“Status-quo is in Azerbaijan’s interest”

Thinks the NA Republican MP Artak Zakaryan

– After the Kazan meeting quite an interesting situation was created, although it had been known in advance that if Azerbaijan did not make any new proposals the turnaround would be possible. Nevertheless, now the French Foreign Minister speaks of new proposals. In your opinion, what does this situation mean?
– There were not many expectations from Kazan, there was the main expectation that the sides were going to agree on the basic principles and the basic principles would be the basis of the future negotiations and agreements. Those three original agreements that should have been reached on the basic principles and had to be reaffirmed in written; Azerbaijan showed that it has disagreements on the original agreements that means disrupting the negotiation process from the beginning, i.e. forbid, not allow from the beginning the possible resolution of the issue through the negotiation process any more. Nevertheless, the threat-to-use-force factor is a factor absolutely ruled out both by the international community and the superpowers and even Azerbaijan itself is not interested in taking any actions by the use of force. I think that the status-quo preservation is also in the interest of Azerbaijan. Otherwise, it was not possible in the case of the positive attitude of Armenia, in the case of our agreement on the basic principles, the full support and urges of the superpowers that any step forward would not be expected. It means that the bottom line is that there exists a silent agreement on the status-quo. Although Azerbaijan talks about the necessity of changing the situation, however those are just statements made for no reason and the status-quo is actually in Azerbaijan’s interest.
– You said that the threat of using force is a ruled-out factor, why are you so convinced; Azerbaijan speaks only of using force and the power of its own military budget, does it not?
– The size and the capacity of the military budget does not indicate the fighting capabilities of the army, the efficiency of the 21st century army is measured not by the spent finances on that, but by the actual capabilities to deal with the existing problems. No military, analytical expertise thus far existing indicates that Azerbaijan’s army overwhelms the Karabakh defense army with its fighting capabilities or generally any army in the region. Azerbaijan understands quite well that any military action from the very first moment will create a necessity of the international forces and military interference on its own territory. Next, there is a gas pipeline that is a stable source of income for Azerbaijan and especially Aliyev clan and threatening that source of income will not be justified with actually pointless military action for the Azerbaijani people.
– The ANC stated at the latest rally that it went for a rest for some time and demanded that the government made its list and sat down to have a dialogue on the pre-term elections. In your opinion, is this a real demand?
– Since the political field is in the forming process in our country and if let us symbolically say in the pre-election logic all the political forces are so to say “allowed” to say everything by the unwritten agreement that all that will be forgotten after the elections and a new correlation with new relations will start. And I think that those are statements made by the ANC to create pre-election mood and our colleagues in the ANC understand quite well themselves that the regular elections are not far away and they must prepare too.