{"id":2298,"date":"2017-01-30T14:54:16","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T14:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/?p=2298"},"modified":"2017-02-20T15:00:25","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T15:00:25","slug":"azerbaijan-is-platform-for-peace-an-olive-branch-or-pr-stunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/?p=2298","title":{"rendered":"Azerbaijan: Is Platform for Peace an Olive Branch or PR Stunt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By ZAUR SHIRIYEV*
\nEurasiaNet<\/em><\/p>\n

At a time when the prospects for peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan seem as bleak as ever, the unprecedented appearance in Baku of several Armenian activists has come as somewhat of a surprise.<\/p>\n

In early November, Azerbaijan hosted a conference, \u201cThe Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Main Obstacles and Prospects of the Settlement. View from Armenia and Azerbaijan.\u201d That was followed up by the creation of a \u201cPeace Platform\u201d comprising activists from Armenia and Azerbaijan. A number of Armenians have moved to Baku, and have started working at an Azerbaijani news website, haqqin.az.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To call this a quixotic effort would perhaps be an understatement. For one, the Armenians involved in the project are obscure, with little credibility in Armenia.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people involved from the Armenian side are mostly little-known and have left Armenia with scandals, or have been granted asylum in European countries \u2013 that raises many questions and suspicions,\u201d said Stepan Grigoryan, a Yerevan-based analyst who has been involved in previous non-official dialogues between Armenia and Azerbaijan, known as Track II diplomacy, in an interview with EurasiaNet.org.<\/p>\n

In addition, their statements from Baku are unlikely to resonate much in Armenia. One of them, Syusan Djaginian, speaking at the November conference, accused Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan of \u201cgenocide, not only against Azerbaijanis, but against the Armenian people.\u201d Another participant, Vahe Avetiyan, told the conference that \u201cinternational law requires respect toward territorial integrity and state sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFewer than 1 percent of Armenians support these principles,\u201d said<\/a> Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, in an interview with Armenian news website hetq.am<\/a>. He describes the initiative as \u201ca road to nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Baku seems to believe that it may be possible to undercut the Armenian government\u2019s support among Armenians, and that this sort of initiative can help achieve that aim.<\/p>\n

Public opposition in Armenia to Sargsyan\u2019s administration seems to be rising, as was vividly illustrated last summer, when a group of ultranationalists seized a Yerevan police station and took hostages, and Armenians came out into the streets to support the hostage-takers against the government.<\/p>\n

One of the sources of public discontent that fueled the hostage-taking episode was a perception that Sargsyan was soft on Karabakh, and supposedly willing to make concessions to Azerbaijan. Even so, Baku seems to believe that it can use this sort of soft power to help peel off support from Sargsyan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Armenians who came to Baku, by their own admission, are under constant pressure from the Armenian authorities,\u201d wrote Ramiz Mehdiyev, head of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan, in an article that he published a week before the Peace Platform\u2019s founding.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch an unfortunate situation for Armenian human rights activists can be explained by the Sargsyan regime\u2019s extreme intolerance towards his critics, which costs Armenia dearly and threatens the country with even more damage,\u201d Mehdiyev added.<\/p>\n

Baku may \u201cnaively\u201d see the platform initiative as a means of reinvigorating negotiations over Karabakh, de Waal said. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing attempts by Baku to find a means of pressure on the Armenian side,\u201d he said. \u201cThis Baku platform should be interpreted in this context.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the first decade after Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a Karabakh ceasefire agreement in 1994, Baku encouraged genuine contacts between Armenian and Azerbaijani activists, primarily funded by European Union member states.<\/p>\n

Starting in about 2009, the Azerbaijani government tried to sponsor Track II diplomacy itself. Some prominent Armenian officials, such as Gerard Libaridian, adviser to former president Levon Ter-Petrossian, were invited to Baku to participate in conferences, and state-run think tanks cooperated with Armenian counterparts to work on ideas for resolving the Karabakh conflict.<\/p>\n

As official negotiations over Karabakh stalled, Azerbaijan\u2019s government soured on these Track II efforts. And in recent years, Azerbaijani officials had become hostile toward them: Three of Azerbaijan\u2019s most prominent peace activists, Arif and Leyla Yunus, and Rauf Mirgadirov, who had for years led dialogues with Armenian counterparts, were imprisoned<\/a> in 2014 on charges including spying for Armenia. Arif and Leyla Yunus were released in 2015 and Mirgadirov in 2016.<\/p>\n

Even some representatives of Azerbaijan\u2019s civil society sector \u2013 which is often under direct or indirect control of the state \u2013 have responded with hostility to some previous Track II endeavors. In 2014, a joint statement initiated by two public figures, former high-ranking government officials from each country, Eldar Namazov and David Shahnazaryan, faced opposition from some in the Azerbaijani elite. \u201cIf the peace process doesn\u2019t yield any results at the presidential level, then there is no meaning in our dialogues,\u201d said<\/a> Sahib Mammadov, Chairman of the Citizens\u2019 Labor Rights Protection League.<\/p>\n

Some in Baku express concern that the Peace Platform may in fact be a means of monopolizing Track II diplomacy and bringing it under tighter government control.<\/p>\n

\u201cLocal civil society actors might feel pressure to join the platform, which could endanger their confidence building measures in different frameworks, in particular in regards to cross-border cooperation,\u201d said one civil society activist in Baku, who spoke to EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n

Moreover, international donor organizations that have financed Track II processes by local non-governmental organizations could be paralyzed by being forced to exclusively support the Peace Platform and cut financing to other initiatives, the activist added.<\/p>\n

Baku has made other moves recently intended as gestures toward Armenia. In 2012, it instituted a system to allow Armenians who had lived in Azerbaijan during the Soviet era to get funds from bank accounts that they had had there, and had not been able to access. And in October, President Ilham Aliyev said that Azerbaijan may accept Karabakh as \u201can autonomous republic,\u201d a formulation he had not previously used.<\/p>\n

*Zaur Shiriyev is an Academy Associate at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By ZAUR SHIRIYEV* EurasiaNet At a time when the prospects for peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan seem as bleak as ever, the unprecedented appearance in [more >>>]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":674,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conflicts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2298"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2336,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions\/2336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covcasbulletin.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}