“I was not surprised it caused a stir to tell you the truth, because we knew — the co-chairs knew — and my predecessor Steven Mann, the co-chair before I assumed responsibility on the very day of that interview, knew that what they had just announced at the OSCE was significant and would, well, make people think twice, and would spark, as we like to put it, a robust debate in the region. I was simply in the unenviable position of having been on this newest assignment for an hour and I was the guy that got to explain the decision that others had made before me. No, I wasn’t surprised that a robust debate was sparked. What did surprise me though was that people spoke so quickly in reacting to the interview without reading the publicly available document that the co-chairs issued at the OSCE in Austria, which laid out in much greater detail everything,” the U.S. diplomat said.
“Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan and their Foreign Ministers did not agree on the core principles that were developed over the course of two years by the co-chairs,” Bryza said. However, in his words, talk about recapturing Karabakh by force or any use of force by any party is simply not helpful. “My predecessor, Steven Mann, and my current fellow co-chairs, have exerted all of the creativity and all the negotiating energy that they could and they have gotten this framework of core principles as honed as possible in their judgment, such that the presidents, in their mind, need a little time to think things over and decide whether or not they can accept or adjust this framework. But what we’re saying in the statement is that there is no more room for diplomatic creativity to make this piece of metal shine a little bit more brightly. It’s honed and you have to decide whether you want it or not, or the trade-offs that would have to be made are so significant politically that it requires the head of state to make the trade-off. So we’re saying OK, it’s yours now,” Bryza said.
“Even though I didn’t have a hand in drafting the statement, I can say particularly because I didn’t, I think it’s an excellent statement. It’s very clear, and lays out in a lot of detail what exactly the overall set of trade-offs would be. Demilitarization is the phrase used for troop pull-back, and that, as the framework indicates, should be, or could be, accompanied by some sort of process that would lead to a population vote, or a referendum vote on the future status of
Karabakh. I think that’s, in the Armenian mindset, extremely important, so that’s what the Azerbaijani side would have to offer the Armenians, along with the other things within this statement to which I refer you. On the Azerbaijani side, I think that they are willing to consider the possibility of some type of a vote on the status of Nagorno Karabakh if many other elements of this overall package are present. What gets difficult is how you correlate the withdrawal, or the redeployment, of Armenian troops with the timing of a vote on the future status of Karabakh,” Mr Bryza resumed.
