Dashnak official warns of war if Azeri, Armenia talks fail

Dashnak official warns of war if Azeri, Armenia talks fail

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Vercihan ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

A deadlock in peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan might lead to new conflicts in the region, warned a senior official from the far-right Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or Dashnaktsutyun Party.

While praising the international negotiators for their active role in talks, Giro Manoian said that neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan now desire to engage a new war. His warning came a day after the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia held their fifth meeting for a peace agreement in the Russian resort city of Sochi, as Moscow pushes the sides to resolve their longstanding conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an enclave in Azerbaijan that has been occupied by Armenian forces since the end of a six-year conflict that left about 30,000 people dead and 1 million displaced before a truce was reached in 1994. The region’s unilateral independence is not recognized by the international community. The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been negotiating on the issue under the OSCE, but little progress has been made in the talks.

When reminded of the positive picture drawn on the solution to the Karabakh problem in previous months, Manoian said he believed that was done to mislead the public. He also said that Turkey perceived the Karabakh problem differently than Russia, the United States and other Western nations. “When a solution to the Karabakh problem is mentioned, Turkey perceives it as returning the whole Karabakh to Azerbaijan. However, Russia and the United States are aware of the sensitivity of the problem,” he told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in an e-mail interview.

Armenia’s Constitutional Court recently published a decision affirming the constitutionality of the protocol, angering Ankara because the decision stipulated that the agreements must not violate a part of Armenia’s declaration of independence that calls for recognition of the deaths of Armenians in 1915 as “genocide.”

According to Manoian, Turkey has tried to use the court’s ruling for its own good. “[Turkey] is not genuine on normalizing ties with Armenia. It is trying to build an image of a country that moves toward consensus. That is all.”