Nazarbayev Again Wants To Mediate Between Armenia And Azerbaijan

PanARMENIAN.Net - It is questionable whether Nazarbayev has the moral right to come up with such an initiative, because Astana is obviously far from being impartial in the Karabakh issue. This becomes apparent particularly in the behavior of Kazakh diplomats in various international structures. In December 2004 Astana supported Baku when the UN discussed the purposefulness of putting Karabakh issue on the agenda of the 59th session of the General Assembly. However, the five regular members of the Security Council were against that initiative. Countries that are not among partners of Armenia abstained from voting, whereas Kazakhstan, being considered Armenia's ally in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), forgot about its partner obligations. At that time Yerevan reacted in quite a harsh way and involved other partners from the Collective Security Treaty in the discussion of the created situation. The organization's Secretary General Nikolay Borduja qualified the situation as a "bug in the mechanism" and hinted that Russia, playing a leading role in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, will make every effort to convince Kazakhstan in the inadmissibility of such steps.
However, after only a few months, Astana made steps after which it is even more difficult to believe in the coherency of CSTO mechanisms. At the conference of the Foreign Ministers of member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan voted for the Baku proposed resolution, which makes mention of the 20 percent of Azeri territories, as if occupied by Armenia.
If Astana calls its CSTO ally an aggressor, then impartiality and objectivity are completely out of question. What is the sense of carrying out negotiations if for the leadership of Kazakhstan things are already clear? In the situation formed, Armenia could not but react with a demarche. At the beginning of September Armenian foreign minister Vardan Oskanyan announced that Yerevan is categorically against the claim of Kazakhstan on OSCE chairmanship in 2009, since Astana does not hold a neutral position concerning Karabakh problem. The announcement alarmed Nazarbayev's administration. The President ordered to work out a program of actions for weakening the obvious tension. Kazakh leaders decided to win Armenia's confidence by economic methods. Leaders of a number of Kazakh companies started expressing readiness to make investments in Armenia. During the Yerevan conference of the Intergovernmental Armenian-Kazakh Commission on Economic Cooperation, high-rank Armenian and Kazakh diplomats also held political consultations. It still unknown what promises did the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Nurlan Onjanov make in Yerevan, but after his departure the Armenian mass media started talking about the "steady support of Armenia to Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship".
However, Kazakhstan has not made any concrete steps, which can convince us that the Kazakh leaders have learned a lesson from the situation and will from now on be more reserved in questions concerning Karabakh. Thus, Nazarbayev's initiative can hardly be called appropriate and timely. The wish of Nursultan Nazarbayev to be a peacemaker looks strange also because once that initiative was crowned with a collapse. Together with Boris Yeltzin in 1991he tried to take up the mediator's role in Karabakh conflict settlement. Their mission, fixed in the history as "Yeltzin-Nazarbayev initiative", did not bring any results. This is why objective political scientists will hardly believe in the new initiative of the Kazakh leader.