User:Yerevantsi/Goble plan
The Goble plan is a plan proposed by a US State Department official Paul Goble to swap land between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1992. It was eventually declined by both parties.
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Since 1995, the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group has been mediating with the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan to settle for a new solution. Numerous proposals have been made which have primarily been based on both sides making several concessions. One such proposal stipulated that as Armenian forces withdrew from the seven regions surrounding Karabakh, Azerbaijan would share some of its economic assets including profits from an oil pipeline that would go from Baku through Armenia to Turkey.[1] Other proposals also included that Azerbaijan would provide the broadest form of autonomy to the enclave next to granting it full independence. Armenia has also been pressured by being excluded from major economic projects throughout the region, including the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway.[1]
According to Armenia's former president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, by giving certain Karabakh territories to Azerbaijan, the Karabakh conflict would have been resolved in 1997. A peace agreement could have been concluded and a status for Nagorno-Karabakh would have been determined. Ter-Petrosyan noted years later that the Karabakh leadership approach was maximalist and "they thought they could get more."[2][3] Most autonomy proposals have been rejected, however, by the Armenians, who consider it as a matter that is not negotiable. Likewise, Azerbaijan has also refused to let the matter subside and regularly threatens to resume hostilities.[4] On 30 March 1998, Robert Kocharyan was elected President and continued to reject calls for making a deal to resolve the conflict. In 2001, Kocharyan and Aliyev met at Key West, Florida for peace talks sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While several Western diplomats expressed optimism, failure to prepare the populations of either country for compromise reportedly thwarted hopes for a peaceful resolution.[5]
A political firestorm ignited after the Key West Peace Talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh. Azerbaijan announced that Armenia offered to swap the stretch of Armenian territory that separates Nakhchivan from the rest of Azerbaijan, called the Meghri strip, in exchange for official Armenian sovereignty over the Lachin corridor.[6] Opposition to this plan erupted in both countries, and Robert Kocharian and Heydar Aliyev had to quickly disavow the proposal.
According to Azerbaijani sources, in 1997, on the margins of the Second Council of Europe Summit, Presidents Aliyev and Kocharyan reached an understanding based on a swap of territories. Subsequently Armenia allegedly rejected the arrangement, which had also become known as the Sadarak agreement. The Armenian view is that a swap of territories is not possible as it would cut Armenia off its border with Iran.
In April 2001, further to their travel to Strasbourg on the occasion of the joint accession of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the Council of Europe, the two presidents met in Paris upon the invitation of President Chirac of France. Reportedly, an agreement was reached, referred to as the Paris principles. Subsequently, in a weeklong negotiation in a proximity format7 in Key West, US, the Paris agreement was put on paper. The bargaining seems to be about exchange of corridors, the Lachin corridor linking Armenia with N-K and the Meghri corridor linking Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan.
According to Azerbaijan, the exchange would be symmetrical, with Baku and Yerevan establishing full control over their respective corridors.
Armenia says says the agreement was asymmetrical, with Yerevan gaining full sovereignty over the Lachin corridor and Baku having the right of passage through Meghri corridor, much along the lines of the Berlin corridor of the past.
