By Ivan Gharibyan

Amid the anti-Turkish hysteria, the Azerbaijani authorities have started sending the public the first signals concerning the necessity for revising their radical policy of refusing any concessions on Nagorno-Karabakh. It is not yet being done by means of high-ranking officials’ statements. Rather, they are statements made by experts close to the Aliyev clan and by foreign experts, with the pro-governmental 1news.az website being the leader.

As usual, the political scientist Vafa Ghukuzade, who is close to the Azerbaijani presidential administration, has contrived to make most contradictory statements lately: whether Russia is responsible for all the misfortunes of the Azerbaijani people by supporting Armenian “occupants” or the United States is the “number one adversary” due to its being actively involved in the Armenia-Turkey normalization process. The leading role is, as usual, being assigned to primitive blackmail, the only trust of the advocates of present-day Azerbaijani ideology.

This time the blackmail has taken the form of Azerbaijan’s possible refusal to participate in the Nabucco project. In his “plain statements” there was a note of supplication to the international community in the context of the old song about “occupied territories.” “Azerbaijan’s refusal to transport its gas through Turkey will thwart all of the West’s efforts to implement the Nabucco project. So if they are to implement the Nabucco project, the United States and the West have to get the five occupied regions vacated at the first stage, with the two others to be vacated later. The five regions are not enough though,” Ghuluzade said thereby betraying official Baku’s growing concern over the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process. One can easily catch a radical change in the rhetoric of President Aliyev’s “political confidant”, who only recently made triumphant speeches about Azerbaijan’s “territorial integrity.”

By “pure coincidence”, David Satter, visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, voiced the opinion that only part of the “occupied territories” will be returned to Azerbaijan. The matter obviously concerns the five regions forming a security zone round about Nagorno-Karabakh.

The main conclusion that can be drawn from the latest articles available on the Government-controlled Azeri website is as follows: being convinced of the irreversible Armenia-Turkey normalization process and untenable reference points of its short-sighted and inflexible policy, official Baku is feeling doubts about its capability to accomplish the tasks, which was once considered unquestionable. By pestering the Turkish leaders and international mediators with appeals for settling the Nagorno-Karabakh problem as soon as possible, the Azerbaijani leaders have been confronted with their own unpreparedness for taking a realistic view of the intense negotiations and for resorting painful, but inevitable, concessions. Obvious signs of a new situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process caused by serious geopolitical changes in the region aroused the Azerbaijani Establishments’ serious concern over the concessions the Armenian side has been ready for – in exchange for referendum on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh. Now President Ilham Aliyev and his team have to do nothing but blame themselves for the Armenian side’s concessions being called into question. The only thing for official Baku to do is to revise its short-sighted policy so as not to be left with nothing.