04/10/2013 10:50
Expert blog: Mediators couldn’t recover after ‘Kazan setback’
When responding to questions of MPs following his speech in the PACE, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan touched upon the negotiating process on Karabakh settlement, disclosing some details.
That Azerbaijan ruined the meeting in Kazan was known as long ago as June 2011, but the fact that Azerbaijan ‘approved’ the Madrid document in 2008 raises some questions. The fact is Azerbaijan has long said that he doesn’t know what document is being talked about. Moreover, instead of expressing its official position in response to the proposals, Azerbaijan has declared since 2007 that Armenia didn’t accept the submitted proposals.
Yet Armenia expressed its positive position on the document shortly after the presentation of the Madrid Proposals. And approval of that document means that the given side deems it possible to resolve the conflict based on these principles.
So it turns out that even at the time when Azerbaijan accepted the documents at meeting with the mediators, it avoided voicing its official position publicly. The reason is that the conflict resolution in the document was based on a number of principles, two of which ‘irritated’ Azerbaijan. The matter concerns the principles of peoples’ right to self-determination and non-use of force or threat of force. The only principle that ‘satisfied’ Azerbaijan was territorial integrity, on which the propaganda policy of Azerbaijan is constructed.
By the way, according to the established ‘rules of game’, these three principles and the six published elements form a single whole and their separation is doomed to fail.
In any case, prior to the Kazan meeting Azerbaijan assured the mediators that he saw no obstacles to signing of the document on the fundamental principles, assuming it as a basis, and continuing the negotiations, but in Kazan, Azerbaijan not only rejected the agreements, while putting forward ten new proposals, but also tried to dissociate itself from the document being negotiated on for 3-4 years. 2007-2011 were quite active years in terms of negotiations - in parallel with efforts of the mediators, trilateral meetings of the presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia were held with the mediation of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Of course, after the Kazan meeting, Azerbaijan tried to ‘put up resistance’ and find a way out of the situation, but everything was so obvious that even Azerbaijan’s ‘super efforts’ could not substantiate its behavior in Kazan. Yet the severest blow was delivered to the mediators who could not recover for a long time, although the political line of Azerbaijan was clear to Armenia initially.
It becomes clear from the Armenian president’s statements in the PACE that no new document has been presented to the sides since the Kazan meeting.