When I moved to Yerevan in October 1998, it was rare to hear much positive conversation about the future of Armenia or Karabakh. That had also been the case when I visited the country on a research trip earlier that June. Many were already tired of the conflict and few seemed enthused with a new regime that had just come to power after the ousting the country’s first president earlier that year. Levon Ter-Petrosyan had chosen to resign following a palace coup staged by his inner circle opposed to a concessionary peace deal with Azerbaijan. They thought the deal proposed by a troika of France, Russia, and the United States was a betrayal. Ter-Petrosyan warned that it might well be the best Armenia could ever hope for.
Despite that failure, the same troika, better known as the OSCE Minsk Group, or to quote its full title on its mandate, the Co-Chairmen of the Conference on Nagorno Karabakh under the auspices of the OSCE (Minsk Conference), mediated another variant in 1999 involving an exchange of territories. Weeks later, nationalist gunmen burst into the Armenian National Assembly and assassinated several high-level officials including newly elected Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, ironically one of those who had deposed Ter-Petrosyan in 1998. Nonetheless, the OSCE Minsk Group was back in business in Key West, Florida, in 2001.
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“We stayed in five-star hotels […] usually assigned suites on the executive floor that gave us access to a private dining room and full bar at no additional expense, former U.S. co-chair Richard E. Hoagland wrote in 2021. “We always sought out the best restaurants in the cities we found ourselves. We lived well while we […] reminded Baku and Yerevan that the Minsk Group exists. But to be blunt, very, very little ever got accomplished.”
That is perhaps a little unfair. The OSCE Minsk Group did at times get close to resolving the conflict, but there was rarely the same political will to do so at the same time in Armenia or Azerbaijan. The then defacto authorities in Karabakh were also nearly always against any peace proposal, leading Hoagland to conclude that “only a war would finally settle the problem.” It was up to Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the conflict themselves, a situation not too dissimilar to today, now mainly through bilateral diplomatic means.
The full piece is available here.
