"ARMENIA PLAYS FOR TIME"

Despite powerful pressure from the Armenian lobby, President Barack Obama has appointed Matthew Bryza as US ambassador to Azerbaijan.  With his record of working as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group for several years, Bryza is an experienced US diplomat with a good knowledge of the region in general and Azerbaijan in particular.  That is why many analysts view his appointment as ambassador as a sign of an intensification of US effort in the region.

In the opinion of Vladimir Socor, senior researcher at the Jamestown Foundation (USA), no other candidate would be trusted by Baku.  "Procrastination over Bryza's appointment as ambassador shows how dependent US foreign policy sometimes is on the influence of an ethnic group," Interfax news agency quoted the US political analyst as saying.

Socor maintains that success for US foreign policy in the South Caucasus depends in large part on whether or not Washington can win Azerbaijan's sympathy.  And Baku's trust in the USA can be boosted by intensification of that country's role in the regulation of the Karabakh conflict, in which Moscow has taken the initiative in recent years.  In an interview with our magazine, Socor shares his vision of the problems of the region and the prospects for their solution with the participation of the main geopolitical players.

- Questions of security in the South Caucasus have been occupying almost all the centres of power and the world's analysts of late.  What are the prospects for tackling these problems in 2011?

- In recent years, the USA and NATO have chosen to distance themselves from the South Caucasus, which exposed the security and stability of both this region and the Caspian and Black Sea basins to risk.

The situation was aggravated further by the Russian-Georgian conflict of 2008.  Following that, all states in the region had to revise and balance their foreign policies.  The lack of security in the South Caucasus can be put down to wrong choices of priority in foreign policy.  The USA, for example, instead of focusing more on the South Caucasus and the Caspian region, concentrates its efforts on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

- And so you believe that there are grounds for serious concern about security in the South Caucasus?

- No matter what happens, the events in Georgia must not be repeated.  No further confrontations must be allowed.  I should note that processes of integration are developing within the region's political alliances.  As for the positions of the world's leading countries, Russia's influence on the South Caucasus is obviously growing.  And the USA is inactive in the region, especially with regard to the settlement of the Nagornyy Karabakh problem.  And Georgia, too, is now defenceless.  This is why I am not hopeful in terms of regional security.

- Do you have any specific forecasts?

- I can make specific statements on the Abkhazia and South Ossetia problems.  These conflicts will remain frozen for a long time to come.  They can be compared with the division of Germany after World War II.  Of course the problems are different.  After all, in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic the majority of the population were ethnic Germans.  That is why, eventually, reunification of the two Germanies created no particular problems.  But Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not populated mainly by ethnic Georgians.  The majorities consist of ethnic Ossetians and Abkhazians, which is why I can say with some certainty that these problems will remain unresolved for a long time.

- And what do you think about the prospects for regulation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict this year?

- The unresolved Nagornyy Karabakh conflict is Azerbaijan's main problem.  Armenia is the occupier in that conflict and the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group must bring influence to bear on it to force it to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani territories.  The Madrid principles of regulation have been agreed, but Armenia has neither accepted nor rejected them.  It is playing for time.  Armenia's only tactic in this issue is to drag the process out.  As for the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, Russia and the USA, Russia is more active now than the USA.  Moscow has organized summits in recent years and even achieved some progress.  That is why I believe that Washington should be more active.

- At the latest summit of the heads of the Caspian states in Baku, Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev said that the countries of the region themselves must work on questions of security in the Caspian Sea, without interventions by third parties.  Do you believe that major confrontations are possible in the Caspian Sea in the foreseeable future?

- Like everywhere else, the Caspian basin has its security problems.  There is the problem of the demarcation of maritime borders with Iran, disputes about hydrocarbon deposits with Turkmenistan...  But none of these problems should give rise to any military threat in the future.

- Thank you for your interview.