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BAKU: Force 'Doesn'T Give You What You Want In The Long Run'

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  • BAKU: Force 'Doesn'T Give You What You Want In The Long Run'

    FORCE 'DOESN'T GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT IN THE LONG RUN'

    news.az
    Nov 29 2011
    Azerbaijan

    News.Az interviews Clem McCartney, an independent consultant on
    conflict, civil society and peace building.

    How did you become involved in conflicts in the Caucasus? Were you
    invited to the region by governments or NGOs?

    My first involvement was back before the end of the Soviet Union. I
    was asked to look at the situation with the Ingush in North Ossetia,
    because someone there had thought there was a comparison that could
    be made with the Northern Ireland conflict and the situation there. So
    that was my very first visit to the Caucasus, in the late 1980s.

    What do you think are the prospects for a Karabakh settlement?

    One of the issues is that when you've got a stalemate, it's very hard
    to move out of a stalemate, and you've got a stalemate at the minute.

    When you've got something you hold on to it, and it's very difficult
    to be open and flexible, because if you're open and flexible you may
    make your situation worse. But if you hold on to what you've got at
    the moment, you may also in the long run make your situation more
    difficult to sustain and maintain. You have a problem in that people
    who have more or less got what they want, why should they change,
    and you have other people who haven't got anything of what they want
    so why should they give up. In that sense, one of the things we found
    in Northern Ireland was that the people who were, if you like, in
    the majority and had something realized that they had to be flexible
    now while they were strong, rather than wait until they became weaker
    and then have to try to negotiate.

    Do you think Karabakh has any chances for independence or will it
    return to Azerbaijan?

    It's quite clear what the Karabakh people want, it's pretty clear what
    the people who were IDPs want, and the two governments - Azerbaijan
    and Armenia - have got reasonably clear ideas of what they want. But
    the question is whether one can satisfy all of those and in most cases
    you can satisfy to some degree everybody, but underlying the immediate
    solutions there are the concerns, so the underlying concerns are
    what's really important. Out of those concerns people have solutions,
    so the Nagorno-Karabakh people say we want to be independent or to
    be part of Armenia, the IDPs say we want our homes back, so for the
    IDPs it has to remain part of Azerbaijan. If you can go behind all
    of that and say, but what is really important here for the people,
    why do the Nagorno-Karabakh people adopt the position they do,
    can we look at how that can be protected - I know that people have
    talked in these terms before - then you may find a s olution which
    satisfies everybody. The positions at the moment are irreconcilable,
    but the concerns may well be reconcilable. I think you have to have
    all the options on the table and acknowledge that they're valid -
    they may not be ones that you agree with, but they are valid positions
    for someone to take, given the reality that they observe.

    Armenia used armed forces to occupy Karabakh and the seven Azerbaijani
    districts surrounding it. If the peace negotiations fail, Azerbaijan
    says it has the internationally recognized right to take its territory
    back by force. What do you think of the possibility of a new war
    over Karabakh?

    There is always the possibility of a new war and obviously people
    prepare for war as well as prepare for peace. But where I come from
    you are much better off preparing for peace. There are very few wars
    in the world that have solved a problem. They may have pushed it down
    the line. You get what you want, but then you have to then hold on to
    what you want and you can't hold on to that interminably by force. I
    don't see force as an option that really gives you a sustainable
    solution. Sometimes you feel provoked into going down that line but
    it's not necessarily the right line to go down. It very seldom gives
    you really what you want in the long run. It's part of my overall view
    of the world that force doesn't ever really give you the solution to
    what you want.

    You have great experience. Do you have any example when land seized
    by war has been returned by peaceful means?

    There are lots of examples where people have reached a resolution and
    changed the status quo. Some of them are quite specific places. For
    example, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea had declared itself
    independent and was operating as an independent state. It eventually
    reached an arrangement with the Papua New Guinea government whereby
    it kind of came back in to Papua New Guinea. They did an interesting
    process by which they looked at all their options and which would be
    the best and it's certainly worth considering. Bougainville didn't have
    another state that it could identify itself with. Aceh in Indonesia
    was eventually given a great deal of autonomy by Indonesia, whereas
    before that wasn't an option and wasn't considered as possible. There
    are certainly shifts which take place where a government or a rebel
    movement shift their ground and try to negotiate rather than hold on
    to what they have.

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