Thomas de Waal: Karabakh ... The Other Failed Peace Process

Thomas de Waal is a senior associate for the Caucasus with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His book, The Caucasus: An Introduction, will be published this fall by Oxford University Press.

With the flurry of foreign news at the moment, you will be forgiven for missing the statement of Presidents Medvedev, Obama and Sarkozy from the G8 summit Deauville on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict. But it is the most serious international declaration on the conflict for many years.

For a decade and a half the world has barely noticed the negotiations to resolve the longest-running protracted conflict in the post-Communist world, the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute over Karabakh. The peace process is too closed and the issue too complex and mysterious for anyone but the poor tiny benighted group of analysts (such as myself) who do follow it to take notice.

The statement made on May 26 by the three heads of state of the mediating powers, makes it clear that a moment of truth is approaching. At Kazan in late June, President Dmitry Medvedev, backed by the French and U.S. mediators, will make a strong push to have Presidents Aliev and Sarkisian finally cut a deal on the Document on Basic Principles that they have been discussing for more than five years now.

As I have argued before in The National Interest, the Karabakh conflict gets only a fraction of the attention that Kosovo did but is in a much more strategically sensitive neighborhood...