. Shahin Rzayev is IWPR’s Azerbaijan country director.
From: Baghdasarian
http://iwpr.net/report-news/karabakh-peace-process-clutching-straws