The recent announcement of the American co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk group, Matthew Bryza caused confusion in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenians worry about this more because this announcement was aimed more towards Armenia than Azerbaijan.
In order to understand what this proposed conflict resolution draft package is, let’s suppose that it is agreed on, signed and is being implemented step by step. In fact, the scenario will look almost like the following: the Armenian military troops will be taken out of five regions (Aghdam, Fizuli, Jebrail, Ghubatli, Zangelan), international peacekeeping troops will be allocated there, refugees will return to those territories. In that period, the international community will recognize the status of Karabagh for some time and the relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan will go for the better. Later refugees will return to Karabagh (Shushi, Martakert region, etc.), but the number of refugees will be more than the refugees in 1992 because there will be a referendum. The Karabagh authorities will try to stop that process, there will be conflicts again and a new war. Nevertheless, this time the war will restart in favor of Azerbaijan because they will have returned five regions peacefully. At the same time, international peacekeeping troops will not interfere; they may just say that Azerbaijan is to blame and that’s all they can do.
In other words, Karabagh will be in the same situation as it was back in 1992. At that time, Karabagh was surrounded by Azeri communities and the international community supported Karabagh; the only difference was that Azerbaijan didn’t have an army then.
In other words, the US has proposed a conflict resolution package, which will result a war in the future (and the U.S. knows this very well). We understand why they do that. Their goal is to establish peace in the region, during which the Baku-Tbilisi-Jeyhan pipeline will make the reputation of Russia slowly go down internationally. The parties are not able to establish peace here because they can’t overcome the results of the war. They have two options for the conflict resolution: they can either oblige Azerbaijan to accept the results of the war, or start a new war and have new results. Based on the announcement of Bryza, we may assume that the US advocates the second version. They do this openly realizing that Azerbaijan does its best to annihilate the origin of Armenians and thus they suggest taking the Armenian troops out of Karabagh before defining its status.
What should the Armenian authorities do in that case? In this case, it’s not that important to hear what the authorities have to say to Kocharyan because in a situation like this, they will not have time to think about that. Kocharyan will not be the only one faced with such a situation; we will all be responsible for that and will have to find a solution together.
Armenia doesn’t have a choice and nothing will go right. To agree with the circle agreement means to give five regions without any guarantees and start a new war. Not to sign the agreement means to continue being the outpost of Russia and the region, have bad relations with our neighbors, which still doesn’t mean that we will be able to keep Karabagh because one day Russia may decide to take it away just like it did with Serbia. We also can’t prolong the conflict solution and try to become a democratic “island” in the region because the authorities are not able to develop such democracy in Armenia and the international community has already made its choice in our region.
In other words, the Armenian authorities can only wait and see what will happen. This not only concerns the authorities, but the opposition as well. Nevertheless, this is another issue.