Justice has been served within Karabakh conflict but int'l community should be ashamed - professor

By Trend

Justice has been served within Nagorno Karabakh conflict but the international community should be ashamed that it required bloodshed to reach this point, Professor Ivan Sascha Sheehan, the executive director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore wrote in an article to EU Reporter, Trend reports.

In an article named “An answer to the Nagorno-Karabakh question”, Sheehan says that world powers have wrestled with the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh for decades but have never applied sustained pressure to achieve a breakthrough.

“Net result: zero progress. Under these circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that the dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia would be settled on the battlefield, not the conference table. Such is the outcome of last week’s historic peace announcement,” he wrote.

In his words, the broad outlines of the current peace arrangement are clear.

“Azerbaijan regains its sovereign territory. Armenian occupying forces withdraw behind their international border. an international peacekeeping force moves in. And the UNHCR will supervise the peaceful return of as many of the 700,000 Azerbaijani refugees from Karabakh who choose to exercise this right. This is almost line by line the terms laid down over a decade ago by the OSCE’s Minsk Group,” he said.

Having noted that thus justice has been served, Sheehan said the international community should be ashamed that it required bloodshed to reach this point.

“Particularly when concerted international diplomatic pressure could have achieved the same result,” the author said.

Concluding the author wrote that the international diplomatic community has failed in this region: now the time has come for the international investment community to repair that wrong.