Week 31 Jan. – 06 Feb.: Every morning is already the future

On the 2nd of February Elmar Məmmədyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, was interviewed by RT. Questioned about the Nagorno Karabakh issue, the Minister expressed the need to increase the region's prevedibility.
Two casualties in three days, in January, on the contact line should remind that the expression “frozen conflict” doesn’t mean that there’s no any process in flux. Nothing can hibernate a human community, that is to say, frozen means – at the very best – a creeping movement.

The Minister mentioned four UN resolutions, EUPA’, PACE’, OSCE’s ones … all international organizations expressed their support for Azerbaijan, because of the principle of territorial integrity. The point is that no one of the three parties involved – Azerbaijan, Armenia, de facto Nagorno-Karabakh – is addressing one of the main issues: how to face the necessary sacrifice to find an exit strategy to the impasse.

Military specialists in Azerbaijan will analyse every now and then the feasibility of military re-conquest, not mentioning the little detail of how to cope with the day after. A military victory wouldn't for sure help to win the hearts of Karabakhis, who from almost twenty years rule the country, having created a separate State and developed their own identity.

The original sin, for all the three ruling classes, was to allow nationalism (or ultra-nationalism) to become one with patriotism. Due to this mystification of what means loving the homeland, the public opinions are now used to the radical positions and whoever might try – as an act of patriotism – to negotiate a reasonable, thou painful, solution, would be taken for a traitor.
If such a condition was critical ten years ago, it’s worse now, when entire new generations are growing up without any memory of peaceful co-habitation. A future of mutual exclusion has already begun.

An unwelcome future has already begun in Georgia as well. At the end of January Georgian authorities lamented and condemned the deployment of short-range ballistic missiles, Tochka-U (SS-21 Scarab B) and other offensive weapons in breakaway South Ossetia, accusing Russia to be preparing an attack. Be as it might be in Russia’s Government’s mind, for sure South Ossetia with a depressed economy, rotten infrastructures, poor resources and a total population comparable to an average small town is most probably on its way to become a little more than a military site, needed to control the situation in South Caucasus but perhaps even more in the North.

The urgency of prevedibility is felt much more in North Caucasus, where the death’s list must be updated almost every day.