UN IS NOT THE PLACE TO DISCUSS NAGORNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT
Support A1+!“Darfur is synonymous with shame”
The RA Minister of Foreign Affairs Vardan Oskanyan dared to break the unwritten rule and to reflect on the problems of small countries at the 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly.
“When the speculative market drives the price of a barrel of oil to $80, those too small to have significant reserves are more quickly affected. And just as large countries with huge appetites for fuel make deals sometimes inconsistent with their politics, so do we. For us, energy security is much more than a matter of global arithmetic; it’s a matter of life and death. When climate change causes significant environmental transformation, it doesn’t take much for prolonged droughts and excessive rains to harm our agriculture and damage our economy, or for rising shorelines to reach our cities. But we lack the diversity and the space to adapt and cope”.
“When Darfur becomes shorthand for hopelessness, we in the small corners of the world realize that power has become a substitute for responsibility. The ubiquitous language of human rights cannot compensate for political will. Genocide must be prevented, not commemorated. Generation after generation, we find new names for man’s appalling tolerance for what we think are inhuman machinations, new names for the places of horror, slaughter, massacre, indiscriminate killing of all those who have belonged to a segment, a category, an ethnic group, a race or a religion. Nearly 100 years ago, for Armenians it was Deir-El-Zor. For the next generation, it was Auschwitz, then the killing fields of the Cambodians and most recently Rwanda. If in each of those cases, together with genocide, these names evoked ignorance, helplessness, wartime cover, today Darfur is synonymous with expediency, evasion and simple inconvenience. Darfur is synonymous with shame.
My appeal, on behalf of small countries, is that the international community tackle each of these problems in their own right, for their own sake, and not as pieces in a global power puzzle”.
“We are inching towards resolution”
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is included on the agenda of this General Assembly session under the topic of protracted conflicts. But Mr. President any resolution that places all conflicts in one pot is necessarily flawed. Each of these conflicts is different. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict doesn’t belong there. This issue should not be discussed at the UN, because it is being negotiated in the OSCE. First, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not frozen. We continue to negotiate and we are inching towards resolution. Second, there is a well-developed negotiating document on the table, based not on wishful thinking, but on the core issue and the consequential issues. Together, they add up to a balanced solution. Third, at the core of the process lies the issue of the right of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to determine their own future. Indeed, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh don’t want anything that is not theirs – they want a right to live in peace and security and to determine their own future, they want to exercise the right that every people here has exercised at some point in their history”.
We follow very closely developments on Kosovo. We hear the international community loud and clear, that Kosovo cannot be a precedent for other conflicts. While we have no intention to use Kosovo as a precedent for our conflict, since that would contradict our own position that all conflicts are different. But at the same time, we won’t understand or accept the reverse logic – that if Kosovo is given independence, no other people can achieve self-determination. No one should tell us that there is a quota on liberty and security”.
