Nagorno-Karabakh: cause for optimism?

I wonder if something significant is brewing regarding the Karabakh issue.  Yes, yes, I know: “something significant” has seemed to be in the offing year after year after year.  And no breakthrough ever takes place.

But I say this because the three OSCE Minsk Group presidents (Barack Obama, Dmitri Medvedev, and Nicolas Sarkozy) issued a very unusual statement last week at the G8 summit in Deuaville. The statement included the usual exhortation to reach a settlement on the Nagorno-Karabakh stalemate.  However, the presidents made a point of saying that “the time has arrived for all the sides to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to take a decisive step towards a peaceful settlement.”

Now, why is this any more significant than the typical Minsk Group joint statement?  For one thing, there are the clarifying comments of the French ambassador to Armenia, Henri Reynaud, when he talked to reporters in Yerevan:  “I expect a rapid agreement on the principles of the settlement,” he said. “I expect that [Armenia and Azerbaijan] will rapidly get engaged in negotiations on the [comprehensive] agreement itself.”

He went on to say that he expects “that the agreement will be rapidly put into practice. I expect that tension on the frontier will decrease. I expect that trust will replace distrust and cooperation will replace hostility.”

So that’s an extraordinary statement from the Minsk Group presidents, and I suspect that there may be cause for cautious optimism.  And significantly, the ambassador kept saying he expects X and expects Y.  That’s unusual too.

Not everyone shares the ambassador’s assessment, however.  On 2 June, News.Az published an interview with Sabine Freizer, director of the Europe Program for the International Crisis Group.  Freizer warned that “the threat of war is steadily increasing” despite the fact that the she was talking to News.Az after the G-8 summit.

Was Freizer’s gloomy picture accurate? Certainly, the rhetorical threats from Azerbaijan have come at a steady, monotonous pace over the past few years as Azerbaijan’s defense budget has skyrocketed.  But even if we ignore the encouraging news from Deauville, I would argue that the overall diplomatic trend is reassuring.

Consider, for instance, a number of news stories in the past two years, many mentioned on the blog, that, when taken together, indicate a growing consensus and even a fundamental realignment of the geopolitical issues.  The realignment was based in part on what seemed to be a major concession made by President Aliyev in 2009 when he said on Russian television that the final status of Karabakh ”will be solved only when the parties agree on that. This could happen in one year, in ten years, in 100 years, or this could never happen. Time will tell.”

“This could never happen?”

That sounds like President Aliyev can live without Karabakh proper being returned to Azerbaijan – as long as the seven districts surrounding Karabakh are returned and certain other conditions met.

Naturally, this intriguing comment by the president garnered no attention whatsoever in Azerbaijan, probably because of its implications and the fact that the press in Baku didn’t know how to handle that particular hand grenade.

However, it should be added that the president also said at the time that Karabakh should return to its “Soviet status of being an ‘autonomous oblast,” according to a report published by Absarez.com.

The president was also quoted as saying that “naturally [we] don’t see a possibility of Nagorno-Karabakh’s existence as an independent state. Azerbaijan will never agree to that, and we think that the Armenian side understands this. At the same time the Armenian side reckons that the level of self-rule that exists in Nagorno-Karabakh must be maintained.”

The “consensus” Aliyev alluded to never materialized, no doubt due to his insistence that “liberation of the occupied territories” take place as a first step leading to more fruitful talks later.

So President Aliyev’s hints amounted to nothing at the time, but he actually told us a great deal about Azerbaijan’s endgame and what it is willing to give away, namely the notion that Karabakh will be formally reintegrated into Azerbaijan: “This could happen in one year, in ten years, in 100 years, or this could never happen.”

And what does that bode for Nagorno-Karabakh’s legal status and the future of its Armenian population?  I think it means that President  Aliyev is willing to live with a Karabakh in a permanent Twilight Zone existence: not a state, not recognized, but also not formally reunited with Azerbaijan.

Whether this is something that President Sargsyan can live with is open to question.  I don’t have a sense of how flexible Sargsyan is on this critical premise.  And of course, the issue of independence is paramount for the unrecognized, de facto government in Stepanakert.

Georgi Petrosyan, the NK foreign minister, insisted to me two years ago that no progress can be made without the Karabakh authorities being directly involved: “We are clearly stating that we are not happy with any process that does not include us as a part whereby we can sit and discuss our future as a full-fledged member, whereby our future and our fate is decided by others. So any process, anything, any action that does not involve our participation to decide our own fate is not satisfactory for us.”

Since then, President Aliyev has used very threatening language from time to time, declaring in July of last year that Armenia had one “last chance” to leave the “occupied lands,” for instance.

This came shortly after an unusually violent Azerbaijani incursion near the Line of Contact, leaving at least four Armenian and two Azeri soldiers dead.

So I don’t want to downplay the potential for a renewed war. Petrosyan confided to me in 2009 that he is “rather worried” about the prospect. “In the situation whereby we hear on a daily basis [from Azerbaijan] that ‘We are getting stronger, we will attack,’ we are subjected to this. These are the words of the Azerbaijani president,..”

But I don’t think we should overlook what may be Azerbaijan’s willingness to compromise on at least one key variable – unless I’ve misread the evidence.  And the news out of Deauville last week is cause for guarded optimism.

That’s not all.  In March of this year, both the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments announced that there were positive developments in the negotiations.  President Sargsyan said after the meeting in Sochi “that there are certain shifts in the position of the Azerbaijani side.”

Likewise, Novruz Mammadov, a key advisor to President Aliyev, reported “a slightly positive evolution in the position of the Armenian side” during the Sochi summit.

In view of all this, I was somewhat perplexed by Ellen Barry’s piece in the New York Times last week, the title of which was “’Frozen Conflict’ Between Azerbaijan and Armenia Begins to Boil.”

OK, so Ellen Barry probably didn’t write the headline.  But the notion that the Karabakh issue is “beginning to boil” is not supported by recent developments. Barry’s main focus in the article seemed to be Azeri IDPs, although she touched upon the prospect of war often, either when quoting presidential advisor Ali Hasanov or when assessing Azerbaijan’s chances if it does attack:

“Azerbaijan sees little way forward: though it could easily drive out Armenian forces, Russia could send its army to help Armenia, its ally in a regional defense alliance, just as it did in South Ossetia.”

Where this notion comes from, I can’t say.  This “easy” blitzkrieg victory, blunted only by Russian intervention, is not an opinion that is shared by anyone I’ve talked to in the past seven years, at least outside of Baku.  And drawing some sort of analogy between South Ossetia and Karabakh when discussing what Russia might do is at odds with the reality on the ground.  Armenia and Azerbaijan are both vital allies of Russia’s.  Ilham Aliyev is not, for the Russians, an Azeri version of Mikheil Saakashvili.

No Russian president would recklessly “send its army to help Armenia…just as it did in South Ossetia,” unless President Medvedev was hell-bent on destroying Russo-Azeri relations for a generation.

I’ve truly enjoyed reading many of Ms Barry’s New York Times pieces from Moscow, but this notion of Russian military intervention against Azerbaijan if war breaks out is a fantasy that is heard often in Baku, and is something that should not be taken seriously.

While I’m not predicting anything, watch for signs of real progress at the next Sargsyan-Aliyev summit to be held in Kazan later this month.

(For a now-obsolete timeline of Karabakh-related diplomatic events from 2009 to July of 2010, go here.)