Interview with Amanda Paul, policy analyst on the EU Eastern Neighbourhood, Russia, Turkey & Eurasia at the European Policy Centre, Brussels.
Q: What is your view of Azerbaijan’s membership of the UN Security Council?
A: I think it’s a fantastic development for Azerbaijan. It really shows Azerbaijan’s increased importance and recognition of that importance throughout the world and, of course, the fact that they have this seat now gives them more credibility on the global stage and could possibly help them vis-à-vis the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, obviously.
Q: The UN Security Council adopted four resolutions on Nagorno-Karabakh. Will Azerbaijan be able somehow to help have these resolutions implemented or at least to make the problem better known in the world?
A: I think it gives them an opportunity to make the problem more visible for sure, now that they have this temporary seat. But at the same time I would be very doubtful whether any of these UN resolutions are going to be transformed from paper into implementation. They’ve been there for nearly 20 years some of them, almost more than 20 years, so it’s very doubtful that it’s actually going to change. But I think Azerbaijan can now do its best to perhaps try and pressure more people into doing the correct move on trying to find a much quicker resolution to Nagorno-Karabakh and to have Armenia remove its occupying forces from Azerbaijani territories in the soonest possible time.
Q: There is much talk about events in the Middle East. What can Azerbaijan do to make raise awareness of Karabakh in the international community?
A: The trouble with the Karabakh conflict, as with other conflicts in this part of the world, is that they’ve been on the international community’s agenda for so long most people just seem to be prepared to accept the status quo. OK, there’s a concern, but nobody seems to really believe they’re going to escalate into something bigger so I do think it is going to be quite difficult to increase the visibility of these conflicts to the top of the international community’s agenda because there are other bigger things going on in the world, and also because clearly the region is about to enter into a new cycle of elections and you have the return of Vladimir Putin, so there are many indicators that are not showing that there’s going to be a rapid solution, or even partial solution, to Nagorno-Karabakh in the near future, unfortunately.
Q: May the events in the Middle East somehow concern the post-Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan?
A: Well, the situations in those countries are quite different to Azerbaijan so I don’t really think they’re going to have any impact to any extensive degree on these countries in the post-Soviet space. There have been some movements, for example in Armenia, and obviously there was some small protest in Azerbaijan as well. But the histories of these two regions are fundamentally different which makes revolutions in this part of the world, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, these sorts of places, makes revolution far more difficult to achieve than in North Africa and the Middle East.
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