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11.07.2011

NAGORNO-KARABAKH BALANCES BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

   

By Haykaram Nahapetyan

The U.S. correspondent for the Public TV Company of Armenia and an analyst at Noravank, a scientific educational foundation based in Yerevan.

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 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.


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