“Everything is lost, Aliyev demands a ‘corridor’, and this issue is paralleled with the Lachin corridor,” the opposition and their supporters say after the Brussels talks. “Everything is great, Pashinyan and Aliyev have agreed to open the railway,” Civil Contract members and their supporters say about the results of the same talks. Intellect suggests that these super-optimistic and super-pessimistic statements can be answered as follows: “If Aliyev wants a corridor, it does not mean that he will get it. On the other hand, if the leaders of the two countries have stated that they have agreed on the railway, it cannot be concluded that the railway will work in the foreseeable future.”
No sane person in Armenia would mind working for a Soviet-era railway. But there are many political, economic, and technical obstacles to this. I do not think that Azerbaijan needs that railway as much as we do, and in the conditions of that low motivation, it is obvious that they will not do us that “good thing” just like that. Similarly, it can be said that if someone announces that he will soon quit smoking, go to the gym and read 50 pages of fiction every day, you have the right to express doubts about these “good intentions” until you see with your own eyes that some steps are being taken in that direction.
In general, I am skeptical of the statements made “in the air,” and from that point of view I will allow myself to doubt Turkey’s recent “neighborly” words. Of course, it is impossible to guess what is happening in Erdogan’s head. The only hint that allows us to make assumptions about Turkey’s intentions is its previous actions. Even if we leave aside the Armenian Genocide and turn to modern history, we can not help but remember that the negotiations on the normalization of relations have already taken place, and they reached a certain point on October 10, 2009, with the signing of the relevant protocols. But it soon became clear that Turkey was not going to implement the points of those protocols and was putting forward preconditions related to Artsakh. If such a thing happened 12 years ago, when the situation of our state and Artsakh was better than now, can we predict that now there will be preconditions again, moreover, more severely?
I am against the use of “pro-Turkish,” “Turkishness,” “Turkish subject,” and other labels with “Turkish” roots – it is, let me say, “rabiz.” But, on the other hand, the government is obliged to explain why it is initiating this whole process and what results it expects from it.
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Aram Abrahamyan
