Mediator for South Caucasus

03/05/2011 Yuri SIMONYAN

A new mediator will appear in the complex region where relations between subjects are complicated, tangled or there are no relations at all. She will undertake unraveling this knot of contradictions, eliminating mutual hatred, inseminating amity and love. And everything will be settled gradually. The mediator will start operating from next week. First she will arrive in Georgia, then Azerbaijan, and then Armenia. The advisor of the mediator announced: “The visit will be devoted to the establishment of a dialogue between Caucasian republics”. The advisor also said that the role of the mediator is to put the dialogue into process. He also mentioned that the contact of the political leaders and people of those countries was needed, so that they could sit down and speak. The mediator’s advisor promised that the mediator would encourage the countries which had unsolved conflicts to make just a small step in order to achieve a dialogue and mutual understanding. Then the advisor focused on Georgia a little more. He told the audience that Georgia’s issue was complicated and that a dialogue should start between Georgia and South Ossetia so as they didn’t block the supply of gas and water of one another. The mediator’s advisor spoke about all of this greatly. It was just splendid. There is nothing bad. Everything is correct. But just reading such announcements as the one of the mediator’s advisor, I understood how right the politician Zardusht Alizadeh from Baku was in his angry and sarcastic observations. In one of his last works devoted to Kharabakh conflict, in some pungent despair, he wrote: “Aren’t our two nations intelligent enough to hold direct negotiations? Can’t old neighbors do without mediators? Where are the consciousness and wisdom that we boast for? When will we speak to one another and not rely on others?” Zardusht Alizadeh is right; he is 1000 times right! Do they really think that we, Transcaucasians, are people with defects? It turns out that the mediator’s role is to put the dialogue into process. We are grateful to the mediator’s advisor! We are very grateful; neither Baku and nor Yerevan didn’t know about it. But now they already know due to him. The mediator will encourage if a step is taken…Gosh! As if when I was a child my deceased grandmother would say if the neighbors didn’t complain of me for three days (usually either for having rows with their children or entering the garden without permission), she’d buy me a ball. Of course the ball was a great temptation but remaining indifferent towards the ripe cherries of the neighbor’s garden for three days even if there were some from the market in our refrigerator, or not hitting someone’s withers was too difficult for me. But once I persisted for three days and didn’t have a row with the neighbors and demanded the ball from my grandmother. She said something, as if her pension was late. I remained without a ball and stopped believing such agreements… But we’ll speak about my childhood memories another time. The advisor expressed one more important idea; he said that Georgia and South Ossetia shouldn’t block one another’s gas and water. But the advisor isn’t right himself. As he simply doesn’t know that South Ossetia doesn’t depend on Georgia’s gas supply for already a long time; it’s been almost two years it receives the gas directly from Russia. Water supply isn’t a problem either; as they say the mediator’s advisor just heard something from somewhere…. There were some water supply problems in the Georgian villages of region Tskhinvali. Now those problems have disappeared as there are no Georgian villages there after the war of 2008. There are no people to be left without water. And now tell me, please, can we expect that the mediator will “put the situation in South Caucasus into process” if the advisor gives him some information which he presented via the Lithuanian radio station Ziniu Radijas according to “Interfax”? I do not want to say anything bad about her; the intentions of this person are quite sincere. I don’t know why but I’m convinced that this mission will be in vain. The only hope is that the mediator is a woman and the Caucasian leaders will listen to her very attentively and try to fulfill even her smallest request at least because of the politeness. The name of the mediator is Dalia Gribauskaite. She’s the President of Lithuania which is the OSCE presiding country this year. President Dalia Gribauskaite will start her journey next week. Welcome to Transcaucasia! Personally I do want her to succeed at least in something.