Epress.am News from Armenia
Karabakh shouldn’t be made into a bargaining chip in order to mask the shortcomings in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, said Russian Academy for Geopolitical Affairs Vice Chair Ara Sargsyan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today.
If Karabakh is “left alone,” according to the academic, it will become clear who is “interested in fueling the conflict.”
“In this case it might become clear that interested in this are the British, the United States of America and some Russian forces that are associated with Gazprom or the energy bloc, who always want tension in Karabakh so that Nabucco [gas pipeline project] won’t be built,” he said.
In Sargsyan’s opinion, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is beneficial for the authorities in neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan. “When they resolve [the conflict], a lot of problems will become obvious: why do people live so poorly, why in the last two years the number of those poor in Armenia has become close to 500,000, why is there no democracy in Azerbaijan? It’s easy for [Azerbaijan’s President Ilham] Aliyev to connect all this with the Karabakh conflict.”
Speaking about Armenia, Ara Sargsyan hoped that Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will implement that which he spoke about in his speech at the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) convention on Saturday.
“As respected former commander of the [Nagorno-Karabakh] Defense Army Mr. [Samvel] Babayan would say, the three [Armenian] presidents squandered Karabakh’s entire victory,” he said.