This Corridor Will Bring Nothing to Armenia and Essentially to the U.S. Too – Vardan Oskanyan

Recently, all the concerns I expressed in several articles posted on this platform regarding the provision of a corridor through Armenian territory to Azerbaijan have been completely confirmed by a newly published document. This was stated by former Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan.

“This document should be viewed in the context of the bilateral and trilateral agreements signed on August 8, where, in silence regarding the general unblocking clause, Armenia has agreed to provide Azerbaijan with uninterrupted and unhindered communication with Nakhchivan. Therefore, the entire purpose and meaning of this project is to provide Azerbaijan with a corridor.

It is difficult to find words to understand, let alone describe, how incompetent and unaware one must be in international relations, how speechless one must be, to hand over a corridor connecting two parts of Azerbaijan through Armenia's strategic territory, at the expense of Armenia's sovereignty, for 46 years to the management of a third country, with Armenia being allocated only 26 percent of this project in its sovereign territory.

This is the index of Armenia's helplessness: 26. Any other negotiator, at least capable of connecting two words, would have demanded at least 50 percent in this already sovereignty-diminishing project. Sometimes it seems that the negotiators of these terms have no mastery over the art of speech. They are presented with a condition, and they nod their heads. This is the essence of the entire “negotiation.”

Any negotiation is built on the simple logic that an offer is made, and the other side tries to negotiate better conditions. A good negotiator is able to do this, a poor one is not. If the 26 percent stake is presented as a victorious result, then perhaps from the very beginning, even smaller stakes were offered to Armenia in its own country, on sovereign land, say, 15 percent, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “heroically” negotiated to raise it to the undignified 26 percent. Or if 26 percent was already offered from the start, the Armenian side quietly agreed without any negotiation.

In any case, this index of Armenia's helplessness means two things simultaneously: first, the party formulating the offer assesses Armenia’s rights over its own territory with this; second, the party accepting the offer is so incapable of negotiating that it considers this a gain.

Despite noting all this, I will repeat my position on this issue from day one: had we made the right orientation from the beginning, in the absence of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor, the issue of the corridor should not have been on the agenda at all.

This corridor will bring nothing to Armenia and, essentially, to the U.S. too. The only parties interested in this are Azerbaijan and Turkey. Well, could we at least have demanded 50+ percent stake when agreeing to such a deal? 26 percent is the pitiful cut one would offer even to an absolutely mute negotiator. Here we have received our country's price and evaluation: the index of helplessness on the world map.”