ArmInfo. The main issue is the fate of Nagorno-Karabakh, everything else is derived from the conflict. The former co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group Vladimir Kazimirov said this on December 1 at a meeting of the ''Lazarev Club'' in Yerevan.
The retired diplomat said that the official position of Azerbaijan leads to a dead end, because Baku's demand is to return the "occupied territories", that is, from 5 to 7 regions of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan, the diplomat believes, is not ready to make concessions on a political decision, on a decision on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. "It seems that the authorities of Azerbaijan are supporters of the unresolved situation of this conflict," he said. Kazimirov also stressed that the lack of progress in this matter suits the leadership of Baku in the sense that it allows him to demonstrate patriotism through incidents and refuse proposals from the co-chairs. Unlike Azerbaijan, official Yerevan, on the contrary, always went in search of compromises, while excluding any forceful settlement of the conflict.
Having made a small historical excursion of the problem, Kazimirov emphasized that this conflict has two features. The first is that the Karabakh conflict has a much longer prehistory than other similar conflicts on the territory of the former USSR. The controversial decision on the transfer of Karabakh to Azerbaijan, taken in 1921, attempts to further revise this decision and the restructuring that began later, gave the Armenians the opportunity to raise the issue of revising the structure of the USSR regarding Karabakh. As a result, the conflict from the political into a military, and the war was very cruel on both sides with its consequences. Since 1992, Russia and Iran for some time became mediators in the settlement, and a little later the OSCE Minsk Group also joined.
The second feature of the conflict is its unusual configuration. "The fact is that in all conflicts there are usually two parties, and here there are three, since Artsakh is one of the parties and a participant in the conflict", the diplomat stressed, expressing the importance of involving Artsakh Republic as a party to the negotiation process.