Tuesday, February 26 2019 11:19

ArmInfo. Unless Artsakh President Bako Sahakyan is involved in negotiations the whole negotiation process to resolve the conflict is senseless. Such an  opinion was expressed to ArmInfo by Deputy Chairman of the Foreign  Relations Committee of the Armenian Parliament Hovhannes Igityan.

"At one time, displacing Stepanakert from the negotiation process,  then-Armenian President Robert Kocharyan was guided by the logic that  he was elected by Artsakh people, he himself was from Artsakh and  therefore understands the needs of Artsakh people better than any  politician from Armenia. Thus, within this logic, he endowed himself  with the right to represent both the people of Armenia and the people  of Artsakh. Nikol Pashinyan, within the framework of the same logic,  today declares that, being the elected prime minister of Armenia, he  has a mandate only from the people of Armenia. Pashinyan has never  been Artsakh's citizen and didn't take part in combat actions, "he  stressed.

The position of the Prime Minister of Armenia, according to the  parliamentarian's estimates, in this light is quite logical. In  today's negotiations Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani community of  Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Republic are represented by Ilham Aliyev,  Armenia by legitimately elected and recognized by the international  community Nikol Pashinyan. Meanwhile, the Armenian population of  Artsakh is still deprived of the opportunity to present its own  position regarding its own destiny. According to Igityan, the only  person capable of legally representing their interests in the  negotiations is precisely the current President of Artsakh, Bako  Sahakyan.  According to the MP's assessments it is within the  framework of this logic that the Armenian Prime Minister made in  Berlin a rather interesting and remarkable statement, according to  which the proposal worked out after the upcoming talks should be  acceptable to the peoples of Armenia, Artsakh and Azerbaijan. And  this statement was made in order to hear a similar answer from  Aliyev, which speaks exclusively with aggressive, non-constructive  rhetoric.

"In other words, in the conditions when Baku, following the results  of the negotiations, is counting on Artsakh's status to be actually  lower than it is today, in conditions when this status does not give  the Artsakh a single security guarantee, its behavior is  non-constructive. Aliyev's constructivism can be expressed solely in  putting forward a settlement acceptable to all parties to the  conflict. I think that this approach of Armenia has already been  brought to the attention of the OSCE Minsk Group, "he said.   According to Igityan, all actions of the mediators, in turn, are  today aimed at resuming the negotiation process. Within the framework  of this logic, the co-chairs have not yet discussed any  preconditions, settlement formulas. The OSCE MG is only trying to  familiarize itself with the views of the parties to the conflict to  resume as soon as possible the negotiation process that was  interrupted about three years ago.

Since 1992, the OSCE Minsk Group, represented by the co-chairs from  Russia, the United States and France, has been involved in resolving  the Karabakh conflict. Since the signing of the trilateral agreement  on the establishment of a truce between the parties to the Karabakh  conflict, almost a quarter of a century has passed. And all these  years, surges of murders on the Line of Contact have been  interspersed with negotiations towards peace. However, since the end  of last year, the killings have practically stopped, and the OSCE MG  mediators, Baku and Yerevan, have started talking about the need to  prepare the parties to the conflict for peace.