Russia wants to revive Karabakh peace processes outside the framework of existing mechanisms

PanARMENIAN.Net - The South Ossetian crisis will not constitute a precedent, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Federation Council's Foreign Affairs Committee on September 18. "We will continue to responsibly fulfill our mediation mission in the negotiation process and peacemaking that fully applies to the conflicts of Transdniester and Nagorno Karabakh," he said, Eurasianet reports.



The signal the Kremlin wants to send is that "it is not restoring its empire and that it is ready to reconcile warring parties while playing a leading role in the process," wrote Sergei Markedonov of the Moscow-based Institute for Political and Military Analysis in the September 16 issue of Russia's "Kommersant" daily.



Russia has been expending a lot of energy since the August crisis to revive the Transdniester and Nagorno Karabakh peace processes outside the framework of the existing international settlement mechanisms.



Concerning Karabakh, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met twice in September with his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan and once with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. "It seems to us that there is now a good basis for a resolution of the conflict, which would fit with the interests of all states and would be based on the principles of international law," Aliyev said after his meeting with Medvedev on September 16. He did not elaborate.



Russian diplomats are now trying to arrange a Sargsyan-Aliyev meeting that would be hosted by Medvedev.



In its peacemaking efforts, Moscow has found unexpected support from Turkey. In the midst of the August Georgian-Russian crisis, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed launching a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform (KIIP), modeled on the 1999 Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. In Erdogan's view, the KIIP should bring together five regional states - Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey - with a view to acting as a comprehensive conflict prevention mechanism, as well as an instrument to foster confidence, democracy and economic prosperity in the Caucasus.



With the exception of Georgia, all regional countries have welcomed the Turkish initiative, and Russia has offered to help get the project off the ground.



There is also an element of suspicion in Yerevan. Armenian opposition leaders in particular see Turkey's proposed KIIP as an attempt to supplant the OSCE's Minsk Group as the chief mediator in the Karabakh peace process. President Sargsyan's administration has dismissed those concerns, insisting that it intends to keep on working with the Minsk Group, of which the United States, France and Russia serve as co-chairs.



In a commentary published September 24 in the International Herald Tribune, Turkey's Foreign Minister Ali Babacan - whose country is a member of the OSCE Minsk Group - said the KIIP was "not designed as an alternative to any institution, mechanism, or any international organization that deals with the problems of the Caucasus." What Ankara is offering, he said, is "an additional platform to facilitate communication between countries of the region, a framework to develop stability, confidence and cooperation, a forum for dialogue."



Not everyone agrees with that view, however.



For Sinan Ogan, the chair of the Ankara-based TURKSAM think tank, the existing international mechanism has demonstrated its inability to solve the Karabakh conflict. "Therefore," he wrote in Turkey's Today's Zaman daily, "one may expect the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group in the days ahead and its replacement with a new mechanism to be generated within the framework of the [KIIP]."