Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – The OSCE summit held in Astana last week "crossed out" talks on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and drew closer "another war" between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Armenia's daily newspaper Chorrord Ishkhanutyun claimed.

Though President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan were expected to continue negotiating Karabakh settlement on the sidelines of the summit, the meeting did not take place. Baku said it deemed presidential talks "unnecessary" and doubted it would move the peace process forward, as it "does not see a fresh view on the Karabakh conflict on the Armenian side".

The paper said that both Armenia and Azerbaijan consider themselves winners, and in the backdrop of this reasoning, the key outcomes of the Astana summit remain in the background. It said that the summit, in fact, indicated "the inaction" of the OSCE as an influential organization.

During the summit in the Kazakh capital, which took place December 1-2, the OSCE was expected to adopt an action plan to strengthen the security group's role in resolving "frozen" conflicts, but no agreement was reached among its members. Diplomats said that efforts to find a deal had been torpedoed by rows over Georgia's breakaway regions, the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute and the Moldovan rebel region of Transdniestr. In conclusion, the OSCE barely adopted a final declaration following lengthy discussions.

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun termed the rising threat of an Azerbaijani-Armenian war as a positive development.

"If this good or bad?" the report queried. "Of course, it’s good, because Armenia is weakening by the day, while Azerbaijan, on the contrary, is strengthening. Thus, if war is inevitable, then the sooner it happens, the better. In this sense, Astana [summit] was indeed our success."

Azerbaijan waged a war with Armenia over the Nagorno Karabakh region in the early 1990s, which claimed some 30,000 lives and displaced about a million Azerbaijanis. Armenian armed forces have been occupying over 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory since then. The OSCE Minsk Group, co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France, is brokering peace talks. Negotiations have been largely fruitless so far.