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Will Armenia's new leaders change position on Karabakh?

1 May 2018 17:54 (UTC+04:00)
Will Armenia's new leaders change position on Karabakh?

By Rashid Shirinov

The power in Armenia is going to change very soon, but it seems that this event does not bode well for the settlement of the long-standing Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The reason for such thinking is the position of Nikol Pashinyan, the leader of the protest movement that started in Armenia more than two weeks ago.

Over the first two weeks of the rallies, the oppositionist was trying not to touch upon the Karabakh problem in his speeches, but this silence ended at a rally in Gyumri on April 28.

Speaking about the future of Armenia in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Pashinyan made a senseless statement: “We will make efforts to make this organization provide more serious security guarantees to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Pashinyan cannot but be aware that the CSTO has never provided any guarantees of security for the unrecognized entity in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, and it will never do so. Karabakh has nothing to do with this organization and its obligations, since it is not a part of the territory that the CSTO covers.

Some time ago, the former Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan tried to change the situation, but he was quickly put in his place by other members of the organization, who pointed out that the joining of the occupied Azerbaijan territory the CSTO in inadmissible.

Three days after the rally in Gyumri, Pashinyan made another silly and provocative statement directed against Azerbaijan. Answering the questions of the Armenian MPs in the Parliament, he said: “The negotiations [on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict] will have a real meaning only if Azerbaijan undertakes to respect the norms of international law and is ready to resolve the issue in accordance with them. OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs should influence Azerbaijan not only to suppress the use of force, but also to prevent the threat of its use.”

Pashinyan should know that despite the fact that the Azerbaijani Armed Forces outweigh the Armenian Armed Forces on all indicators, Azerbaijan has never wished to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh problem by the use of force. The Nagorno-Karabakh war that Armenia started in the late 1980s took lives of more than 20,000 Azerbaijanis, while over 1 million people became internally displaced persons and refugees due to the large-scale hostilities. Azerbaijan, the country that is doing its best to ensure security in the region, is not interested in a new war and new war victims.

Armenia, in turn, every day tries to provoke Azerbaijan for new hostilities by shelling the Azerbaijani military positions from Armenia’s border regions and the occupied Azerbaijani lands.

As for the respect to the norms of international law, Pashinyan seems to have forgotten that it is not Azerbaijan but Armenia who has been ignoring the international law for more than two decades. The four UN Security Council resolutions of 1993, demanding the unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian Armed Forces from the occupied Azerbaijani territories, as well as other international documents, still remain on paper, since Armenia aims to maintain the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh in every possible way.

In a nutshell, the leaders of Armenia change, but their viewpoint on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is almost identical. This means that Armenia will continue to hinder peaceful negotiations within the OSCE Minsk Group, and that the conflict is not going to be resolved in the foreseeable future.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz

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