In a recent interview with Tert.am, Director of the Regional Studies Center Richard Giragosian commented upon the recent developments in the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) peace talks and his expectations of the meetings between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In his words, the peace proccess quickly accelerated especially after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s January 22 meeting with the Azerbaijani president on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Giragosian noted that almost after a month since the informal talks between the two leaders, the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group returned to the region to meet with separately with the Armenian and Azerbaijani officials. He cited the official statement issued after the talks with Prime Minister Pashinyan, highlighting the call for creating an “appropriate atmosphere” in the negotiation process and “implementing understandings on maintaining the ceasefire regime.”
“But despite a joint statement issued in an earlier meeting in Paris that called for ‘taking concrete measures to prepare the populations for peace,’ there has not been much progress in that direction. Moreover, looking at Azerbaijan, it seems that the reverse is true, as Baku has only tended to maintain its aggressive and negative rhetoric directed against Armenia and Artsakh.
“This was most evident in the ‘celebration’ of convicted murderer Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army officer who was serving a life sentence in a Hungarian prison after a Hungarian court had convicted Safarov of axe-murdering a sleeping Armenian officer, Gurgen Markarian, during a NATO training course in Budapest on 19 February 2004. The later extradition to Azerbaijani by the Hungarians quickly turned into an insulting farce, as the convicted murderer was welcomed as a “hero” by the Azerbaijani government once he landed in Baku,” he said adding that the axe-killer glorification as a hero makes clear that Azerbaijan has a lot to do to “prepare and not to poison its population”.
He also highlighted the Azerbaijani authorities’ repeated failures to abide by earlier promises to strengthen the confidence-building measures (CBMs). “First, the record of Azerbaijan’s promises is matched by its history of failing to meet its obligations. Promise have not been kept before and Baku has failed to fulfill its promises in recent years. This means that the international community needs to demand that Baku meet its expectations for CBMs. Second, such support for confidence-building measures should include all parties to the conflict, and Karabakh needs to be present and represented. There is no other way to expect CBMs to work,” he said.
As another important factor, Giragosian stressed the importance of the international community’s support.
“The international community needs to widen the audience, include more civil society participation and share information on the status of the peace talks, but also need to not impose any position of policy. The conflict can only be resolved by the parties themselves, and although international support and mediation is important and helpful, it is not the answer alone,” he added.