Resume of the week: Stalemate in the Karabakh conflict

PanARMENIAN.Net - The current stalemate may urge the conflicting sides to seek for «foreign» mediators, which, by the way, is already happening. Statements of Official Tehran on readiness to join the negotiation process already have a long history, and lately Ankara has begun to speak of it too. However, for participation in the negotiation process, Ankara has one negative point - absence of Armenian-Turkish relations. But even here there are some variants: Ankara wants to play first fiddle in the Near East, and the role of a mediator is the most relevant one. Though Turkey failed to start a dialogue between Syria and Israel, Syria may achieve more success. During a recent visit to Syria Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan declared to President Bashar Assad that Armenia would be pleased to see Damascus in the role of a mediator between Armenia and Turkey. Observers believe that Armenia's top-priority task must be regulation of relations with Turkey, and Syria can help her with it in the initial stages. However, Official Baku believes that the «principle of territorial integrity» is as eternal and invariable as the existence of the Planet Earth and the all the intermediary efforts of any country will come to a naught the moment the question of territorial integrity comes to the fore. According to Turkish experts, maintaining friendly relations with both Turkey and Armenia, Syria can mediate between these states only in the initial stage, because she cannot have the necessary instruments for further regulation of the negotiation process without considering Azerbaijan's interests. It is quite interesting however, what Damascus has to do with Azerbaijan.

This week also marked the trial start-up of Iranian nuclear power plant "Bushehr" and, strange as it may seem, this fact was rather quietly received by the USA. The US has acknowledged that Iran's activities at the Bushehr nuclear plant do not cross the boundaries of peaceful nuclear technology, Iranian Agency "Press TV" reports. At that Iranian journalists refer to the statement of US State Department Spokesman Robert Wood, who declared that "the trial start-up of the Bushehr nuclear plant in southern Iran is in the realm of peaceful use of nuclear energy."

Iran received Wood's statement with great satisfaction as a sign of apparent approval of her peaceful nuclear program. According to Iran, a peculiar role in the approval played the fact that the Bushehr reactor is equipped with the help of Russia, which must provide a firm guarantee to the US that the plant is of exceptionally peaceful character.

And the week ended with the 21st anniversary of Armenian pogroms in Sumgait. The Azeri-led program that targeted the Armenian population of the seaside Town of Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan during February 1988 was the first mass killing of ethnic population in the history of the newly-established Soviet Union. The pogroms continued for 3 days and were accompanied by mass violence, robbery and killings, which resulted in the first flows of refugees from Azerbaijan to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. No investigation was carried out and the guilt of the offenders was not established, which allowed the situation to worsen. According to official data, the pogroms resulted in the death of 32 people.

By concatenation of circumstances these days Azerbaijan "commemorates the events" in Khojaly… According to the officially recognized variant in Baku, "On the night of February 26 the Armenian Armed Forces attacked and occupied the town of Khojaly. Occupation was followed with unprecedented brutalities against the civilian population. In a few hours the aggressors killed and took hostage about 2000 people." Let us leave the lie about Khojaly on the conscience of the Baku Agitation and Propaganda Department; God will fix them. As we have been writing, for all her misfortunes Azerbaijan has recently been blaming only Armenians.