Armenia, Azerbajan closer than they think on Karabakh – US envoy
As the Minsk Group turns 20, Armenia and Azerbaijan are 'Closer than they think' to settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the US envoy has said.
In an interview with the European Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the American co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Robert Bradtke highlighted the past years’ activities of the mission, considering it a factor promoting stability and channeling a dialogue between the parties.
“I think the Minsk Group has done three important things. First of all, it has helped be a factor for stability. It has helped defuse tensions. It has helped prevent the outbreak of another war, and when cease-fire violations occur - and they have occurred throughout this period, since 1994 - it has helped ensure that those cease-fire violations do not escalate into something more serious. The second thing the Minsk Group has done is be a channel for communication between and among the parties,” he said.
Another important achievement according to the diplomat, is the ability to develop a common basis for negotiations. He said that their activities in the past 5 years focused in particular on the development of the Basic Principles [which include the return of Armenian-occupied lands surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Baku’s control; the right of return for displaced persons; interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh with security and self-governance guarantees; a corridor linking Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh; and an agreement to determine the territory’s final legal status at some point in the future].
Asked whether the parties are closer to resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute today than they were in 1992, Bradtke said: “I think there's no question we're closer today than we were 20 years ago. I think the sides understand the basic elements of what a settlement should look like. They've articulated, and we've articulated with them, elements that are captured by the presidents in the joint statements they made at the summits in L'Aquila, in Muskoka, and last year in Deauville. Those elements, I think, are more clear now than they've ever been, and do represent real progress over where we were in 1992 or in 1994, when the cease-fire came into effect.”
Speaking of the June 2011 Kazan summit between the Armenian Azerbaijani and Russian leaders, the diplomat regretted to note that they saw no progress despite having great expectations.
“But that doesn't mean that everything is lost. It doesn't mean we don't have areas where the sides agree or that we can't still move forward from the work that has been done. It means we take a deep breath and look for ways to move forward. One of the challenges at this stage is the interrelationship among the steps [described in the Basic Principles document]. I really don't want to get into too much detail, because this is a sensitive negotiation, but that's really one of the challenges now. It's the sequencing and interrelationship of the steps that take place,” he said.
To the remark that Presidents Sargsyan and Aliyev expressed willingness, in the Sochi statement, for the OSCE to investigate cease-fire violations along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact, Bradtke responded: “This was something that they originally discussed last year. We have presented the sides with some of our ideas on how to do this. It's not a simple matter, again. We have given ideas to the sides and we discussed them when we were in the region just a couple of weeks ago. We've got some views back from them, but we continue to feel that there's more than needs to be done to elaborate this mechanism in a way that it might actually be able to contribute to increasing stability along the line of contact and along the front lines. We will be meeting as co-chairs in Vienna later this week before we meet with the OSCE Permanent Council. This will also give us a chance to discuss with the high-level planning group at the OSCE -- their military experts -- [and we will] get some input from them on this mechanism. So we will continue to work on this and try to develop ideas that the sides can agree upon.”
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