Minsk Group worked actively in 2017 despite specific outcomes – politician

The developments in the Nagorno-Karbakh (Artsakh) peace process been very active in the past year, with the international mediators periodically arranging meetings and issuing statements to address the dynamics in the negotiations, according to a politician.

“In 2017, we had over 10 statements by the co-chairs [of the OSCE Minsk Group], i.e. – one statement per month on average. So the co-chairmanship worked very actively in essence; it is a completely different matter what specific outcomes they practically achieved,” Karen Bekaryan, a lawmaker of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia and the president of the European Integration NGO, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

He noted that the negotiations focused basically on the deployment of monitoring mechanisms and further efforts towards relaxing tension along the Line of Contact.  

“Simultaneously, they worked towards breaking the political stalemate in the negotiations,” he said, stressing further the importance of re-establishing peace in the conflict zone (pursuant also to the Vienna and St Petersburg arrangements).

Bekaryan said he thinks that the more global regional, and international developments added to the tensions around Nagorno-Karabakh over the period, not contributing to any positive processes.

“If we consider the region in a broader context, we will see [more] hotbeds,” he said, pointing out to the anti-ISIS battle in Iraq and Syria and the United States’ counter-action against Iran.

As another serious concern, Bekaryan cited the Turkish-Azerbaijani attempts to isolate Armenia from regional projects.

Meantime he noted that the year was full of challenges also for Azerbaijan.  “All the international human rights organizations continue recording a regress in the country,” he said, citing the ECHR’s recent judgement against the Azerbaijani government.

“The disclosure of corruption scandals, the continuing political reprisals against [public and political] figures, journalists and bloggers considerably affected the country’s image,” Bekaryan added.