An Armenian opposition newspaper has said that the Turkish and Azerbaijani media are 'gushing' with information about Karabakh.
Editor-in-chief Nikol Pashinyan commented in Haykakan Zhamanak (The Armenian Times) about Azerbaijani claims that Armenia was given two weeks at the January summit in Sochi to respond to the OSCE mediators’ updated peace proposals on Nagorno-Karabakh.
'Now the Azerbaijanis are insisting that three months ago Serzh Sargsyan took two weeks’ time to solve the Karabakh conflict,' Pashinyan wrote in yesterday's editorial. 'We don’t believe the Azerbaijani press, of course we don’t believe them, though for Armenians the Turkish-Azerbaijani press has become the main source of information on processes relating to Armenia and Karabakh. And the fact that sooner or later the information provided by those sources gets confirmed is even worse. The feeling that something is happening with regard to the resolution of the Karabakh conflict is palpable. Armenian sources, however, are keeping silent about it, while Turkish-Azerbaijani sources are gushing with information.'
'We find information about the negotiating process only in Turkish-Azerbaijani sources. As for the information from Azerbaijan that in January Serzh Sargsyan asked for two weeks’ time to solve the Karabakh conflict, we shouldn’t really believe it, because if we believe that information, we should state that Sargsyan has understood from the very beginning that the Karabakh conflict and Armenian-Turkish relations are irreversibly connected and has acted on the basis of that logic.'
'It is believed that Serzh Sargsyan will set himself the task of suspending the resolution process of the Karabakh conflict like he did with the process of Armenian-Turkish relations, because the processes have taken a very unfavourable course for us. We will not consider in this article whether he will succeed in suspending the negotiating process or not. I just want to visualize today’s Armenia when the negotiating processes on Armenian-Turkish relations and the Karabakh conflict are suspended. It is a little difficult to imagine what [Armenian Public TV news] Haylur and the professional press conference holders will talk about under such circumstances, what will fill the Armenian governmental agenda.
'Surely, they will speak about the brave operations to suspend the issues for the next two months: what then? Then the the authorities will run out of subjects to talk about and the public’s attention will again focus on domestic issues. And then the brilliant failure of the Turkish-Armenian process, the splendid reopening of the Armenian production lines abroad and the tough economic situation will add fuel to the fire of the conversations about domestic problems. As you can see, suspensions are not so favourable for Serzh Sargsyan either, because they also have the potential to cause domestic shocks as much as the attempt to return the liberated territories to Azerbaijan.
'Thus there seems to be no scenario of developments that will guarantee a quiet life for Serzh Sargsyan. One should just hope that the recent news from the Turkish-Azerbaijani press will not have further developments and Serzh Sargsyan will not attempt to solve the Karabakh conflict within the scope of the revised Madrid principles. Such an attempt would be a disaster for Armenia.
'Incidentally, I just remembered that right after his visit to Yerevan in September 2008, the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, left for Baku, saying his decision followed Serzh Sargsyan’s request to get involved in the Karabakh problem. The Armenian authorities didn’t deny Gul’s statement then, and the geopolitical processes confirmed the fact. Nevertheless, one should not believe the Turkish-Azerbaijani information sources. One should believe Serzh Sargsyan, who states that he will leave for Turkey either with the border open, or, if we are on the verge of opening the border. And that's what he does. We have been on the verge of the Armenian-Turkish border opening for a long time, starting from the moment that the border was closed.'
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