On CNN Türk’s Eğrisi Doğrusu program, Davutoğlu declared that either France should resign its co-chairmanship or Turkey should be made a co-chair. This follows President Abdullah Gül’s proposal that France end its involvement in the mediation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, given that through this bill, it has renounced its neutrality. During the program, leading journalist Taha Akyol asked whether Azerbaijanis will call upon France to leave the Minsk Group.
In fact, Azerbaijan has on multiple occasions questioned the Minsk Group’s efforts on the resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; there has already been discussion of France’s position in the Minsk Group, as well as the possibility of bringing in Turkey as co-chair. In the recent protest against the French bill, Azerbaijani youth demanded France leave the Minsk Group. There is a strong belief among the Azerbaijani public that France is not neutral and that any future promises of objectivity are tempered by this new law. The key question today, in my opinion, is not simply the neutrality of the group’s co-chairs. There is a complex matrix of demands and alliances at play, including the suggested exclusion of France, challenges to the Minsk Group’s role in the resolution process and the possible inclusion of Turkey.
The Minsk Group since its inception has almost exclusively focused on peacemaking -- i.e. efforts toward achieving an agreement rather than a comprehensive solution. Following the 2004 Prague Process, more space was given to direct talks between the conflict parties. Disappointed that the Minsk Group had not achieved even a basic outline of a conflict resolution strategy, the Azerbaijani public was and remains skeptical of the three OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries’ objectivity. The Kazan meeting in June 2011, held before the official meeting with the OSCE Minsk Group, was the most promising meeting to date. It seems perhaps the OSCE Minsk Group never really served as an effective mediator. It lacks the necessary carrot-and-stick policies to actually persuade the parties to make concessions. During the negotiation process, both sides on occasion accused the OSCE of being biased.
Under these circumstances, anyone might question the effectiveness of the current framework for negotiations. Questioning the neutrality of France or other Minsk Group co-chairs is in fact coming very late in the game -- the world’s largest and most influential Armenian communities are concentrated in the three co-chair countries of the current OSCE Minsk Group. The US, despite initial opposition from the State Department, provides direct financial aid to the separatist authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia is Armenia’s main military and political ally, and France, with its traditional strong cultural and social relations with Armenia, is its main lobbyist in the European arena. Russia was and still is something of an unknown quantity with regard to this conflict; in some situations, it has acted in support of Armenia, while in other cases, it has strongly advocated for peaceful conflict resolution. The US policy towards the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has always been pulled in opposing directions, with its domestic politics (the influence of the Armenian diaspora) in conflict with its economic and strategic interests in the Caspian region. France has never had much incentive to act as an honest broker in terms of eliciting Armenian concessions, which would dissatisfy French-Armenians.
In this regard, i.e. if the current negotiations under the Minsk Group format do not seem to be geared towards genuine conflict resolution, is it time to be discussing Turkey’s inclusion? Even if Azerbaijan were to propose such a plan, there are a number of obstacles that preclude it.
Firstly, none of the current mediators can afford to withdraw or terminate the mediation efforts under the current format. Their national interests are at stake, and they are not keen to initiate another mediator. Secondly, Armenia as direct party to the conflict has always opposed Turkey’s involvement in the resolution process and strongly objects to the possibility of Turkey taking on the role of co-chair.
I asked this question to Gerard Libaridian, former senior adviser to Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian and current professor in the history department at the University of Michigan, who said: “Ahmet Davutoğlu has always struck me as a most intelligent and visionary statesman. It is unfortunate that he is increasingly grounding that vision in failed experiments in history, for example the late Ottoman Empire with its failed reforms and the consequences of those willful failures, as well as the more recent Minsk Group process, which can best be characterized as still-born mediation.”
Thirdly, current negotiations under the auspices of the Minsk Group are not doing enough to change the perceptions of the warring parties, to transform their “zero-sum game” mentalities to visions of a win-win solution, a shift that is essential to the solution of the conflict.
In this respect, it is also important to bear in mind that Turkey’s inclusion in the Minsk Group could be good opportunity to reinvigorate the negotiations, but it is almost certain that not only would Armenia directly oppose such a proposal, the other Minsk Group countries would say -- diplomatically -- there is “no need to change the existing format.”
For these reasons, opening the debate on France’s exclusion or Turkey’s inclusion will not be productive and is not something that Azerbaijan can do. It would be naïve to believe Azerbaijan could present a considerable challenge to France’s co-chair position; the co-chairs were specially appointed by the OSCE at the Budapest Summit in December 1994 to lead the Minsk group.
To return to the question of the new French law, Turkey has tried to recruit 60 French MPs to ask the constitutional council to examine the bill to determine whether it is constitutional. If Turkey succeeds in blocking the bill, will Ankara still push for France’s abdication of its Minsk Group seat? I think Ankara’s energy could be best directed towards challenging the Minsk Group’s role in the resolution process; in any case, due to the forthcoming elections in all three Minsk Group co-chair countries as well as Armenia, most of us have already accepted that 2012 is a lost year.
