“I think that we will have no agreement before the end of the year,” Giro Manoyan, the opposition party’s chief foreign policy spokesman, told journalists.
Like official Yerevan, Manoyan blamed Azerbaijan for deadlock in the negotiating process that followed the June 24 Armenian-Azerbaijani summit held in the Russian city of Kazan.
Contrary to the U.S., Russian and French mediators’ expectations, Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev failed to finalize the basic principles of the conflict’s resolution put forward by the three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group.
The mediators have since tried to salvage the peace process. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who hosted the Kazan meeting, presented his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts with a set of unpublicized proposals meant to break the impasse.
Manoyan suggested that Aliyev’s and Sarkisian’s responses to those proposals seem to have been “not positive.” “If the responses of Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s presidents were positive, I think we would have felt that through the Russian side’s reaction,” he said. “But there has been no reaction from the Russian side.”
Dashnaktsutyun, which was represented in Armenia’s government until April 2009, is opposed to the peace formula at the heart of the proposed framework accord. It is particularly unhappy with Armenian territorial concessions to Azerbaijan envisaged by the basic principles. Dashnaktsutyun leaders warned Sarkisian ahead of the Kazan summit against accepting them.
Manoyan reaffirmed the nationalist party’s criticism of the Armenian government’s policy on Karabakh. He said that unlike the Azerbaijani leadership Sarkisian and other Armenian leaders regularly express their readiness to make major concessions.