Armenia and Azerbaijanq

THE PRESIDENTS of Armenia and Azerbaijan wasted no time complaining about each other to Hillary Clinton, the American Secretary of State, who visited both countries this week.

When she sat down with Ilham Aliev , the Azeri president, in his lavish presidential palace overlooking the Caspian sea,  Mr Aliev was supposed to make few polite remarks for the cameras before disappearing with Ms Clinton into private negotiations. Instead, he launched straight into the subject of Nagorno-Karabakh, blaming Armenia for violating the ceasefire agreement of 1994. A few hours later, in Yerevan, the Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan, did the same. 

The tension has been building up in recent months resulting and on June 18th several people were killed in an exchange of fire. Yet neither side is doing much to resolve the conflict, argues Thomas de Waal a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, argues 

Naturally suspicious, neither government offers the offer anything constructive. To be precise, the Armenians offer constructive engagement on small issues such as sharing water over the ceasefire line, but the Azeris reject these gestures, worrying that this is “doing business with the enemy.” The Armenian side rejects all proposals to give up even an inch of Armenian-held land, before pledges on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh are made up front. The Azeris, saying that they are in a state of war, even reject the proposal made by the French, Russia and U.S foreign ministers in Helsinki in 2008 to remove snipers from the front line.

Mr De Waal has recently returned from Nagorno-Karbakh and has penned an evocative description of this tiny piece of disputed land in the Caucasus mountains.