Armenia and Azerbaijan hold talks

Carl Schreck
Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 23. 2009 12:37AM UAE / November 22. 2009 8:37PM GMT

MOSCOW // The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan met yesterday for talks over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory, one day after the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, threatened military action against the Armenian-controlled region should negotiations fall through.

Mr Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sarksyan, met at the French consul general’s residence in Munich, Germany, to discuss the mountainous territory, which has been the focus of a frozen 15-year conflict between the two ex-Soviet republics. They agreed to a ceasefire in 1994 after a six-year war that left 30,000 people dead.

Before the meeting, Mr Aliyev said a failure to reach any resolution on Karabakh’s status could force his country to respond militarily. “If that meeting ends without result, then our hopes in negotiations will be exhausted and then we are left with no other option. We have the right to liberate our land by military means.”

Analysts were not expecting the meeting to produce major results. A statement by the Azerbaijan state news agency AzerTac yesterday said only that the two leaders had met and discussed “the current state and prospects of the talks to solve” the Karabakh conflict.

The negotiations come at a time of significant changes in the region. Turkey and Armenia have agreed to resume diplomatic relations and open their borders, which have been closed since 1993, when Ankara sided with Azerbaijan, whose Azeri majority is ethnically Turkic, on Karabakh.

The normalisation of ties between Armenia and Turkey has increased the stakes for the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to resolve the Karabakh issue, as Azerbaijan understands it is losing leverage in the conflict as relations warm between Ankara and Yerevan, the Armenian capital, said Svante Cornell, the research director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

Azerbaijan has been boosting its negotiating position by building up its economy and military with petrodollars, a position that could be scuttled completely with the opening up of Turkey to landlocked Armenia, Mr Cornell said from Washington.

“There is a kind of panic where the Azeris are thinking that if they don’t get a solution now, they’ll never get anything,” Mr Cornell said. “There is a clear sense of urgency. They want Armenia and the rest of the world to understand how they see things.”

It was perhaps this urgency that prompted Mr Aliyev’s comments about possible military intervention, Mr Cornell said.

Political and military analysts in both Azerbaijan and Armenia said yesterday, however, that the Azerbaijani president’s mention of a military option was not a surprise.

“It was a rather characteristic statement of the type that the Azeri side likes to release from time to time,” said Alexander Iskandaryan, the head of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute, a political think tank and postgraduate institute. “Such rhetoric is instrumental in consolidating internal support and applying pressure on outside players. It gets stronger ahead of various international summits.”

Mr Iskandaryan said the risk of a failed Azerbaijani military operation was too great for Mr Aliyev to attempt to take the region by force.

Azad Isazade, an independent military analyst in Baku, said Mr Aliyev was simply “restating his position that Azerbaijan is not excluding a military option”.

“This isn’t any sort of blackmail attempt,” Mr Isazade said by telephone from Baku. “If a government is planning to start a military action, he probably wouldn’t announce it. He would quietly prepare a strike that would be unexpected. If he makes an announcement, he is just leaving open the chance for a peaceful solution.”

With 100,000 residents, defended by ethnic Armenians and backed by Yerevan, Karabakh is one of numerous disputed territories in the former Soviet Union. Following its military defeat of Georgia last year, Russia recognised two rebel Georgian regions – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – as independent states, increasing pressure on Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the Karabakh dispute without violence, Mr Cornell said.

He said the negotiations are at a “crucial point” right now. “It’s not that people are so happy about compromises or concessions,” Mr Cornell said. “But both sides see that if it doesn’t happen now, God knows what it could lead to.”

cschreck@thenational.ae