"A pie in one hand, a lash in the other"
Member of "Sardarapat" Movement, politologist Hayk Balanyan is not as concerned about the Serzh Sargsyan-Ilham Aliyev meeting in Kazan on June 24 as he is about the possible developments of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution process.
"The most that can happen in Kazan will be something like the Meindorf Declaration. It is not the meeting that is the problem, but the process that is up for bargain. The Armenian authorities have de facto put the NK conflict up for bargain," Mr. Balanyan told "A1+" today.
"A1+" asked Balanyan to go into detail and he said: "There have been declarations that if Azerbaijan is ready to make investments in Karabakh, Armenia is ready for them." According to Balanyan, Serzh Sargsyan is the one who made this declaration nearly one and a half year ago.
"Armenia is functionally and financially broke, and since the government has a problem with legitimacy, it is surviving by asking for funding from abroad. These authorities lack the people's support to say "no" to any foreign politician. In that sense, they are bargaining with foreign powers."
Hayk Balanyan says a brilliant example of the foreign powers' pressure was the report by PACE Co-Rapporteur on Armenia John Prescott during today's session of the Monitoring Committee when he stated that the preliminary inquiry into the case of March 1 has been ineffective.
"That is a loop of the chain of pressure. On the one hand, they are offering Armenian a piece of the pie, that is, financial assistance, and on the other hand, they are using the lash by accepting the regime's errors as a basis."
The politician doesn't see the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution in the months to come, but taking into account Armenia's heavy financial state, he believes that the processes will develop differently at any given moment.
