When I moved to Yerevan in October 1998, it was rare to hear much positive conversation about the future of Armenia or Karabakh. That had also been the case when I visited the country on a research trip earlier that June. Many were already tired of the conflict and few seemed enthused with a new regime that had just come to power after the ousting the country's first president earlier that year. Levon Ter-Petrosyan had chosen to resign following a palace coup staged by his inner circle opposed to a concessionary peace deal with Azerbaijan. They thought the deal proposed by a troika of France, Russia, and the United States was a betrayal. Ter-Petrosyan warned that it might well be the best Armenia could ever hope for.
Despite that failure, the same troika, better known as the OSCE Minsk Group, or to quote its full title on its mandate, the Co-Chairmen of the Conference on Nagorno Karabakh under the auspices of the OSCE (Minsk Conference), mediated another variant in 1999 involving an exchange of territories. Weeks later, nationalist gunmen burst into the Armenian National Assembly and assassinated several high-level officials including newly elected Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, ironically one of those who had deposed Ter-Petrosyan in 1998. Nonetheless, the OSCE Minsk Group was back in business in Key West, Florida, in 2001.
Though nothing also came from that, the Minsk Group was at least increasingly more visible. In 2001, the troika even traveled from Azerbaijan to Armenia via Karabakh. Starting in Baku and accompanied by international media, the co-chairs traveled via Aghdam to Stepanakert before heading to Armenia. Coincidentally, a solitary can of baked beans was also transported by the delegation, or at least by British writer Tom de Waal who brought it from London to Yerevan for yours truly. Tom and I had traveled around Karabakh during his research for Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.
And in 2006, an Azerbaijani Airlines flight directly ferried the co-chairs from Baku to Yerevan. Even the arrivals board at Zvartnots Airport listed the flight. It was perhaps intended to highlight what the situation could be if only there was a peace deal.
In the decade that followed, however, many on both sides were to become increasingly frustrated by the Minsk Process. Window after window of opportunity were announced only to be slammed shut at the last minute. It also wasn’t long before many criticised the process as an imitation of talks. Focus had also shifted away from conflict resolution to conflict management. Baku was clearly unwilling to grant Karabakh anything more than high degree of autonomy while Yerevan wanted independence and was reluctant to return all of the seven surrounding regions taken in the early 1990s.
In fact, in 2005, when I was invited to meet members of the OSCE Minsk Group fact finding mission dispatched to those same parts of Azerbaijan to examine whether they were being settled by Armenians, it seemed that they had already written their conclusions. The albeit small number Armenians is settling there were refugees and only a minority were socially vulnerable families from Armenia, they believed. My experience from years visiting those settlements, however, concluded the opposite. Not tackling this issue directly meant that by 2011 a new war was inevitable.
The Minsk Group had only managed to limit the conflict to albeit fairly regular cross-border incidents before the four-day war in 2016 and for 13 years anyone supporting the 2007 Madrid Principles in Armenian circles were marginalised or ferociously attacked by online trolls. Only after defeat did those same voices, opposed to peace beforehand, support them simply out of desperation.
And the reason for that is not too hard to see. It was only to keep alive any dream of outright independence, something unlikely before 2020 and impossible to realise now. Yet, the Madrid Principles were just one of many proposals or frameworks drawn up over the years. The whole purpose was to instead prepare the ground for convening a post-conflict international conference in Minsk, Belarus, where everything could be concluded.
Moreover, while it is common to talk about the troika of co-chairs, the OSCE Minsk Group also includes Belarus, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Turkiye in addition to Armenia, Azerbaijan, France, Russia, and the United States. By the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, any hope for it to continue as is died. The negotiation process has anyway shifted away from Nagorno Karabakh, which now ceases to exist, to normlising relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The right to return for IDPs and refugees seems a secondary concern.
Last week, in the face of renewed calls by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev earlier this month to dissolve the OSCE Minsk Group, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has acknowledged that it is under consideration. For three years now, even the co-chairs are unable to function as they are mandated to operate only in agreement with each other. Hardly anyone believes that it might return to the fold.
“We stayed in five-star hotels […] usually assigned suites on the executive floor that gave us access to a private dining room and full bar at no additional expense, former U.S. co-chair Richard E. Hoagland wrote in 2021. “We always sought out the best restaurants in the cities we found ourselves. We lived well while we […] reminded Baku and Yerevan that the Minsk Group exists. But to be blunt, very, very little ever got accomplished.”
That is perhaps a little unfair. The OSCE Minsk Group did at times get close to resolving the conflict, but there was rarely the same political will to do so at the same time in Armenia or Azerbaijan. The then defacto authorities in Karabakh were also nearly always against any peace proposal, leading Hoagland to conclude that "only a war would finally settle the problem.” It was up to Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the conflict themselves, a situation not too dissimilar to today, now mainly through bilateral diplomatic means.
