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ISTANBUL: Turkey's Challenge To French Co-Chairmanship

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  • ISTANBUL: Turkey's Challenge To French Co-Chairmanship

    TURKEY'S CHALLENGE TO FRENCH CO-CHAIRMANSHIP

    Today's Zaman
    Jan 31 2012
    Turkey

    Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu has spoken out once again
    in opposition of France remaining part of the Organization for Security
    and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, following its adoption
    of a law criminalizing the denial of the 1915 Armenian 'genocide.'

    On CNN Turk's Egrisi Dogrusu program, Davutoglu declared that either
    France should resign its co-chairmanship or Turkey should be made a
    co-chair. This follows President Abdullah Gul's proposal that France
    end its involvement in the mediation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,
    given that through this bill, it has renounced its neutrality. During
    the program, leading journalist Taha Akyol asked whether Azerbaijanis
    will call upon France to leave the Minsk Group.

    In fact, Azerbaijan has on multiple occasions questioned the Minsk
    Group's efforts on the resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; there
    has already been discussion of France's position in the Minsk Group,
    as well as the possibility of bringing in Turkey as co-chair. In the
    recent protest against the French bill, Azerbaijani youth demanded
    France leave the Minsk Group. There is a strong belief among the
    Azerbaijani public that France is not neutral and that any future
    promises of objectivity are tempered by this new law. The key question
    today, in my opinion, is not simply the neutrality of the group's
    co-chairs. There is a complex matrix of demands and alliances at play,
    including the suggested exclusion of France, challenges to the Minsk
    Group's role in the resolution process and the possible inclusion
    of Turkey.

    The Minsk Group since its inception has almost exclusively focused
    on peacemaking -- i.e. efforts toward achieving an agreement rather
    than a comprehensive solution. Following the 2004 Prague Process,
    more space was given to direct talks between the conflict parties.

    Disappointed that the Minsk Group had not achieved even a basic outline
    of a conflict resolution strategy, the Azerbaijani public was and
    remains skeptical of the three OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries'
    objectivity. The Kazan meeting in June 2011, held before the official
    meeting with the OSCE Minsk Group, was the most promising meeting
    to date. It seems perhaps the OSCE Minsk Group never really served
    as an effective mediator. It lacks the necessary carrot-and-stick
    policies to actually persuade the parties to make concessions. During
    the negotiation process, both sides on occasion accused the OSCE of
    being biased.

    Under these circumstances, anyone might question the effectiveness
    of the current framework for negotiations. Questioning the neutrality
    of France or other Minsk Group co-chairs is in fact coming very late
    in the game -- the world's largest and most influential Armenian
    communities are concentrated in the three co-chair countries of
    the current OSCE Minsk Group. The US, despite initial opposition
    from the State Department, provides direct financial aid to the
    separatist authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia is Armenia's main
    military and political ally, and France, with its traditional strong
    cultural and social relations with Armenia, is its main lobbyist in
    the European arena. Russia was and still is something of an unknown
    quantity with regard to this conflict; in some situations, it has
    acted in support of Armenia, while in other cases, it has strongly
    advocated for peaceful conflict resolution. The US policy towards
    the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has always been pulled in opposing
    directions, with its domestic politics (the influence of the Armenian
    diaspora) in conflict with its economic and strategic interests in
    the Caspian region. France has never had much incentive to act as
    an honest broker in terms of eliciting Armenian concessions, which
    would dissatisfy French-Armenians.

    In this regard, i.e. if the current negotiations under the Minsk Group
    format do not seem to be geared towards genuine conflict resolution, is
    it time to be discussing Turkey's inclusion? Even if Azerbaijan were to
    propose such a plan, there are a number of obstacles that preclude it.

    Firstly, none of the current mediators can afford to withdraw or
    terminate the mediation efforts under the current format. Their
    national interests are at stake, and they are not keen to initiate
    another mediator. Secondly, Armenia as direct party to the conflict
    has always opposed Turkey's involvement in the resolution process
    and strongly objects to the possibility of Turkey taking on the role
    of co-chair.

    I asked this question to Gerard Libaridian, former senior adviser to
    Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian and current professor in the
    history department at the University of Michigan, who said: "Ahmet
    Davutoglu has always struck me as a most intelligent and visionary
    statesman. It is unfortunate that he is increasingly grounding that
    vision in failed experiments in history, for example the late Ottoman
    Empire with its failed reforms and the consequences of those willful
    failures, as well as the more recent Minsk Group process, which can
    best be characterized as still-born mediation."

    Thirdly, current negotiations under the auspices of the Minsk Group
    are not doing enough to change the perceptions of the warring parties,
    to transform their "zero-sum game" mentalities to visions of a win-win
    solution, a shift that is essential to the solution of the conflict.

    In this respect, it is also important to bear in mind that Turkey's
    inclusion in the Minsk Group could be good opportunity to reinvigorate
    the negotiations, but it is almost certain that not only would Armenia
    directly oppose such a proposal, the other Minsk Group countries
    would say -- diplomatically -- there is "no need to change the
    existing format."

    For these reasons, opening the debate on France's exclusion or
    Turkey's inclusion will not be productive and is not something that
    Azerbaijan can do. It would be naïve to believe Azerbaijan could
    present a considerable challenge to France's co-chair position;
    the co-chairs were specially appointed by the OSCE at the Budapest
    Summit in December 1994 to lead the Minsk group.

    To return to the question of the new French law, Turkey has tried to
    recruit 60 French MPs to ask the constitutional council to examine the
    bill to determine whether it is constitutional. If Turkey succeeds in
    blocking the bill, will Ankara still push for France's abdication of
    its Minsk Group seat? I think Ankara's energy could be best directed
    towards challenging the Minsk Group's role in the resolution process;
    in any case, due to the forthcoming elections in all three Minsk
    Group co-chair countries as well as Armenia, most of us have already
    accepted that 2012 is a lost year.

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