CivilNet’s Tatul Hakobyan was part of reporters’ pool accompanying Armenia’s Prime-minister Nikol Pashinyan at a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Vienna, March 29. Tatul Hakobyan’s article was published on Jam-news.net.
Immediately after the negotiations
While the state airplane was gaining altitude, heading from Vienna back to Yerevan, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan took turns and approached journalists on the plane. He gave a hand to each of them and asked with a restrained smile:
– How are you, all is well?
When he approached me, I asked:
– How are you, all is well? What is your mood after your meeting with Aliyev?
“Good, very good,” he said confidently.
I’ve known the Armenian Prime Minister since his student years. I’ve followed his journalistic and political career for two decades, spent many interviews with him and walked tens of kilometers with him during the Velvet Revolution. And I have never seen him so calm and peaceful as on the plane flying from Vienna to Yerevan.
First takes
A few hours before that, Pashinyan met with the Armenian community of Austria. Waiting for the applause to stop, he began talking about the negotiations. And here he also gave a positive assessment of his meeting with the President of Azerbaijan.
“I cannot say that a breakthrough occurred in the negotiations, or a revolution, but it is important that a process has begun that allows us to talk about the issues on our agenda. This is a very deep, serious problem, and I think it is important to have an atmosphere in which we can express our positions, speak and understand each other”, the premier said in a crowded hall of the Armenian Embassy in Vienna.
The Vienna meeting between the Armenian Prime Minister and the Azerbaijani President lasted more than three hours and was the fourth in a row in a year, but the first one during which the Karabakh settlement process was officially discussed.
Three years after the April 2016 war and a year after the April 2018 Velvet Revolution, a new stage has begun in the process of the Karabakh settlement. The parties to the conflict and international players are more emphatic about strengthening the truce, improving the mechanisms of direct communication between the conflicting parties, increasing possible cooperation in the humanitarian sphere and creating an atmosphere conducive to peace.
It is only in an atmosphere that excludes belligerent statements and hate propaganda that one can conduct a constructive dialogue, discuss controversial issues and try to find a solution to the problem – a solution that will bring long-term peace to the region and its peoples.
Armenia’s position
What are the most important issues for Yerevan in the negotiation process:
1. Pashinyan has repeatedly said that Armenia is not satisfied with the format that has been in place for the past 20 years: the Yerevan-Baku summit meetings, in which, in fact, Stepanakert (Nagorno Karabakh) is not represented.
The participation of Karabakh is important, since Armenia, being the only guarantor of NK’s security, cannot bear full responsibility for negotiations, progress and resolution of the conflict, and most importantly, for a long-term peace.
2. For Yerevan, it is important from which point the negotiations will continue. In fact, the process stopped in Kazan in 2011, when Aliyev rejected the working bill on the settlement. In April 2016, the settlement process was dealt a fatal blow by the Four-Day War, which did not become a victory for Baku or a defeat for Yerevan and Stepanakert. But it did shake the basis of negotiations and minimized trust between the parties.
3. If the basis for the settlement is the Madrid Document or its derivative with the three principles of:
The equal rights and self-determination of peoples,
Territorial integrity,
Non-use or threat of force
and six other elements:
Interim status for Karabakh,
The return of territories to Azerbaijan,
A corridor between Armenia and Karabakh,
The definition of a final status for Nagorno-Karabakh,
The return of refugees and IDPs,
Guarantees of security,
then they need clarification to exclude possible discrepancies on all points.
4. Armenia is interested in whether the immediate conflict will be resolved exclusively by peaceful means or whether the Azerbaijani side will continue to consider war as an alternative, as it did in April 2016. Does the Armenian side need to prepare the societies involved in the conflict for peace, or are we returning to militant rhetoric and hate propaganda?
Has Azerbaijan’s position changed?
In Azerbaijan, they put a clear distinction between Armenia’s former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan and the current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
The attitude towards them is determined by the fact that the first two were born in Nagorno-Karabakh and participated in the war, and Pashinyan was born in Armenia and, by and large, had nothing to do with war or conflict.
However, the approach of the Armenian side to the Karabakh conflict is not determined by individuals, since it is a question of the security of the entire Armenian people.
The question of from which point the negotiations will continue is also important for Azerbaijan. Baku continues to believe that the self-determination of Nagorno-Karabakh can be considered only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan as it was in Soviet times.
The only acceptable negotiation format for Baku is direct contact with Yerevan at the highest level. Thus, Azerbaijan wants to strengthen at the international level the perception that the conflict is a territorial dispute between the two countries, and Armenia seized a part of Azerbaijani territory.
Pashinyan dissatisfied with his received “inheritance”
In public speeches and in private conversations, Nikol Pashinyan does not hide the fact that he is dissatisfied with the negotiating “legacy” left to him by former President Sargsyan.
1. Pashinyan is concerned that he is continuing the negotiation process in a situation where the allied states are sure that the five regions around Nagorno-Karabakh must be returned to Azerbaijan.
2. The Madrid principles, or 3 principles and 6 elements, which were negotiated during the presidencies of Kocharyan and Sargsyan, are unacceptable as long as there are discrepancies in them.
Recently in Stepanakert, Pashinyan voiced the most important questions for the negotiation process:
Does Armenia accept the 3 principles and 6 elements that the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs offer as a basis for negotiations?
What can these principles mean in practice and who has the right to interpret them?
The way Azerbaijan understands them is unacceptable for Armenia, the PM has stressed.
3. The most important issue is the preparation of the nations for peace.
Pashinyan believes that preparing the nations for peace cannot be a separate task for only one of the governments involved in the negotiations, this is joint work. Pashinyan’s statements about preparing for peace are revolutionary and unprecedented:
“The preparation of the Azerbaijani society for peace should be held with the participation of not only thee Azerbaijani, but also the Armenian authorities. Any version of the settlement of the Karabakh issue should be acceptable to the residents of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan. It would be my contribution to the preparation for peace not only of the inhabitants of Armenia and Karabakh, but also of the Azerbaijani people.
“We do not see the corresponding statements and steps by the President of Azerbaijan. But despite this, I am ready to continue the dialogue not only with the president, but also with the people of Azerbaijan, because I am sure that the Azerbaijani people are as peaceful as the people of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.”
4. Pashinyan said that the participation of Nagorno-Karabakh in the negotiation process is not a whim of Armenia and not a precondition. This is a simple statement of the fact that the involvement of Stepanakert is of paramount importance in resolving the Karabakh conflict.
Pashinyan stresses that he can and has the right to negotiate on behalf of Armenia, but the conflict concerns Nagorno-Karabakh. Therefore, someone must represent the position of Stepanakert. In Nagorno-Karabakh there is an elected government formed as a result of elections. At the same time, the residents of Karabakh do not participate in the elections of Armenia.
“They did not give me the mandate to represent their interests anywhere. The residents of Nagorno-Karabakh have their own representatives who must participate in the negotiation process”, Pashinyan stresses.
After the Vienna meeting, Ilham Aliyev stressed that “the format of the negotiations remained the same, and negotiations are taking place between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as it has been for many years.”
Conclusion
The format of the negotiations is undoubtedly important. It is also important from what point they will continue. However, these issues are, by and large, solved.
The most important thing is something else: whether the parties actually want peace, but are not willing to pay the price. If they are not ready for painful compromises, then the situation “neither war nor peace” will continue for dozens of years, taking more and more human lives and leaving the door open for other wars, like we experienced in April 2016.
Tatul Hakobyan is an analyst for the CivilNet online publication, coordinator of the Armenian Ani Studies Center and author of Green and Black: Karabakh Diary and Armenians and Turks.
