In a podcast with ANN/Groong, Dr. Benyamin Poghosyan, the founder of the Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies, offered his opinion from Yerevan on the recent teleconference between the Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, French President Emmanuel Macron, and European Council President Charles Michel held on 4 February 2022.

Poghosyan said that he believed the video conference focused mainly on humanitarian issues. This resulted in the return of 8 Armenian detainees held in Azerbaijan and the return by Armenia of the remains of 108 Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh war of the early 1990s. He also said that he did not exclude the possibility that there was a follow-up on discussions and agreements made at the previous Sochi and Brussels meetings.

In a video released prior to the teleconference, Macron stated that it was important to do this after Brussels. Poghosyan believes that this related to the construction and reconstruction of the Soviet-era railway connecting Azerbaijan through Armenia to Nakhichevan, Armenia to Iran via Nakhichevan, and the potential connection from Armenia to Russia via Azerbaijan.

When asked if the announcement of a €2 billion assistance package to Baku was an attempt by the EU to create its own separate format with Armenia and Azerbaijan away from Moscow, Poghosyan believes that it was not. Macron and Michel continue to confer with Russian President Vladimir Putin before meeting with Aliyev and Pashinyan, he said. They all want peace and stability in the South Caucasus region, Poghosyan noted.

“Franky speaking I don’t believe we have competition,” he said. “I believe that at least from France and the European Union perspective there is no competition, somehow to create an alternative platform, try to replace Russia, or thwart Russian efforts, but I have an understanding that there is some preliminary agreement or at least discussed policy or strategy implemented by Russia and the European Union.”

He also highlighted how neither the €2.6 billion for Armenia nor €2 billion package for Azerbaijan are direct financial aid. Providing the example of Armenia’s package, he said that Yerevan will only receive €40 million financial aid per year for 5 years, making €200 million in total. The remaining €2.4 billion will take the form of either loans or guarantees for loans from other financial donors for specific projects.

Poghosyan believes this will be similar for Azerbaijan’s financial assistance package. Though in both cases the actual amount could therefore turn out to be less, it can only be hoped that they can contribute to the necessary process of post-war reconstruction and development.

Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

UPDATE, 8 May 2022: Caucasus Edition has since posted its summary of the event and what was discussed on their website here.
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Though there have been many online Zoom discussions between Armenian and Azerbaijan activists, analysts and academics during and especially since the 2020 Karabakh War, there have been precious few actual in-person meetings. In part, this has been because of pandemic travel restrictions, but not only. For example, one meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijani analysts due to be held late last year was postponed because of the November border skirmishes and has still yet to be held. If it will at all, of course.

It’s for that reason that it was encouraging and refreshing to discover that Caucasus Edition held a one day symposium, The Future of Armenia-Azerbaijan Relations in Tbilisi, Georgia, on the 17th January. Some 50 Armenian and Azerbaijani as well as international professionals and activists involved in cross-border cooperation and conflict-resolution initiatives to date were invited to the event.

There’s still a long way to go, of course, and until such events can be held in Armenia and Azerbaijan, rather than third countries such as Georgia, and with the participation of all, it is admittedly hardly ideal. There also remains the need to make such events more inclusive and open to others, but they nonetheless remain desperately necessary. On that, one good sign – the US Embassy in Baku has already announced that grants are now available for just that.  

Hopefully, there can now also be a proper focus on alternative narratives as well as on media and social media, something that I know the International Crisis Group’s Zaur Shiriyev also believes is necessary too. Anyway, Caucasus Edition will likely publish something on what was discussed later so I will leave that to them. For now, a few photos from the event.

Nigar Goksel, International Crisis Group, Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

Ahmad Alili, Caucasus Policy Analysis Center, Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

Mikayel Zolyan, Political Analyst, Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

Phil Gamaghelyan, Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

Olesya Vartanyan, International Crisis Group, Caucasus Edition Symposium, Tbilisi, Georgia © Onnik James Krikorian 2022

Graphic © Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Serzh Sargsyan, the Gray Cardinal of Armenian politics as he was often referred to back in the day, has spoken. It is unlikely that many Armenians will be hanging on his every word given that it’s only four years since street protests forced him to resign. The hand-picked successor to the far more ruthless and cynical Robert Kocharian, Sargsyan had come to power in 2008 in a bitterly contested presidential vote that left 10 people dead following post-election violence.

But even though that was largely Kocharian’s doing, and while Sargsyan was hardly as bad as his predecessor, he was nonetheless loathed, paving the way for the 2018 Velvet Revolution that perhaps wasn’t as much about democracy, but more an intense dislike of a self-perpetuating regime poorly governing a country from which many thought only of leaving. Yet, while his re-emergence might come as a surprise, it is also understandable.

Today, Sargsyan’s nemesis is the same as in both 2008 and 2018 – Nikol Pashinyan.

Perhaps more significantly, following Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Karabakh war, both Sargsyan and Kocharian likely view the current environment as one that they can exploit to return to power. However, it isn’t just that. In recent statements, Pashinyan has effectively accused both men of ‘selling-out’ the mainly ethnic Armenian-populated and disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Pashinyan might not be a nationalist, but he is a populist.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Yerevan Bureau has more.

