Armenia’s Authorities Don’t Make Use of Azerbaijan’s Mistakes: Opinion

The main events in the Nagorno-Karabakh issue today take place not in the Minsk Group Co-Chairs’ format and during actual negotiations, but around them. In PACE (the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe), where the Nagorno-Karabakh Sub-Committee has been reactivated, there will be the report by the international fact-finding group in the near future, which Azerbaijan will try to use (to its advantage) at the UN General Assembly, said Armenian National Congress (HAK) representative Davit Shahnazaryan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today.

“Azerbaijan, apart from raising the issue on different international platforms, has now adopted another direction for itself: in different countries’ parliaments, it tries to make it so that country’s parliamentarians approve a decision on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; for example, there’s such a bill in the Lithuanian parliament,” said the opposition member.

Shahnazaryan noted regretfully that Armenia’s diplomacy doesn’t demonstrate any sort of adequate approach to all this.

“Azerbaijan’s authorities have made many mistakes, proving that the negotiations process for them means only the return of territories, as well as obviously speaking solely of a military solution: Azerbaijan has placed itself in a very serious and difficult situation, but one in which our government simply does not take advantage of,” he said.

The HAK representative then suggested what the Armenian authorities should do under these conditions:

“In all these platforms, consistency is needed, which should be based on the following realities: Azerbaijan began the war, the ceasefire was imposed on Azerbaijan, and Armenian diplomacy has forgotten a very important document: the document signed in Feb. 1995 which was called ‘Measures to Strengthen the Ceasefire Regime.’ The next thing Armenia should make use of is that Azerbaijan absolutely refuses to implement the UN Security Council’s 4 resolutions and moves toward a military solution exclusively,” he said.

The opposition member said if added to all this is the new tension developed in the region and Turkey’s new active involvement, then there’s the likelihood that domestic issues, social, economic and external threats, can convene simultaneously, which can result in Armenia being before a very serious situation.

According to Shahnazaryan, a unique situation has developed today, tied with the Nagorno-Karabakh issue: the likelihood of the resumption of war is greater than reaching any kind of little progress in the negotiating process.

“All of this is the result of the deep and deepening political crisis that begun in 2008. The only way out of this situation is to reach an agreement through early elections, we just don’t have another option, and I’m simply amazed that the ruling administration led by Serzh Sargsyan doesn’t understand this basic truth. Once more I am proving that HAK sees the solution to these problems through early elections, and only through this means will national agreement and political agreement be reached,” he said.