ANOTHER TRUMP CARD

An important event took place last week which may be ground-breaking in settling the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict.

On 4 November a sitting of the Parliamentary Affairs and Democracy Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE] took place in Paris. Besides other issues, the participants in the sitting discussed and approved a draft report relating to the problem of Nagornyy Karabakh, the author of which was a committee member, the British Member of Parliament Robert Walter.

It should be noted that even during the early stages of the work, the report, which was actively backed by Azerbaijan, evoked serious controversy. The very title of the document - "The escalation of the violence in Nagornyy Karabakh and in other occupied territories of Azerbaijan" is causing the Armenian side to start twitching nervously. To begin with, the latter tried to do everything it could to prevent the rapporteur from working on the report and collecting materials for it, refusing to allow him to visit occupied Azerbaijani territories. The Armenian side boycotted the report and the Assembly's commission on Nagornyy Karabakh and now it wants to stop the document from being approved. But that is all in vain. All these attempts to put a spoke in the wheel have rebounded on the Armenians themselves. Consequently, in Yerevan they have called the document "anti-Armenian", described PACE members as "bribed by Baku" and the author of the report "Baku's top propagandist". 

"No-one was surprised by the fact the PACE has long become a daughter company of the Milli Maclis [Azerbaijani parliament], in particular the Political Affairs and Democracy Committee, on which Azerbaijan has concentrated its own lobbyist, diplomatic and financial resources," Naira Zoghrabyan, a representative of the Armenian delegation at the PACE, complained. 

But this clumsy justification of their own powerlessness was exposed by other members of the Armenian delegation at the PACE. For example, one of Zohgrabyan's colleagues, the leader of the opposition parliamentary faction "The Armenian National Congress", Levon Zurabyan, recognised the adoption of the report as a "diplomatic defeat for Armenia". Armenia's former foreign minister, Alexander Arzumanyan, shares this opinion and said that the adoption of the disputed report is the result of unprofessional work and negligence. His statement that Azerbaijan is bribing European parliamentarians with oil dollars, is simply "a way of disguising weakness".

Be that as it may, in spite of the efforts of the Armenian side, the participants in the PACE Committee sitting in Paris approved the report by a majority of votes. The desperate attempt by the Armenian delegation to get the document revoked and in general never to return to this subject was voted down by 24 votes to 14. Moreover, at the insistence of the Azerbaijani side three amendments were made to it, which caused even more dismay in the Armenia camp in the assembly hall.

Thus, the sentence "The conflict relating to Nagornyy Karabakh has still not been settled" in clause 4 has been replaced by a more categorical one: "The occupied territories of Azerbaijan have still not been freed from occupation." The second amendment concerned the unconditional freeing by the Armenian side of the Azerbaijani hostages Dilqam Asgarov and Sahbaz Quliyev. After this part of the document had been approved, the following phrase was added: "We call upon Armenia, the occupying force, to release these individuals as soon as possible." Finally, the Armenians were in for it because they had refused to cooperate with the rapporteur. In assessing these actions, the members of the sitting replaced the conciliatory "regret" with "decisively condemn".

The main essence of the report was that Armenia is called upon to withdraw its armed forces from Nagornyy Karabakh and other occupied Azer-baijani territories and recognise Azerbaijan's absolute sovereignty over the above-mentioned territories.

The head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the PACE, Samad Seyidov, notes that the significance of this report is linked with the general change in attitude towards international adopted rules and laws governing behaviour: "Our territories have been occupied by terrorist formations and bandits and, as a result, millions of refugees have had to flee their homes and lands. The creation and adoption of this document is of course extremely important for Azerbaijan, but at the same time it is important not only for Azerbaijan, but for the restoration of the competence of international laws. The possibility for that to happen is naturally being provided by our state, in particular by Mr President. His consistent, constant, invariable and definite stand on the need to respect international laws is bearing fruit in the form we might say of the report which Mr Robert Walter of Great Britain has prepared."

