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.