On December 1-3, the seventeenth Ministerial Council of the OSCE was held in Athens, with the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh settlement as one of the principal points on the agenda. Despite many efforts by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as international mediators in the form of the OSCE Minsk group, the problem still seems far from a solution. The conflicting parties have not displayed any visible progress in reconciling their views about the Basic Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, proposed in Madrid in November, 2007. Nevertheless, each of the numerous meetings between their leaders, including the latest one held on November 27 in Munich, have been followed by optimistic statements about “progress”.

At the Athens ministerial, the OSCE was more successful in pushing the process further ahead. In particular, the three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group represented by foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov and Bernard Kouchner, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg succeeded on December 1 to issue a five-party statement, joined also by the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Edward Nalbandian and Elmar Mamedyarov.

According to the document, the co-chairs reiterate their commitment expressed in the Joint Statement issued by the three presidents on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at the L’Aquila Summit of the Eight on July 10, to support the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan as they complete the work on the Basic Principles. The co-chairs also urged that the parties complete this work as soon as possible, expecting that an agreement on the Basic Principles will provide the framework for a comprehensive settlement to promote future peace, stability, and prosperity for the entire region, the Statement read.

According to the Statement, the five Heads of the delegation “noted the positive dynamic in the talks, demonstrated through six meetings this year between the Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

At first glance, this Statement may seem an insignificant document, possibly even an attempt by the OSCE to save face. However, along with the usual encouraging and optimistic phrases, the document contains a formula of importance for the stability of the South Caucasus region. For the first time, Azerbaijan put its signature under the following lines: “The Ministers reaffirmed their commitment … to reach an agreement based, in particular, upon the principles of the Helsinki Final Act of Non-Use of Force or Threat of Force….” This is in striking contrast to the previous statements by Azerbaijani officials, the latest by President Ilham Aliyev at the Munich summit, that Azerbaijan could use force to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh problem if the negotiations fail to yield results. This part of the Statement of the Five was repeated also in a special statement of OSCE as a whole on December 3, which is the first document on behalf of the 56-member organization about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict since the Budapest summit of the CSCE in 1994 (OSCE and its predecessor CSCE adopt documents by consensus, and Armenia and Azerbaijan have not agreed on a single document since then).

An important aspect of the Karabakh problem is its relationship with the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations. Both Azerbaijan and Turkey seek to link this process to the Karabakh issue, implying progress in the latter may be a precondition for the ratification of the Turkish-Armenian protocols in the Turkish Parliament. Meanwhile, representatives of the co-chairs stress that these two processes are independent, although they recognize that progress in one of them would also help progress in the other. The most recent example of this type of assessments was the letter of President Obama to a group of Armenian American organizations (publicized on December 7 by the Armenian Assembly of America), in which the U.S. President said: “normalization between Armenia and Turkey should move forward without preconditions.”

The documents adopted at OSCE Ministerial Council constituted a step forward for the Minsk process. The three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group are expected to arrive in Armenia and Azerbaijan later this month to present new proposals for the progress of the negotiation process.