Recently French co-president of the OSCE Minsk Group Bernar Fassie told journalists at the airport in Baku that the purpose of his visits to Armenia and Azerbaijan was to discuss the preparation for the meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers Vardan Oskanyan and Elmar Mammedyarov to be held on March 14th in Geneva. The co-president expressed hope that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would finally be resolved this year and the resolution, as the co-presidents always claim, will be based on compromises.
What is going to be the compromise of the Armenian side? Hovik Badasyan, student of the Artsakh State University, was interested in finding the answer to this question during the meeting with Nagorno-Karabakh President Arkadi Ghukasyan. Ghukasyan mentioned that Nagorno-Karabakh has tried to appeal to the international tribunal, however nobody is neither interested in the legal grounds nor history. They are all trying to find the political solution to the problem which presupposes compromises. According to President Ghukasyan, the compromises should not hurt Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence and security. Badasyan contradicted by saying that the Armenian side has already made the compromise on May 12, 1994.
“In fact, we are expecting north Artsakh and lowland Karabakh. If we don’t do that, the future generation will not forgive us”.
In response to the student’s remark, Ghukasyan said:
“I am happy to see that youth of Nagorno-Karabakh thinks that we have nothing to compromise. But if we were a strong and powerful country, our position would be right and the opinion of others wouldn’t interest us. I am certain that we are right from the historical perspective; we were the ones who lost. Unfortunately, we are not that country and will rarely become the country that will fight against the entire international community. We don’t have that opportunity; we are small and surrounded by enemies. We are finding ourselves in isolation and it is obvious that we can’t have that kind of a position in this kind of a situation. Unfortunately, the international community does not accept the right. Of course, they are not telling us that we have to make compromises because we are wrong, rather they are telling us that we have to make compromises because otherwise a war will restart and either Armenia or Nagorno-Karabakh will be excluded from regional projects. They say that Azerbaijan has oil, gas and will possibly gain strength and start a war. That is why our goal is the following: to do everything so that there will not be a war. But the compromises should not refer to principal issues. We will never give up our independence. We know what we can compromise and what we can’t. In any case, we must understand one thing: we can not live in a state of war and military status for 100 years. We must establish peace and are striving for that. I don’t believe that we must always see the enemy in Azerbaijani and I wouldn’t like for them to accept us as the enemy. We have to convince them to leave Karabakh alone, that Karabakh acquired its independence, is able to govern a state on its own and build a democratic country”.