[RT] A ceasefire was declared in the disputed territory 21 months ago, but is there any chance of a genuine peace?Hayk Khalatyan, the head of the Analytical Center for Strategic Studies and Initiatives in Yerevan, and Nijat Hajiyev, a political analyst from Azerbaijan, shared their thoughts with RT on why Armenians and Azeris keep returning to arms and if there is a way out of this vicious cycle. We have combined their monologues into one article.
Hayk Khalatyan: When Soviet control loosened towards the end of the 1980s and the USSR began to disintegrate, the conflict flared up again. Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, who had been pressured and discriminated against by the Azerbaijani authorities throughout the Soviet period, decided to reunite with Armenia to avoid the fate of Nakhchivan Armenians, who had been completely pushed out of the autonomous republic by the Azerbaijani government. Those developments took place amid pogroms perpetrated against Armenians in Sumgait, Baku and other Azerbaijani cities. The issue of Karabakh’s reunification with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was on the agenda even before the USSR collapsed. When Soviet republics gained independence, Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians decided they wanted it too, in accordance with peoples’ fundamental right to self-determination as stipulated in the UN Charter.