It was touch and go for a while. Even a day before this year’s prestigious Munich Security Conference it was unclear whether both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev would attend. In the past, Armenian leaders have more often shunned the event and even despite December’s much-lauded bilateral COP-29 joint statement made bilaterally by Baku and Yerevan, the war of words between the sides unfortunately continues.
Indeed, it has only been since 2020 that Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders have attended the prestigious conference at the same time. Controversy has always followed. Not to be outdone, perhaps, Georgia even got in on the act this year too when Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili attended without clearing it first with the government in Tbilisi. Newly appointed Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze anyway stayed away, favouring Brussels for his first official foreign trip.
Perhaps the publication of this year’s Munich Security Report which also criticised Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili just days before the conference was another possible reason for the no-show.
But even that paled into insignificance compared to the shenanigans usually surrounding Armenia and Azerbaijan. In February 2020, for example, Aliyev and Pashinyan found themselves on the same stage in a well-intended effort by organisers to bring the sides together. Though the two did attempt to put a jovial face on proceedings, it nonetheless descended into petty bickering and a tiresome journey through a bitterly disputed history rather than look to the future.
Many watching hoped that such a spectacle would never happen again, as well they should. Five months later, clashes on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border set the scene for the 44-day war that broke out another two months later.
Fast forward to post-pandemic times and another attempt was made, albeit alongside Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, perhaps in the vain hope that his presence could serve as a potentially stabilising factor. It didn’t and what followed was little more than Aliyev reprimanding a meek and timid Pashinyan. Many in Yerevan were critical of the Armenian prime minister’s performance as well as his English-language proficiency compared to that of his fellow speakers.
Some even begged him to never speak English again at future international fora, instead conversing in Armenian simultaneously translated for a foreign audience. The critics included a former main Pashinyan advisor.
But despite the problems, it would be wrong to dismiss the potential of the Munich Security Conference. Efforts in 2020 and 2023 were at least a good-willed attempt to have the two speak publicly together. The spectacle of the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders publicly sharing the same public stage let alone the same panel was unprecedented. Moreover, last year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also convened a meeting between the two on the sidelines just hours beforehand.
Regardless, Aliyev and Pashinyan did again attend Munich this year though shied away from sharing a panel. Instead, they met trilaterally with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz before engaging in bilateral talks. Though little appeared to come out of the meeting other than a commitment to hold another meeting of the border demarcation commissions and face-to-face bilateral talks between the two foreign ministers, the meeting was better held than not. The process had otherwise stalled.
Indeed, the foreign ministers met again at the end of February in Berlin in what one one insider privately says very nearly didn’t happen following a particularly bombastic interview with Pashinyan by France 24 just days before. Though details are not known, it was at least decided to resume talks although still not on the U.S. platform. More was also to come.
Immediately following the Berlin talks the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers set off the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkiye. There another regional panel took place. Rubin Rubinyan, Armenia’s Special Envoy for Normalising Relations with Turkiye, shared the stage alongside Turkish counterpart, Serdar Kilic, Azerbaijani Presidential Advisor Hikmet Hajiyev, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Lasha Darsalia, and EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar.
Kilic even dared Rubinyan to invite him for talks in Yerevan in order to resume Armenia-Turkiye efforts. At time of writing there has been no official response. Foreign Minister Mirzoyan also held a bilateral meeting with Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan.
But even if such meetings are to be welcomed they mean little without any tangible progress visible to the public. In 2001, for example, then-President Heydar Aliyev met four times with then-President Robert Kocharyan in six months, including once on the Armenia-Nakhchivan border. Given the same proclamations made in the recent three years, few want to hear even more predictions that an agreement can be signed by the end of this year too.
They want to see results while claims from Yerevan that a new war is imminent in the face of denials from Baku hardly help. Instead, Armenians want to know whether a peaceful future lies ahead while those who left Karabakh last year are in an even more uncertain predicament. And those Azerbaijani IDPs that fled their homes in the 1990s want to know that they can return without having to relive the same experience again at a later date.
Meanwhile, a question also arises. If Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have been meeting regularly for the past three years, isn’t it about time that they at least establish diplomatic relations or hold talks closer to home? For a public starved of credible information, that would at least be symbolic of a potentially more positive future waiting on the horizon. At the same time, while Track I and especially Track II diplomacy continues often in secret, Tracks III-IX involving actual citizens, businesspeople, clerics, mainstream media etc. remain as absent as ever.
In 2024 that must change in order to effectively prepare both populations for peace.
source: Onnik James Krikorian is a journalist, photojournalist, and consultant from the U.K. who has covered the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict since 1994.
photo: Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan at the Antalya Diplomatic Forum on 1 March 2024.
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