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  • BAKU: De Waal: The International Community Needs To Invest More Reso

    ANALYST THOMAS DE WAAL: THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NEEDS TO INVEST MORE RESOURCES INTO THE RESOLUTION OF NAGORNO KARABAKH CONFLICT

    APA
    May 11 2010
    Azerbaijan

    "Turkey and Armenia can't open the border between them, because we're
    still stuck in negative regional dynamics such as the Nagorno-Karabakh
    conflict"

    Washington. Isabel Levine - APA. "Turkey and Armenia can't open the
    border between them, because we're still stuck in negative regional
    dynamics such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict", - stated Thomas de
    Waal, senior associate of the Eurasian program of Carnegie Endowment
    for International Peace in US capital, in an organization's last
    report, APA's Washington correspondent reports.

    The analyst reminded that, in 1993, after one Armenian operation
    which captured a large Azerbaijani province in solidarity with its
    Azerbaijani neighbors, the Turks closed the border.

    "We have two issues laid one on top of the other. One is what happened
    in 1915, that huge tragedy during the First World War and then more
    recently, the lesser but also tragic, history of the early 1990s,
    the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict".

    Mr. Waal believes that, the dialogue has begun on the level of
    societies and that will continue now that the Armenians have taken
    a step back from the process but haven't killed off the process.

    "Armenian President Sarkisian and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan,
    met at the beginning of April in Washington on the sidelines of
    President Obama's nuclear summit to try to see if they could bridge
    their differences, but they couldn't".

    Although, according to analyst, the big problem here, the pebble
    in the shoe which keeps on coming back, is the Armenian-Azerbaijani
    conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

    "The Armenians are still in control of not only Karabakh but the zone
    around Karabakh. And Turkey, in solidarity with Azerbaijan, closed its
    border with Armenia during the war to support the Azerbaijanis. The
    two processes are not formally linked, but everyone knows that in some
    ways they are actually linked. The Armenians want to see normalization
    with Turkey and an opening of the border to proceed anyway--they say
    the border opening is good for both countries. Turkey sort of accepted
    that, signed the protocols, but simultaneously, were hoping and saying
    we need some progress on the Karabakh issue and that Armenia must
    move forward if we are going to ratify these protocols. Between the
    signing and the ratification, nothing happened on the Karabakh issue
    and basically, even though the Karabakh issue was not mentioned in
    the protocols, the Turks have basically made this a precondition and
    this is why we're stuck.

    Mr. Waal also reminded that, President Gul was the one who flew to
    Armenia in September 2008 to a soccer match in Yerevan which kicked
    this whole thing off, while Prime Minister Erdogan has several times
    explicitly said that Armenia needs to move forward on the Karabakh
    issue for the Turks to move forward on the protocols.

    "There have been some mixed messages here. The big question is why the
    Turks signed protocols with Armenia which explicitly did not mention
    the word Azerbaijan or the word Karabakh. They clearly hoped that
    something would happen in parallel; the hopes may be that someone would
    take care of the Azerbaijani factor. That didn't happen so they found
    themselves boxed in earlier this year. With no progress on Karabakh,
    Azerbaijan was extremely unhappy, Armenians were insisting on forward
    movement, and they basically put a halt to the whole process".

    Speaking about the U.S. policy on the issue, analyst stressed that,
    Washington is a key player in this process.

    "The international community needs to invest more resources into
    doing something about this. It's really a tiny group of people who
    are trying to resolve this conflict and they don't really have enough
    international support" - he added.

    Mr. Wall is an author of the authoritative book on the Nagorno-Karabakh
    conflict, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War
    (NYU Press, 2003), which has been translated into Armenian, Azeri,
    and Russian.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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