In October 2002, there were vague press reports about new Azerbaijani proposals – notably, to divide contested lands with international mediation, with some localities choosing by referendum whether they belong to Armenia or to Azerbaijan. The same reports indicated that Baku had reiterated it would never accept that N-K become a new sovereign state. http://www.coe.int/t/e/com/files/events/2003-04-Youth-conflicts/Nagorno_conflict.asp
http://geo.1september.ru/articlef.php?ID=200404303
In April 1999, both Aliev and Kocharian attended the summit in Washington marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of NATO. With the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, they had an informal meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in her office. Albright left Kocharian and Aliev together to talk one-on-one. Thus, almost by accident, a new kind of dialogue began. The two men had virtually not seen each other since their secret wartime discussions in Moscow in 1993. They found there was a common base of understanding between them. Both were hard, lonely leaders who were more comfortable with the format of confidential top-level talks. As a former Komsomol official from Stepanakert, Kocharian had an almost filial respect for Aliev, who was more than thirty years older. Over the next two years they met fifteen times or so. The fact that Kocharian came from Karabakh reduced the problem of Nagorny Karabakh’s representation in the talks: in practice, he represented the Karabakh Armenians as well. It was clear that for Kocharian, Karabakh’s de facto independence was paramount. This was one reason that at one of their early meetings the two men appear to have revived what had been called the “Goble Plan.” The project was named after a former U.S. State Department specialist on the Caucasus, Paul Goble, who had written a briefing paper in 1992 in which he proposed the idea of a territorial exchange to resolve the Karabakh dispute. Basically, in return for Armenia’s being given the “Lachin[8] corridor” linking it to Nagorny Karabakh, Azerbaijan would receive a land corridor across Armenia’s southern Meghri region connecting it with Nakhichevan.14 The idea had the virtue of simplicity and would also give Aliev a substantial prize to brandish before the Azerbaijani public when he announced other painful and unpopular concessions. Yet it did not escape notice that a plan that suited both Nakhichevan and Karabakh was being discussed by men who were natives of the two regions involved. Many in the Azerbaijani elite rejected the plan on offer in 1999 as meaning a surrender of Karabakh. In October 1999, three of Aliev’s top aides all resigned, apparently over this issue, depriving him of his most experienced advisers. They were his long-term foreign affairs aide, Vafa Guluzade; the head of his secretariat, Eldar Namazov; and his foreign minister, Tofik Zulfugarov.
In Armenia, the “Goble Plan” was even more controversial because giving up Meghri would mean the loss of Armenia’s southern border with its friendliest neighbor, Iran. Kocharian, a Karabakhi, would be vulnerable to the charge that he was selling land of the Republic of Armenia to secure the future of Nagorny Karabakh. That was why, to have any hope of selling the plan, Kocharian badly needed the support of Defense Minister Vazgen Sarkisian, who in the summer of 1999 had become the most powerful man in Armenia. In May 1999, Vazgen Sarkisian’s Republican Party, based on the Yerkrapah movement, won a resounding victory in Armenia’s parliamentary elections. It had formed a strong alliance with Karen Demirchian’s People’s Party, and together they supplanted the former ruling party, the ANM, which failed to win any seats at all. After the elections, Kocharian made Sarkisian Armenia’s prime minister, and Karen Demirchian became speaker of parliament. [9]
It seems that over the next few months, Sarkisian, who had led the palace coup to oust Ter-Petrosian, was gradually persuaded of the advantages of a peace deal on Karabakh. The new prime minister made a trip to the United States, during which he was told that financial support from the Diaspora was decreasing and could not be relied on to sustain Armenia. On 11 October, Aliev and Kocharian met for two hours on the border between Nakhichevan and Armenia—their fifth meeting in six months. The Azerbaijanis barbecued a sheep and the mood was friendly. There were hopes that some kind of framework declaration on[9] Nagorny Karabakh could be made at the coming OSCE summit in Istanbul in November.[10]
References edit
- Specific
- ^ a b Cohen, Ariel (2005). Eurasia in Balance: US and the Regional Power Shift. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. p. 60. ISBN 0-7546-4449-9.
- ^ "By Giving Karabakh Lands to Azerbaijan, Conflict Would Have Ended in '97, Says Ter-Petrosian". Asbarez. 19 April 2011.
- ^ "Ter-Petrosyan on the BBC: Karabakh conflict could have been resolved by giving certain territories to Azerbaijan". ArmeniaNow. 19 April 2011.
- ^ "Azerbaijan threatens renewed war". BBC News. 12 May 2004. Retrieved 17 July 2012.
- ^ Peuch, Jean-Christophe (10 April 2001). "Armenia/Azerbaijan: International Mediators Report Progress On Karabakh Dispute". RFE/RL.
- ^ Land Swap in Nagorno-Karabakh: Much Noise Over An Unrealistic Option.Tigran Martirosyan. 14 August 2002. Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.[1]
- ^ Stern, David (March - April 2003). "Background paper on the Nagorno-Karabak conflict". Council of Europe. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ de Waal 2003, p. 263.
- ^ a b de Waal 2003, p. 264.
- ^ de Waal 2003, p. 265.
- General
- de Waal, Thomas (2003). Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 9780814719459.