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Tatul Hakobyan

Yerevan-Baku: Diplomatic Exchange of Fire

Aliyev makes warlike calls from an occupied area of Martakert Kocharyan threatens to recognize NKR

"If the Karabakh negotiations reach a deadlock Armenia will recognize Nagorno Karabakh de jure ," President Robert Kocharyan stated on March 2 nd in a televised interview with the state-controlled TV channels of Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. Last November he told the Slovenian daily Delo in an interview that "if the negotiations exhaust themselves yielding no results, I do not rule out the recognition of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic by Armenia or the reunification of NKR with Armenia."

Ever since Levon Ter-Petrossian and his administration resigned, the Armenian authorities have periodically uttered similar threats. On June 17, 1998 Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian stated, "In the event that the problem is not solved in three or four years, the annexation of Nagorno Karabakh will be possible." Two days later the official representative of the Foreign Ministry of Russia, Vladimir Rakhmanin, retorted: "It will hardly be possible to draw the positions of the parties to the Karabakh conflict closer through the political blackmail to which the Armenian foreign minister has unfortunately resorted."

Influential political forces in Armenia have made use of President Kocharyan's statement - which was supposedly addressed to Ilham Aliyev, who had threatened on March 1 st yet another time to "return the occupied territories by all means, including the use of force - in different ways." Interestingly, Aliyev uttered his usual threats from what was for him an unusual spot-the Northern area of the Martakert region of Nagorno Karabakh, occupied by Azerbaijan since 1992.

The head of the parliamentary faction of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF/Dashnaksutyun), Levon Mkrtchyan, assessed Kocharyan's appearance positively: "The mere fact that Armenia has refrained from this move (recognizing NKR) over these years is already an expression of goodwill aimed at securing the continuity of the negotiating process and at finding a solution. The president of Armenia has responded to warlike statements. No one can intimidate us with the prospects of war," Mkrtchyan said.

The head of the Armenian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Tigran Torosyan, doesn't believe that the international community will perceive president Kocharyan's statement as an attempt by Yerevan at endangering the negotiating process. "The main purpose of the president's statement was indeed to draw attention to the fact that the negotiating process is being endangered through the fault of Azerbaijan. When negotiations fail, Azerbaijan's militant statements and threats against Armenia and Karabakh remain at the surface. Under these circumstances, Armenia will have no other choice-that is what President Kocharyan was referring to. It was a warning to prevent the negotiating process from coming to a halt," Torosyan said.

While Yerevan and Baku blamed each other for the failure of the Rambouillet negotiations and the international organizations expressed their regrets to the conflicting parties that this "window of opportunity" was not taken advantage of, Ilham Aliyev emphasized in his interview with Turkish NTV channel: "At present, we have two ways of solving the Karabakh conflict: Should we hurry and agree to any deal or proposal that doesn't please us or wait a bit longer and get better results? I support the second option."

The Armenian opposition has tended to blame both Aliyev and Kocharyan for the Karabakh settlement process or, rather, for not settling it. The secretary of the opposition parliamentary faction Ardarutyun (Justice), Victor Dallakyan, said, "Today a specter is haunting Armenia - the specter of the question 'war or peace?'.We are advocates of a dignified peace. The methodology of the negotiations has changed since 1998; they have turned into a territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, in fact, Kocharyan has tried to find justifications, and the existing contradictions between Kocharyan and Arkady Ghukasyan have been highlighted without reference to Ghukasyan's name."

Are there contradictions between the presidents of Armenia and Karabakh? A few days ago Arkady Ghukasyan stressed that there was only one way for Karabakh to join the negotiating process - Armenia should refuse to negotiate with Azerbaijan.

The Armenian president specified during his televised interview a number of arguments according to which Yerevan has defended Karabakh's interests more efficiently through his direct talks with Aliyev. "It is hard to compare the level of contacts by the president and the foreign minister of Armenia with the level of contacts by the president and the foreign minister of Karabakh. The involvement of the president of Armenia raises Armenia's responsibility for Karabakh to a different level," Kocharyan said, and continued, without mentioning any names, "Some recent statements show one thing - there are people who either don't understand these nuances or are trying to catch hold of something for some other aims."

An aide to the Nagorno Karabakh president, David Babayan, said that when Baku is ruining even the Armenia-Azerbaijan negotiating format, which "doesn't reflect the real nature of the Karabakh conflict", "there is no other alternative than the recognition of the independence of Karabakh by Armenia." Babayan believes that recognition will make it possible "to bring the settlement of the Karabakh conflict back onto its original track, i.e. into the framework of Baku-Stapanakert dialogue."

Former Armenian Foreign Minister Alexander Arzoumanian noted that "the negotiating process has again reached a deadlock and the Minsk group co-chairs have found themselves at a loss.I'm firmly convinced that the presidents of both countries are not ready to make compromises. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is the lack of legitimacy of Kocharyan and Aliyev. In other words, they don't enjoy enough popular support to be able to make painful compromises. The distortion of the negotiating format has had an impact as well, and Azerbaijan is making efforts to find backing in other forums, such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or the UN Security Council, and to exert pressure on Armenia by means of various resolutions, whereas Armenia is attempting to lay the blame at Azerbaijan's door," Arzoumanian said.

Current Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has hinted that when the Armenian National Movement was in power (in those years, by the way, Oskanian headed the Armenian delegation in negotiations), official Yerevan was looking for easier solutions. "What is on the negotiating table today is a more complex solution and requires serious compromises from the conflicting parties. Indeed, there were instances in the past when we pursued an easier solution which was opposed not by the international community but by our people," Oskanian said.

Alexander Arzoumanian maintained, "Eight years later the same step-by-step proposal is being discussed. Are we better off today? Was that the price that was required for returning to the same document? Who has profited, Azerbaijan or Armenia? I don't know, history will judge. We believed at that time that conditions were very favorable. Azerbaijan was just recovering from the war, it was in an uneasy internal situation, had lost a number of regions, had no ability to resume the war, its army was demoralized. Today the Azerbaijani army is rearming and renewing its equipment. If this keeps up the possibility of the resumption of military operations can't be ruled out."

Both Oskanian and Kocharyan have suggested without going into detail that in Rambouillet the parties were unable to reach agreement over one issue. It is assumed that this was the issue of the so-called "deferred referendum", that is, the withdrawal of Karabakh forces from the security zone, perhaps with the exception of the Kelbadjar and Lachin districts, in exchange for a referendum to be held in Nagorno Karabakh, but in ten to fifteen years. "If we try to provide an assessment of the process of settling conflicts in recent years we notice that all of them were settled in accordance with the principle of national self-determination," Kocharyan stated in his TV interview, citing referendums held in Eritrea and East Timor as examples. Kocharyan is convinced that too a referendum will be held in the Caucasus as well.

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