Official Baku has proposed to Yerevan that they jointly request the dissolution of the Minsk Group from the OSCE.
This proposal was first publicly voiced by President Ilham Aliyev. Following this, Elchin Amirbayov, the special representative of the President of Azerbaijan on special assignments, stated in an interview with the Washington bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the formal existence of the Minsk Group is one of the obstacles preventing the signing of a peace treaty.
According to Amirbayov, in order to sign a peace treaty, Armenia must amend its Constitution to remove the reference to the early 1990s decision to annex the former Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, and must also jointly with Azerbaijan request the dissolution of the Minsk Group.
However, although Yerevan has not yet officially commented on Baku’s proposal for a joint appeal to the OSCE, it is evident that after November 2020, Armenia is not interested in dissolving the Minsk Group. This raises reasonable suspicions in Azerbaijan that Yerevan still hopes to bring the Karabakh issue back to the level of the OSCE in the future.
After Elchin Amirbayov’s interview, the Armenian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty contacted Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to clarify the official Yerevan’s reaction to Baku’s appeal and to understand why Armenia is not interested in the dissolution of the Minsk Group. The official response from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was as follows:
“The Armenian side can consider the continuation of the Minsk process in the context of comprehensive regulation of relations and, above all, the signing of a peace treaty.”
This clearly indicates that Yerevan intends to postpone the dissolution of the Minsk Group until a peace treaty is signed. This undoubtedly slows down the negotiation process: despite the lack of a direct link between the dissolution of the Minsk Group and the process of settling Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, Armenia’s reluctance to meet Azerbaijan halfway on this issue suggests that Yerevan is using the topic of the Minsk Group’s dissolution as a sort of bargaining chip in the negotiation process.
As is known, in June of this year, President Ilham Aliyev’s appeal to Armenia to jointly request the OSCE to dissolve the Minsk Group did not receive an official response. However, there was a reaction from several Armenian political and public figures, which clearly defined the country’s position on this issue.
For example, Armen Khachatryan, a deputy from the ruling “Civil Contract” party, stated that the Minsk Group should be dissolved only after the signing of a peace treaty.
“I believe that the OSCE Minsk Group should be dissolved when there is peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, when all issues are resolved, and an agreement is signed. Only then can we discuss this issue, but it is certainly not appropriate to discuss it now.”
The Speaker of the Armenian Parliament, Alen Simonyan, noted that there is no need to appeal to the OSCE for the dissolution of the Minsk Group as such.
“We can talk about the Minsk Group after the peace agreement is signed. Once the agreement is signed, the purpose of this format disappears. When we sign the peace agreement, and the issue is resolved,” Simonyan noted.
However, Gegam Manukyan, an opposition member of parliament, was even more direct, stating that the Minsk Group might be useful to Yerevan in the future to bring the “Karabakh issue” back into the international agenda.
“The Minsk Group should be preserved,” said the opposition deputy. “It is a unique legitimate platform at the international level, and its task is the Karabakh issue, which, by the way, is also part of the Minsk Group’s mandate. Since this mandate exists, it means that the problem also exists. Given the geopolitical changes and possible shifts in relations between Russia and the U.S./West, it is not excluded that the situation may change drastically in the future. Armenia should not abandon this legitimate mandate.”
It is important to emphasize here that Gegam Manukyan’s statement fully reflects the position and intentions of Armenia’s revanchist circles, who do not hide that in the future, if the geopolitical situation changes and Armenia ensures a military balance in the region through an arms race, it could once again make territorial claims against Azerbaijan.
This position sharply contradicts the Armenian government’s statements that it has no territorial claims against Azerbaijan and considers the Karabakh issue closed.
But then why is the Armenian government not interested in dissolving the Minsk Group, which has been in a dormant state for four years now?
Linking the dissolution of a fully obsolete international format created to resolve the “Karabakh issue” with peace negotiations and deciding on this issue after the signing of a peace agreement—does this position not align with the intentions of Armenia’s revanchist circles?
Farhad Mammadov
Translated from haqqin.az
