Baku. Viktoriya Dementyeva-APA. ‘I don’t think that the problem of our inability to reach a peace agreement has been the format of the Minsk Group or the format of the co-chairs.
The problem is that these are very difficult questions. The differences between the sides are very great, and frankly, there’s a lack of trust. Changing the format is not going to address any of those things’. The OSCE Minsk group Co-chair Robert Bradtke told in an interview to Radio Liberty, APA reports.
‘I feel that we’ve made a lot of substantive progress in the last years. Again, I think the outlines of an agreement are there. There are complications about the sequencing of steps toward a final settlement, about fleshing out some of the details, and as I say, there’s this lack of trust which makes it much more difficult to reach agreement. So I think rather than starting over again from some new perspective with some new format, the sides have told us that they want to work in this format [and] that they accept this format’- he added.

According to Bradtke for ۲۰ years of its activity the Minsk Group has done three important things: it has helped be a factor for stability and helped defuse tensions, be a channel for communication between and among the parties and could develop a common basis for negotiation. ‘We’ve worked very hard with the parties to try to develop this framework document. We haven’t succeeded yet. But I point to the statement of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan made when they were in Sochi in January of this year with [Russian] President [Dmitry] Medvedev, when they expressed readiness to accelerate work on this document. I think there’s no question we’re closer today than we were ۲۰ years ago. I think the sides understand the basic elements of what a settlement should look like. They’ve articulated, and we’ve articulated with them, elements that are captured by the presidents in the joint statements they made at the summits in L’Aquila, in Muskoka, and last year in Deauville’.

Commenting the questions on the developing a mechanism to investigate cease-fire violations along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact, the Co-chair said that they have given ideas to the sides on the issue and discussed them when we were in the region just a couple of weeks ago. ‘So we will continue to work on this and try to develop ideas that the sides can agree upon.’

R. Bradtke welcomed the the idea of people-to-people dialogue. ‘It is important. If you look back from the a ۲۰-year perspective, what we now see is a generation in Armenia and Azerbaijan growing up that has really not lived side by side. So people-to-people contacts can help play a role there, but one of the challenges is to do this in a way that is constructive [and] to do it in a way that is genuine. People-to-people contacts don’t work if they are used by the sides for political purposes or are politicized. If they are used to continue arguments about who was at fault or who did wrong to whom ۲۰ years ago, that’s not going to help move things forward.’