Serzh Sargsyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2008

Sargsyan said that new proposals received from the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in 2016 would allow Kelbajar and Lachin, two of seven Azerbaijani regions surrounding the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) then under Armenian control, to remain a physical land link between with Karabakh until a referendum was held at an unknown time in the future. The other five regions, however, would be returned before then. 

Indeed, this was much speculated about at the time, resulting in an armed ultra-nationalist violent extremist group, Sasner Tsrer, taking over a police station in Yerevan in July the same year to prevent it, as well as to also call for the release of Zhirayr Sefilyan, a Lebanese-Armenian former commander in the first Karabakh war who had long threatened violence if any land, as expected by the international community, was returned to Baku’s control. 

The hostage situation that left three policemen dead is believed to have made Sargsyan back off from the “5+2 proposal,” but there is also no indication he would have accepted it anyway.  If the red line was whether the referendum to be held would be on external self-determination, i.e. independence, rather than internal self-determination, i.e. some form of local autonomy or governance, then that was a red line for Azerbaijan too.

In fact, it is believed that the basic principles made no reference to what any question would be in any future referendum, so if Baku was unwilling to make concessions, so too was Yerevan.

Indeed, as Robert Aydabirian, Jirair Libaridian, and Taline Papazian wrote in last year’s white paper, The Karabakh War of 2020 and Armenia’s Future Foreign and Security Policies, “the authors do not see the path to independence a likely one, just as it was unlikely before the war.”

Moreover, they even go further, indirectly putting some blame on Sargsyan’s presidency. 

In 2016, during the presidency of Serzh Sargsyan, a four-day war exposes vulnerabilities in the defense positions of the Armenian side. Sargsyan then displays a more flexible attitude. Yet he insists on the question of independence, or referendum for independence, which results in the same outcome: no resolution to the conflict.

 And it was this deadlock that ultimately lead to the 2020 Karabakh war. It was even clear in the late 2000s that war clouds were visible on the horizon, and by 2011 others such as the International Crisis Group (ICG) were loudly ringing the alarm bells. Though the Azerbaijani side can be criticised for much, it was clear to any attentive and objective observer that time was on Baku’s side and not Yerevan’s – just as Levon Ter-Petrosyan warned in 1997. 

Under Kocharian’s presidency, and even though the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs say both sides were close to a deal in Key West, it never seemed like anything more a charade of imitated peace negotiations. Sargsyan, to his credit, did not appear to be as hardline as his predecessor, after all being engaged in the ill-fated 2009 Armenia-Turkey Protocols process as well controversially stating that Armenia never had any claims to Agdam.

Nikol Pashinyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2008

To be fair, the 2016 Erebuni Police Station siege might well have prevented him from following through with the so-called Lavrov Plan, itself not much more than a variation on the Madrid (Basic) Principles, but this was really the beginning of the end.

“There are Madrid Principles. There are documents prepared by the Russian Federation in 2010-2011, the so-called Kazan document. There are projects that were distributed in April last year in Moscow at the meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan with the participation of the co-chairs, and they are now being actively discussed,” Lavrov said, implying that the an eventual settlement of the conflict will be done in phases, or a stage-by-stage approach.

 

Lavrov went a step further in his remarks on Tuesday by saying that “assuming at the first stage the solution of the most pressing problems, which are the liberation of a number of areas around Nagorno-Karabakh and the unlocking of transport, economic and other communications.”

As mentioned earlier, Pashinyan is not a nationalist but he is a populist and miscalculated that there would not be any negative reaction to some of his words and actions. The infamous meeting between the Armenian Prime Minister and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the Munich Security Conference in February 2020 particularly springs to mind.

Following the Velvet Revolution led by Nikol Pashinyan, the parties to the conflict agree on confidence-building measures. The expected negotiations on substantive issues do not take place. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes the Armenian side has still time before it must enter into such negotiations. He is convinced that he can assemble a strong international alliance in support of Armenia and Karabakh’s independence, relying on the success of his Velvet Revolution and the strong steps taken toward the return of democratic governance in Armenia. Eventually the positive atmosphere between Azerbaijan and Armenia degenerates into mutual recriminations. The Armenian side declares that negotiations are useless, and rejects formulas offered for the partial resolution of the conflict based on the step-by-step approach.

 

Pashinyan does not have the full confidence of Russia. When full scale war arrives, anticipated diplomatic, and possibly military, support from the West does not materialise, and the Armenian side finds itself alone and loses the war.

In a sense, then, Sargsyan and Pashinyan are hardly being honest on the prospects for peace back then,  and who is particularly to blame, leading some to accuse both, as well as Robert Kocharyan before them. All three failed to recognise the reality and and a precarious situation that should have seen more of a sense of urgency in striking a peace deal. But perhaps the most blame lies with Robert Kocharian, Vazgen Sargsyan, and Serzh Sargsyan in 1998.

It is also quite possible that peace was never possible after they forced the first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, to resign precisely over a compromise peace deal.

To end, while there is much to criticise Pashinyan for, that overlooks one other new reality. There is now another chance to work towards a difficult but necessary peace before it is too late. As Libaridian and others have warned, failure to do so will likely lead to more losses for Armenia in the future. Though sadly and inexcusably coming at the cost of several thousand deaths, that opportunity should not be squandered for the sake of future generations.