According to the Atlas Political Studies Center, which has held a public opinion poll on foreign political priorities in 2016 in Azerbaijan, the majority of respondents (86%) do not expect positive shifts in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Only 14% of respondents believe that there will be positive changes. Answering the question: ‘Can hostilities start in 2016?’, most of respondents answered positively. 56% of people believe a war is possible, 23% are sure that a war is not possible, and 21% of people are undecided.
The pessimism of the Azerbaijanis is connected with the absence of any real progress in the negotiations on Karabakh. No summits (since 1999) have yielded actual results. The talks held by the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group have a status quo nature and are aimed at preventing the situation from breaking out into hostilities.
Therefore, to hasten the settlement of the conflict, Baku intends to use political, diplomatic and economic leverages, as well as to accumulate its military potential.
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev stated at the governmental session on the results of the last year that there was no progress in the settlement in 2015; there was stagnation in the talks. The Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan met at the end of last year, but the meeting was very formal – a meeting for a meeting. “The meeting was absolutely useless and it yielded no results. The reason for this is that Armenia doesn’t want peace, it is trying to maintain the status quo as long as possible, it doesn’t want to leave the occupied territories, it considers the negotiations only to be a process, it wastes time and wants to turn the negotiations into an infinite process,” Aliyev believes.
According to him, the mediators do not bring serious pressure to bear on Yerevan. The heads of the states which are the co-chairs of the Minsk Group have many times stated that the status quo is unacceptable, but no concrete steps to change the status quo have been taken.
Meanwhile, it is well-known that the UN Security Council adopted four resolutions which demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces, even though it didn’t adopt any resolutions on similar conflicts in the post-Soviet space.
In 2016 Baku intends to raise the Karabakh issue at all international platforms, accumulate not only diplomatic and political conditions, but primarily military power. In 2015 Azerbaijan provided the edge on the contact line. “Dozens of occupiers were killed; the Armenian government is panic-stricken, in a crying jag; it appeals to foreign forces to protect it. However, where are Armenian soldiers dying? They are dying on Azerbaijani territory. They must go away, leave our lands, and the conflict will be over; and nobody will die there and probably peace will be restored,” Ilham Aliyev said.
