Today in “Maendorf” castle near Moscow, the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliev signed a very important declaration on the peaceful resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and international guarantees. The meeting was initiated by the president of Russia Dmitry Medvedev.
This is the first document since 1994 that the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed together in relation to Nagorno Karabakh conflict resolution. The details of the resolution are not publicly known yet, but as France 24 reports, both presidents smiled during the signing of the Nagorno Karabakh declaration.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisian smiled and shook hands in front of reporters before entering talks to resolve their frozen war over the disputed province of Nagorny Karabakh.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who in August oversaw Russia's war with Georgia -- which borders both Armenia and Azerbaijan -- was also present for the talks at his residence in Barvikha near Moscow.
An enclave of Azerbaijan with a largely ethnic Armenian population, Nagorny Karabakh broke free of Baku's control in the early 1990s in a war that killed nearly 30,000 people and forced two million to flee their homes.
A ceasefire was signed in 1994 but the dispute remains unresolved after years of negotiations. Shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region are common.
Medvedev in October launched a fresh push to end the long-simmering conflict during a visit to Armenia.
At the meeting Sarkisian said he was ready for talks with Azerbaijan on the basis of principles worked out at negotiations in Madrid last year under a plan that would give Nagorny Karabakh the right to self-determination.
The Kremlin would act as guarantor of a new accord, an administration official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"Russia would be prepared to support a resolution to problem that suits both sides and act as guarantor if a compromise deal is reached," the unnamed Kremlin official said, state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
A resolution would "allow the return of stability and calm in the South Caucasus and in the post-conflict period maintain the historical balance of power in the region" the official said.
As Trends news agency reports the U.S. co-chair Matthew Bryza of the Minsk group who has been mediating the conflict resolution between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh has said that the signing of the declaration is a very important step toward the peaceful resolution of the conflict.
“It is constructive character and contains several important items - a solution to the conflict only through political means and the point that the country would solve the conflict, together with the OSCE Minsk Group,” Bryza said.
The ethnic conflict between the Azerbaijani Republic and the Armenian region of Nagorno Karabakh — formerly part of Soviet Azerbaijan — resulted from the awakening of Azeri nationalism during the last years of the USSR.Azerbaijan has been locked in a decade-long conflict with the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, formerly a region within Soviet Azerbaijan but now a de-facto independent state. The Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh won the ensuing war in the name of gaining freedom from Azerbaijani rule.
The NATO intervention in Kosovo offers a geopolitical precedent that would be highly unfavorable to Azerbaijan if directly applied to the case of Nagorno Karabakh. That would highlight the similar campaign of ethnic cleansing that Azerbaijan is guilty of perpetrating in its attempts to negate the autonomy of Nagorno Karabakh, seize that territory entirely and expel its Armenian population. It is noteworthy that the term ethnic cleansing was used in relation to Azerbaijan's policies before it became familiar to the world in the context of events in the former Yugoslavia. The Azerbaijani onslaught against the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh proved that the phrase "Never again!" — much repeated after 1945 — has been empty rhetoric. Nevertheless, today, Azerbaijan is engaged in a an attempt of historical revisionism seeking to rewrite the actual course of the Karabakh conflict, by propagating a distorted, ex-post account of the conflict to validate its position vis-à-vis international public opinion.
In a larger sense, comparative analyses of the conflicts in Nagorno Karabakh and Kosovo transcend the evaluation of current political developments in the Caucasus and the Balkans. Insights into the structure and the dynamics of these two crises could provide a theoretical basis for early identification and prevention of international conflicts that have the potential of escalating into large-scale humanitarian catastrophes, as has already occurred with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and Nagorno Karabakh's ethnic Armenians. For an ethno-political minority, which is suffering from the genocidal policies of a dominant ethnic group, acquiring the status of an international legal party in some cases could be the only long-term guarantee for that minority's political rights and security. Similar comparative studies of ethnic conflicts may provide valuable insights into the evaluation of foreign policy. They can also serve the purpose of preventing the manipulation and exploitation of economic, political and military resources of NATO countries and international organizations engaged in humanitarian operations abroad.
Therefore, this signing of declaration between Armenia and Azerbaijan is a new sunrise and hope for the resolution of Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
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