In keeping with the rules of procedure, a report adopted at the Political Affairs Committee should be submitted to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for discussion. This is most likely to happen in January during the organisation's winter session. The Azerbaijani side regards the future discussions with restrained optimism. At least there are no serious pre-conditions to mean that the report should be rejected. Although the PACE report is not a directive, its importance should not be underestimated.

First and foremost, we are talking about international recognition of Nagornyy Karabakh and its districts as occupied lands in Azerbaijan, i.e. a matter of key importance to Baku. The above-mentioned report adds to a solid file of PACE-adopted documents reflecting the actual situations regarding a wide variety of military, political, economic and humanitarian consequences of the Armenian occupation of one fifth of Azerbaijan's territory. As we know, water can erode a stone little by little, so yet another document in which it clearly specifies who is to blame in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and who is legally responsible, will bolster Baku's efforts to achieve a peaceful solution to the conflict.

And even not a peaceful one. If there is going to be war, then it is important for the world to see for whom and for what it is being waged. The ever expanding recognition of the Azerbaijani lands is creating an advantageous information backdrop for Baku in the event that the country's leadership sees a military solution to the problem of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity as the only alternative. This variant has never been off the cards and today it is becoming an increasingly more realistic one. In Azerbaijan it is ever more frequently being said that the attempts to resolve the conflict peacefully by the efforts of the OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] Minsk Group are not producing any result. During their recent visit to Baku, the co-chairman of this structure were told this by members of the Azerbaijani community of Nagornyy Karabakh.

Quite recently, the woeful intermediaries in the person of the American James Warlick heard an unbiased account of the PACE report by official Baku. An inveterate fan of publishing truisms on his page of the Twitter social networking site, clearly hinting at Robert Walter's report, James Warlick said that the PACE and other international organisations should take advice from the co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group before publishing reports and resolutions on Nagornyy Karabakh. The Azerbaijani authorities immediately reacted to the statement by the representative of the Minsk Group, which has not managed to achieve any results for more than 20 years, and who is trying to openly intervene in the work of the PACE rapporteur.

"James Warlick does not have any right and grounds to give advice or recommendations to other organisations on resolving the conflict," the Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmat Haciyev stated. "The activity of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmen boils down to nothing. Against that backdrop, there is no need for other international organisations which are trying to make a contribution to the resolution of the conflict, to have consultations with the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmen who are engaged in meaningless activity." H. Hajiyev said that on the contrary the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group, especially James Warlick, needed to be guided by the intentions and principles in the relevant documents on a settlement of the conflict adopted by the UN Security

Council and the UN General Assembly, the PACE, the non-aligned movement, the OIC [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] and other international organisations and have consultations with them.

"Useless activity like that of the OSCE Minsk Group serves the interests of Armenia which is striving to preserve the status quo by every possible means and is continuing to pursue its occupation policy. It is not to be ruled out that James Warlick is a component element in this plan which serves to prolong Armenia's occupation policy," the Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry spokesman stated.

So, Azerbaijan can be expected to keep on advancing the Nagornyy Karabakh topic at the PACE, in the European parliament and in other organisations, regardless of the attempts by the Armenian side to prevent this which have now become clear to everyone, even to the mediators of the Minsk group. The co-chairman's zealous attitude towards Baku's efforts is understandable for no-one wants to lose their job. 

There is also a reason why the Armenian authorities regularly accuse Azerbaijan of wishing to change the format of the talks, taking the negotiating process away from the Minsk Group's monopoly. Attracting any others into the talks in any way is not advantageous to the Armenians who are interested in retaining the status quo, since it would, in the view of Yerevan, mean potentially more active organisations involved in the peace process, besides the ineffectual Minsk group. For this reason, in Armenia they fear that, against the backdrop of the conciliatory and already too diplomatic statements of the Minsk Group co-chairmen in the spirit of "come on, kids, let's all be friends", some-one else like the PACE would express a categorical position on the conflict which does as a rule coincide with Baku's international-law-based stand. The Armenians certainly do need to be concerned, because there can be no doubt that Azerbaijan will keep on applying maximum effort to attract international institutions and other countries into the process.