Yerevan-based analyst Richard Giragosian has said that Armenian and Azerbaijan are too far apart to achieve a breakthrough at their next summit.
He was commenting for The New York Times on the summit of the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents, to be mediated by the Russian president in Kazan on 25 June.
Originally, the sides were to be presented a one-page document renouncing the use of force, Giragosian said. That goal has been replaced by a more ambitious one — endorsement of the basic principles for a Karabakh settlement — which he says is unrealistic.
“The two sides are simply too far apart, and there’s no political will,” said Mr Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Centre. “When I was in the US government I worked on the Madrid talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and this has become almost as intractable.”
Passions about Nagorno-Karabakh run so high in Azerbaijan and Armenia that the leaders of both countries run serious risks if it looks like they have ceded ground, Thomas de Waal, a Caucasus specialist at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, told The New York Times.
Mediators are pushing for agreement at the summit on the basic principles of a settlement, which would allow the return of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced during the six-year war over the territory. Armenia’s president must persuade his people that ethnic Armenians living there will not be in danger. And because it grants Nagorno-Karabakh an interim self-governing status, Azerbaijan’s president will have to show that he is not compromising territorial integrity, The New York Times noted.
“This becomes a dangerous moment in which maybe nothing is happening on the ground, the leaders have stuck their heads over the parapet, and domestic opposition is firing missiles at both of them,” de Waal said. It is especially important, he said, that any deal be followed by tangible progress.
The foreign ministers of Armenian, Azerbaijan and Russia met in Moscow on Saturday to discuss preparations for the presidential summit.
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