Possibilities and Understanding of the Karabakh Conflict Resolution 25 Years after the Ceasefire : Page 9 of 10

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Who Needs to Be Prepared for Peace – the Authorities or the Peoples?

Sergey Markedonov - What is primary to the conflict, the people or the authorities? This is an eternal question. If I paraphrase Henry Kissinger just a little, "What number should I dial for people to answer." Did Aliyev and Pashinyan (and earlier Sargsyan and Kocharyan) come from the Mars? Are they not the people? They turn their speeches, statements to those who are the people. We should note that many “ordinary citizens” would be much ahead of professional bureaucrats and diplomats in terms of their radicalism, xenophobia, and hatred. Let usrecall history from the period of 1988-1991. Political liberalization against the background of the collapse of the CPSU created opportunities for open debates, granted freedom for rallies and demonstrations. And didn't the radicals take advantage of this freedom? Didn’t hundreds of pamphlets claiming the “birthright” of their people in a particular territory appear? Didn’t many rallies and demonstrations simply turn into banal pogroms and ethnic cleansing? Was it all not the"people"? Of course, the proponents of the “populist point of view” are prepared to have arguments about “KGB agents”, specially disguised as regular citizens and so on. But weren’t there too many "agents"? Probably such a numberwould be physically impossible to ensure. And the last (in order, but not least). Politicians in Armenia and Azerbaijan are turning to people. If ordinary citizens did not accept the "logic of conflict", were tolerant to "outsiders", how many politicians would have lasted in power? Most likely, not for long, they would just be overthrown. In practice, it’s enough to look at the electoral results of ex-President of Armenia LevonTer-Petrosyan, whose political association, which emerged in the 2017 parliamentary elections with the idea of a compromise on Karabakh, did not even end up in the National Assembly. In Azerbaijan, such parties are not visible at all. So here is the answer that shows whether the people did really have "anything to do with or not" ....

Alexander Iskandaryan – Both Pashinyan, and Kocharyan, and Sargsyan were "ordinary citizens." There is a public demand and politicians must comply with it. Even politicians who are not democratic, even dictators. Well, Comrade Stalin did not personally stand at the gates of each camp, he did not personally shoot all the Trotskyists and he did not write four million interrogation protocols, asDovlatov puts it. And Hitler did not personally fight on all fronts, shoot civilians in cohorts and burn all Jews in furnaces, no matter how politically incorrect it is to say this. Some things the society does give carte blanche for, it does not for others. And in this matter the Dutch society is different from, say, that of Zimbabwe. That is why in Georgia an Azeri person generally behaves differently as compared to the potential behavior in Azerbaijan. This is especially true in cases of democracies. Pashinyan, strictly speaking, had no agenda on the Karabakh conflict, he came to power purely based on social and anti-elite discourses. By the way, leftist elites,