[NEWS ANALYSIS] Will Karabakh peace talks lead to breakthrough?

Foreign Ministry spokesman Burak Özügergin said the Minsk process has led a revival of negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia that stands to positively influence the ongoing talks between Turkey and Armenia.

“There are more reasons to be hopeful that the meetings will deliver results, as the Minsk process has been revived,” he told Today's Zaman, referring to the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which is mediating the dispute between the two countries.

In a statement they released during this month's G-8 summit in Italy, the presidents of the OSCE Minsk Group's co-chair countries France, the Russian Federation and the United States, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama, respectively, called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to endorse a version of a set of principles put forward in the Madrid Document of 2007.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan have met a number of times over the past 13 months; today's discussion will be the third such meeting in three months. There are hopes that this time, their talks will deliver results.

“Any progress between Azerbaijan and Armenia concerning the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory stands to positively influence the progress of talks between Turkey and Armenia,” Özügergin told Today's Zaman.

Turkish officials have emphasized that the resolution of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave inside Azerbaijan, between Yerevan and Baku is a condition for the reopening of Turkey's border with Armenia since this dispute was the main reason the border was originally closed.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since a truce was reached in 1994 after a six-year conflict that killed about 30,000 and displaced 1 million people.

The endorsement of the principles of Madrid Document by Armenia and Azerbaijan will allow for the drafting of a comprehensive settlement to ensure a future of peace and stability not only for Armenia and Azerbaijan but the broader region, including Turkey.

“The timing of this latest stage of peace talks is most significant in terms of Turkish-Armenian diplomacy,” said Richard Giragosian, director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS) based in Yerevan.

This, he said, is because Turkey seeks to pressure Armenia to produce something that can be used as “progress” over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict so that Turkey will proceed with its diplomatic engagement with Armenia in anticipation of the Armenian president's October visit to Turkey to attend a soccer World Cup 2010 qualifier between the two national teams. There is a possibility that the Armenian president may refuse to make that trip if no new diplomatic developments occur before the game.

Giragosian added that representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh should have been included in the peace process.

“As the recent G-8 statement demonstrated, the failure to include the democratically elected representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh only threatens to make the peace process a meaningless exercise and a lost opportunity, with no real possibility for a fair and lasting resolution to the last remaining frozen conflict in the region,” he said.

Stepan Grigoryan, a former deputy in Armenia's parliament, said the Karabakh problem will not be solved quickly, since Russia will not allow it. “Russia gave Armenia $500 million on June 13. Russia makes sure Armenia is strong because if Armenia is weak, it will make concessions to solve the Karabakh issue,” he said. “Russia also tells Azerbaijan, ‘Sell us gas and we'll help you on the Karabakh issue.'”

He added that if the Karabakh issue is solved, then Azerbaijan and Armenia will be more independent and move out of the Russian sphere of influence. “But if the border between Turkey and Armenia opens, the arguments will change because Russia's zero-sum game will end,” he said.

US mediator for the Minsk group Matt Bryza, who is also deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, was in Yerevan and Baku last week. He told NTV in Turkey on Monday that the leaders of both countries feel “momentum” and that “they are considering how to reach agreement.”

But time will tell how much of this will lead to progress both for Turkish-Armenian and Armenian-Azerbaijani relations vis-à-vis finding a peaceful settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh.