FORCE ‘DOESN’T GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT IN THE LONG RUN’
news.az
Nov 29 2011
Azerbaijan
News.Az interviews Clem McCartney, an independent consultant on
conflict, civil society and peace building.
How did you become involved in conflicts in the Caucasus? Were you
invited to the region by governments or NGOs?
My first involvement was back before the end of the Soviet Union. I
was asked to look at the situation with the Ingush in North Ossetia,
because someone there had thought there was a comparison that could
be made with the Northern Ireland conflict and the situation there. So
that was my very first visit to the Caucasus, in the late 1980s.
What do you think are the prospects for a Karabakh settlement?
One of the issues is that when you’ve got a stalemate, it’s very hard
to move out of a stalemate, and you’ve got a stalemate at the minute.
When you’ve got something you hold on to it, and it’s very difficult
to be open and flexible, because if you’re open and flexible you may
make your situation worse. But if you hold on to what you’ve got at
the moment, you may also in the long run make your situation more
difficult to sustain and maintain. You have a problem in that people
who have more or less got what they want, why should they change,
and you have other people who haven’t got anything of what they want
so why should they give up. In that sense, one of the things we found
in Northern Ireland was that the people who were, if you like, in
the majority and had something realized that they had to be flexible
now while they were strong, rather than wait until they became weaker
and then have to try to negotiate.
Do you think Karabakh has any chances for independence or will it
return to Azerbaijan?
It’s quite clear what the Karabakh people want, it’s pretty clear what
the people who were IDPs want, and the two governments – Azerbaijan
and Armenia – have got reasonably clear ideas of what they want. But
the question is whether one can satisfy all of those and in most cases
you can satisfy to some degree everybody, but underlying the immediate
solutions there are the concerns, so the underlying concerns are
what’s really important. Out of those concerns people have solutions,
so the Nagorno-Karabakh people say we want to be independent or to
be part of Armenia, the IDPs say we want our homes back, so for the
IDPs it has to remain part of Azerbaijan. If you can go behind all
of that and say, but what is really important here for the people,
why do the Nagorno-Karabakh people adopt the position they do,
can we look at how that can be protected – I know that people have
talked in these terms before – then you may find a s olution which
satisfies everybody. The positions at the moment are irreconcilable,
but the concerns may well be reconcilable. I think you have to have
all the options on the table and acknowledge that they’re valid –
they may not be ones that you agree with, but they are valid positions
for someone to take, given the reality that they observe.
Armenia used armed forces to occupy Karabakh and the seven Azerbaijani
districts surrounding it. If the peace negotiations fail, Azerbaijan
says it has the internationally recognized right to take its territory
back by force. What do you think of the possibility of a new war
over Karabakh?
There is always the possibility of a new war and obviously people
prepare for war as well as prepare for peace. But where I come from
you are much better off preparing for peace. There are very few wars
in the world that have solved a problem. They may have pushed it down
the line. You get what you want, but then you have to then hold on to
what you want and you can’t hold on to that interminably by force. I
don’t see force as an option that really gives you a sustainable
solution. Sometimes you feel provoked into going down that line but
it’s not necessarily the right line to go down. It very seldom gives
you really what you want in the long run. It’s part of my overall view
of the world that force doesn’t ever really give you the solution to
what you want.
You have great experience. Do you have any example when land seized
by war has been returned by peaceful means?
There are lots of examples where people have reached a resolution and
changed the status quo. Some of them are quite specific places. For
example, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea had declared itself
independent and was operating as an independent state. It eventually
reached an arrangement with the Papua New Guinea government whereby
it kind of came back in to Papua New Guinea. They did an interesting
process by which they looked at all their options and which would be
the best and it’s certainly worth considering. Bougainville didn’t have
another state that it could identify itself with. Aceh in Indonesia
was eventually given a great deal of autonomy by Indonesia, whereas
before that wasn’t an option and wasn’t considered as possible. There
are certainly shifts which take place where a government or a rebel
movement shift their ground and try to negotiate rather than hold on
to what they have.