The US Helsinki Commission has gathered on December 7 in Washington DC to discuss the progresses, outcomes and fails of the frozen conflicts in the South Caucasus
Prominent experts, some officials and Congress members, Diasporas’ members, lobbyists and media gathered at a briefing to discuss the three existing conflicts, including the Nagorno-Karabakh.
Congressman Michael C. Burgess, who chaired the meeting, mentioned that the conflicts in the Caucasus strike the region’s development potential and the people’s lives.
“Unfortunate, it has been 20 years that the people were struggling to find a peace, where the two principles of the Helsinki Act clash,” he said.
Fiona Hill, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, said although there are different expressions of the Caucasus conflicts, such as “frozen”, “protracted” or “unresolved”, these conflicts are have always been actual. She believes that Russia is still a key country for the resolution of the problems in the region.
During the briefing the participants were seeking an answer to a question, why 20 years after the Soviet Union collapsed, there is still no solution to those conflicts?
Tomas de Waal from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reminded that all the three conflicts – Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia – started before the Soviet Union’s days were over.
He believes that internal and geopolitical factors are making those conflicts even more complex. According to the analyst, changing the Minsk Group format would be destruction.
Wayne Merry from American Foreign Policy Council mentioned that despite the long mediation the results of the peace process in Nagorno-Karabakh have been disappointing. He called on Azerbaijan, Armenia and George to not give up on peaceful initiatives in the region.
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