As the President of Azerbaijan said, the Brussels meeting on Karabakh scheduled for December 7 will not take place. As it turned out, Nikol Pashinyan said that he would attend the meeting mediated by Charles Michel only if Emmanuel Macron would attend it as well. Ilham Aliyev voiced Azerbaijan’s response to this “initiative”. The head of state recalled that less than a week after the Prague meeting, President of France Macron in his interview had attacked Azerbaijan and accused us of something we had not done.
This was followed by the notorious French Senate resolution, which was absolutely unacceptable and insulting. Now the National Assembly of France is expected to adopt another anti-Azerbaijani resolution. And then there was France’s attempt to attack us through the Francophonie Summit. Summing up, Ilham Aliyev said, “Taking all that into account, it is clear that under these circumstances, with this attitude, France cannot be part of the peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And it was not us who cut them from this format, it was them, because neither Russia nor America ever officially took sides in the post-war period, only France did. This means that the December 7 meeting in Brussels will not take place. And we will see what alternative we have, who will be the mediator or facilitator or where the platform will be.” He added that he considered Pashinyan’s condition on Macron’s participation in the Brussels meeting “as an attempt to undermine the peace process”. The President of Azerbaijan does not waste words. And if Baku promised something, Baku will do exactly what it promised.
First and foremost, the recent incident has once again demonstrated Armenia’s “lack of self-sufficiency”, to put it mildly. This country behaves at best like an elementary school student who shows up everywhere with her “daddy”, i.e., Russia, or with her “big sister”, i.e., France. Theoretically, in such a situation, the “adults” should have enough common sense to call the annoying squirt to order, tell her to wise up, come to an agreement, if they want it so much, with the other “big guys” on their own and make the little troublemaker do as agreed.
But it is the common sense that Macron lacked. After squeezing himself in to the negotiating table on Karabakh in Prague once, he clearly does not mind repeating the experience, even though the EU mediators did fine without him before the summit in the Czech capital. Macron’s Napoleonic plans need a way out after the failures in the Mediterranean and North Africa. But before making any grand plans, Macron should have learned to tell where his election campaign ended and serious state policy—especially foreign policy—began.
Yet this is exactly what Monsieur Macron was unable—or unwilling—to do. Or perhaps he was sure that this would do as it is.
And now it turns out that he should have listened to the warnings of the President of Azerbaijan. You may recall that on October 14, speaking at the CIS summit in Astana, Ilham Aliyev, among other things, harshly criticized the behavior of official Paris. The head of state brought up the promise of French President Emmanuel Macron, where the head of the Fifth Republic “manipulated the facts, trying to mislead the French and world public”, and warned: “For our part, we categorically condemn and reject such statements and, given such an attitude of the French government, see no further possibility for France to play a role in the normalization of Azerbaijan-Armenia relations.” Even then, experts warned: Macron’s obsession with collecting votes of ethnic Armenians and ultra-rightists in the Karabakh field not only puts an end to France’s chances of playing the role of mediator, but also undermines the mediation of the European Union.
Baku’s warnings are now coming true. Pashinyan is hanging from Macron’s arm like a pet monkey, and Macron, instead of shaking off the bothersome pest, is fawning over him and trying once again to piggyback into the negotiations on Karabakh as an uninvited guest, but he chose the wrong back for this maneuver. And the master of the Élysée Palace is certainly hampered by his own foul-smelling political “baggage”.
It is now the European Union’s turn to figure out how to save its mediation, which is being undermined by the joint efforts of the “two sisters”, France and Armenia.
