"I am very happy to arrive in Baku.
I want to find new friends as a result of this event. Do people live in Caucasus see their future? We don’t still approach this issue so and we don’t see settlement of problems at a regional level. Before our expectations were from Moscow, but now from Brussels, Strasbourg and the other cities.
Now we are searching for our future elsewhere," said Jirair Libaridian, senior adviser to the ex-president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian at the international conference entitled "Joint efforts for the sake of Caucasus’ future: Past 20 years and its lessons", which was organized by the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of Azerbaijan (SAM), Caucasus International and Turkish Policy Quarterly magazines.
Libaridian said that everybody thought that the "cold war" has ended after gaining independence:
"But the "cold war" in Caucasus hasn’t ended, the war continues under the influence of external forces. We don’t know how much time this cold war will continue. It has already known that independence doesn’t mean that you can behave as you want. We can see it much in small countries. We made big mistakes. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict is not problem of the two countries. It is problem of Georgia too, because, it is difficult to carry out joint projects in such situation."
President of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies Alexander Rondeli noted that South Caucasus countries look like experimental rabbits:
"After independence, we thought that how we would pursue state-building policy. We thought that everything would be better. But we had no strategic culture. Ethnic nationalism annihilated Georgia. We try to solve this problem. We haven’t got necessary results yet. New revolutionary group in Georgia try to find common point in security and democracy. They achieve successes in most cases. But there are still difficulties. There are such people in Georgia that they still think about the USSR. I am a classic soviet product, but I don’t think so. Georgia was a multinational country. We must find common formula in this issue."