Epress.am News from Armenia
A solution to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict can be found only if the interests of both sides are taken into account, a US academic has said, News.az reports.
Analyst Ronald Grigor Suny, director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan and emeritus professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago, made the comments after the latest meeting between the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents, mediated by the Russian president on Jun. 24, ended in failure to reach an agreement.
“Nagorno-Karabakh is a problem that can be solved with the recognition of the interests of both sides,” Ronald Grigor Suny told APA.
“Such a solution was available about 12 years ago, but that opportunity was lost. The facts that Armenians are the majority and ought to be able to govern themselves in Karabakh has to be reconciled with the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, possibly through a federal status that is real, gives Karabakh full autonomy but maintains a de jure association with Azerbaijan. Neither side will like that solution but it might be a step toward greater cooperation and less hostility,” Suny said.
He said that the main problem of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia was that “these three have fallen into a pattern of mutual hostility, based on exclusivist claims to territory, to the rightness of their cause, their own victimhood, and seeing others as enemies”.
“How those attitudes will be overcome is very difficult to say, but it is the first important step toward integration into the Euro-Atlantic structure, which is based on forgetting the negative aspects of the past.
“The Caucasus weakens itself through these conflicts,” Suny told APA, adding that negotiation and compromise was the only way out.