Deauville Statement Most Serious Declaration on Karabakh Conflict: de Waal

Deauville Statement Most Serious Declaration on Karabakh Conflict: de Waal

The parts of following article was written for The National Interest by Thomas de Waal, a senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

With the flurry of foreign news at the moment, you will be forgiven for missing the statement of Presidents Medvedev, Obama and Sarkozy from the G8 summit Deauville on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. But it is the most serious international declaration on the conflict for many years.

For a decade and a half the world has barely noticed the negotiations to resolve the longest-running protracted conflict in the post-Communist world: the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute over Karabakh. The peace process is too closed and the issue too complex and mysterious for anyone but the poor tiny benighted group of analysts (such as myself) who do follow it to take notice.

The statement made on May 26 by the three heads of state of the mediating powers makes it clear that a moment of truth is approaching. At Kazan in late June, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the French and US mediators, the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev will meet.

Russia, the United States and the EU have worked well together in the negotiation process, but, given all their diverse interests in the Caucasus, their bilateral agendas with both countries and all the competing claims on their resources.

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