Failure of highly advertised OSCE summit in Astana

PanARMENIAN.Net - Having nothing against Kazakhstan as the OSCE Chairman, we have to note that the choice of the country, to put it mildly, caused bewilderment. Kazakhstan would more befit to lead the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) than the OSCE. Most likely, Nursultan Nazarbayev, together with Ilham Aliyev, Abdullah Gul and Mikhail Saakashvili decided that they could push forward their versions of the final declaration, in which there would be made a reference to “frozen conflicts”, edited so as to suit their own interests. However, it all turned out differently and, we must admit, better than expected.

The experts coordinating the final document were in session for almost ten hours, instead of an hour and a half, so no one knew when the meeting would end. When announcing the December 2 break in the plenary session of the summit at the request of experts to agree on the concluding document, President Nazarbayev recalled that during the discussions the Heads of State and Government had stressed the importance of a concluding document of the summit. However, Russia said she would not support the resulting document, which would have a mention about “the conflict in Georgia”. Neither did Armenia and Azerbaijan come to a consensus in Astana over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. According to the Russian delegation, the compromise turned impossible because of the ideology-driven approaches manifested by individual members of the negotiation process. Who the Russian delegation meant is easy to guess. The Presidents of Georgia and Azerbaijan apparently decided that the lost war would be declared “aggression”, and the lost territories would be handed to them on a silver platter in Astana.

According to the U.S. representative, at the summit the parties failed to agree on an action plan which would identify areas of further work of the OSCE. “We cannot admit that the first summit of the OSCE in 11 years adopt an action plan that does not reflect the rather serious major security problems of our time, namely, the prolonged conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Since we did not manage to come to an agreement, we decided that the best way forward is the adoption of the Astana Declaration which reaffirms the basic principles of the OSCE,” he said.

But if we are really to compare the OSCE summit in Istanbul with the current one, we see that in 1999 there were made at least some decisions that affected the power distribution in the South Caucasus region as a whole. It was in Istanbul that the decision to build the oil pipeline Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and the gas pipeline Baku-Erzurum was made. Both projects were directed against Armenia and have been implemented. But it should be mentioned that the Istanbul summit was attended by super-heavyweights on politics Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Heydar Aliyev, Tony Blair, i.e. people with specific goals and objectives.

It is also a fact that its role in the failure of the Astana summit also played the publication of WikiLeaks, which distracted the U.S. from addressing pressing issues and forced her into the unenviable business of justification of her own diplomats. On the other hand, Armenia should be pleased with such results of the OSCE summit for one simple reason: they made it clear for Ilham Aliyev that his hysterical calls for war do not scare anybody; moreover, they sometimes cause laughter.

The summit ended, and the guests left, content with the reception - what else is necessary? We’ll wait for another 10 years. But one thing became clear in this summit: for the mere reason of pleasing oil interests, chairmanship should not be trusted to a country, which strikes you with nothing but violation of human rights and authoritarianism...