APPREHENSIVE AND INDECISIVE

The latest visit by the co-chairmen of the OSCE's Minsk Group to the region of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict will remain in the memory for some time. After Armenia and Nagornyy Karabakh, where they were told time and again that Azerbaijan is the one holding back the peace process and is maliciously breaking the cease-fire regime on the front line, the mediators took part in an OSCE scheduled monitoring at a sector of the troop line in Azerbaijan's Tartar District. And right here, during the monitoring, somebody "suddenly" opened fire. Judging by reports, the shelling didn't last for very long, but it was enough for the apprehensive members of the OSCE to seek cover, as the American co-chair, James Warlick, recalled. As one would expect, the defence ministries of Azerbaijan and Armenia immediately accused one another of the incident. But what is most interesting is that neither immediately after the incident, nor on arrival at the terminal point of their route - Baku - nor even in the final statement after returning from the region, were the co-chairs able to point the finger at the culprit of the cease-fire violation.

Be that as it may, the mediators continued on their way, but their reception in Baku was no warmer. Still reeling from the attack, the troubled diplomats came under serious opposition because of the lack of progress in the peace talks.

"You talk so calmly because it is not your homes that have been set ablaze and not your lands that have been occupied. The Azerbaijani citizens in Nagornyy Karabakh have not been able to return to their lands for over 20 years now. During this period of occupation not a single centimetre of land has been liberated and not a single person has returned to their land. This means your work has been ineffective," Milli Maclis deputy Elman Mammadov bluntly told the confused diplomats during their meeting with members of the Azerbaijani community in Nagornyy Karabakh. "I don't believe this problem can be resolved as a result of what you are doing. And the reason is that your countries have their own interests in the South Caucasus and these interests clash when trying to resolve this problem. You will never reach a common ground and solve this problem."

At a subsequent meeting with the Azerbaijani president, the co-chairs also had to listen to a number of forceful statements, albeit not as frank as the one in which the deputy expressed himself. The semi-official newspaper at the meeting between the Azerbaijani president and the mediators, which is usually incredibly brief, was this time more informative and included forceful comments about Armenia's position at the talks, which is quite remarkable. Ilham Aliyev blamed the Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan for the provocations on the Azerbaijani-Armenian troop line. At the same time, he cited a number of facts from the relatively recent past. Specifically, the head of state recalled that two weeks after the talks last year between the Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders in Paris, the Armenian side began large-scale military exercises on the occupied Azerbaijani territories, Armenian air-force helicopters carried out raids on Azerbaijani positions and after several such attacks one of these helicopters was shot down. Aliyev also recalled an incident in September last year when subversive activity by an Armenian saboteur group on Azerbaijani territory was averted, as a result of which the enemy sustained considerable losses. Armenian President Sargsyan bears responsibility for all these provocations, Aliyev stressed. He said that Armenia has now become the source of a great threat in the region.

"The Armenian armed forces are regularly bombarding innocent people from the Azerbaijani territories they are occupying and even attacking people attending a wedding ceremony," the president noted, adding that as a result of such incidents the Azerbaijani civilian population is suffering losses. "But when the Azerbaijanis respond to such provocations they start accusing us," the president said.

He regretted that the international community, especially the mediators, have not made an appropriate response to Armenia's actions. Moreover, Aliyev pointed out, Sargsyan recently resorted to a new political provocation when he said that Nagornyy Karabakh is an integral part of Armenia. "Unfortunately, there was no response from the mediators to this unacceptable statement, which even contradicts Armenia's official position," the president said. He stressed that all this is deeply regrettable to the Azerbaijani side and casts a shadow on the mission of the co-chairs, which is to resolve the Karabakh conflict.

At the end of the visit the co-chairs issued a joint statement, judging from which the main achievement of their latest visit was obtaining consent from the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents to hold a meeting before the end of this year. Besides this, of the main events in Yerevan they recalled their meeting there with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to discuss the question of exchanging information about missing persons as a humanitarian step, to which the co-chairs give their full support. Among the negotiations in Baku the co-chairs recalled the aforementioned meeting with representatives of the Azerbaijani community of Nagornyy Karabakh, during which the mediators called for a dialogue between those affected by the conflict as an important part of the peace process and supported programmes to bring Armenians and Azerbaijanis closer together. And, of course, in their joint communiqu? the co-chairs expressed concern at the increasing tension in the conflict area and issued a formal call for reconciliation to the parties to the conflict.

Time will tell if the heads of the warring sides will find time for a new meeting before the end of the year after such a long interval, and if so, how productive it will be. The sides placed definite hopes on this visit by the mediators and it cannot be said that this time it was as ritualistic as the previous ones. The shelling, which took place in the presence of the co-chairs, the personal representative of the incumbent OSCE chairman and his field assistants, should carry more weight than the revelation of the bemused American mediator, James Warlick: "We are now convinced how dangerous this conflict is."

This incident doesn't leave one with any positive thoughts. Baku is not going to wait for the representatives of the mediating countries to call the culprit and the victim in this conflict by their names. And is there any point in waiting if they can't even decide who the guilty party is in one armed incident in which no-one was killed? And you can bet they do know.

Of course, the mediators themselves can be accused of spineless behaviour. After all, they are merely the standard-bearers of the policies of their countries which, it is clear, have no motivation to be seriously involved in resolving the conflict.

While in Baku, Russia's representative in the Minsk group, Igor Popov, said that the three mediators are working as a tight-knit team on the Karabakh question, despite the differences in their countries on other problems of the international agenda. Pull the other one…the US, Russia and the EU, whose interests in the Minsk group are represented by France, are up to their eyes in solving the crisis in Syria - in their own interests, of course - and, to a lesser extent, other hot-beds of conflict.

Before intervening in the Syrian conflict Russia demonstrated a relative interest in a Karabakh settlement, but after Russian planes were involved in bombing positions of the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria in September, one would hardly expect the same activity from Moscow as far as Karabakh is concerned. The hard truth is that so long as there are wars in other parts of the world which affect the interests of the leading countries, the Karabakh conflict, even with its ever-increasing clashes, will always be of secondary importance in a world context.

"The keys to solving the problem are with the 'great and the good'". In other words, either Russia or the US (the rest come someway behind in terms of importance) need to want to resolve the Karabakh problem. Are Moscow or Washington earning "political points" on this now? I doubt that very much. As for the rest, they "couldn't care a hoot" about Karabakh, political observer Yuriy Sigov reckons.

Of course, in theory one would hope that the parties in the conflict themselves will find common ground. Azerbaijan would settle for a stage-by-stage but ultimately complete withdrawal of Armenian troops from all the occupied lands. Armenia has for years rejected this option, and one can hardly expect this solution from the people currently running the country who personally participated in the occupation. It is also highly improbable that anyone different will take over in Armenia, bearing in mind the Armenian traditions of how the authorities deal with political rivals, including the use of arms. And it will be three long years before the presidential elections in that country.

Azerbaijan will not settle for any scenario in which a settlement of the problem of guaranteeing its territorial integrity does not depend on it. The heavy-handed approach of restoring territorial integrity remains the most likely scenario of resolving the question, but the decision to start a war has never been regarded as simple.