Thank you Madam Chairperson,

  My delegation would like to join the others in welcoming the distinguished Foreign Minister of our neighbor Azerbaijan to Permanent Council. We did in fact listen very carefully, as we do and ought to do, since what our neighbors say, do and think are of great consequence and interest in my country. I would have proffered to say that what we heard had some surprise; the fact that something is not surprising, does not at times make it any less disappointing.

  We are in a situation in which the Heads of our states, the two Presidents, president Kocharian and president Aliyev have been trying for the last two years in various ways to find some kind of compromise accommodation and a solution. And while that process is going on we would have assumed that there ought to be within each political system a certain kind of coherence and congruence in the signals that are given to each other. Our disappointment is in the fact that while our Presidents are able to talk to each other with certain sense of re4alism, without which those meetings could not proceed, elsewhere, the signals remain ideological. Realism in fact consists of knowing and somewhat empathizing with the constraints of your opponent's real political situation. We assume and we have every reason to believe and to hope that our Presidents are able to continue, because there exists between them a realistic empathy for the difficult situation that each one sees the other as being in.

  Thus, when it goes beyond the immediate circle of the two President's meetings, the declarations that come from Azerbaijan and its distinguished representatives are what I would call unilateral statements of exaggerated and exacerbating character. I would like to refer to three specific points.

It is rather curious that in all these statements where Azerbaijan discusses the Nagorno Karabagh conflict there is absolutely no reference to the people of  Nagorno Karabagh. We would suggest that this is both cause and symptom of the difficulties that this process of peace making is going to encounter. Not recognizing that there are in fact in Nagorno Karabagh a people that have over the years tried to express their own needs and aspirations, and to exercise their own rights, by making abstraction of them or, in fact, ignoring their very reality and to conveniently reduce the conflict simply to a conflict of two states, is symptomatic of the difficulty that our neighbor will have to encounter in the long term solution to this problem. The people of Karabagh exist: they have made their existence felt: they have expressed it and they have dealt with years and years of frustration, of misrule, quite often abuse and the denial of their fundamental rights.

  So if there is going to be some solution realism would require that at least in public statements the leadership of Azerbaijan would give some indication that they are aware of the legitimacy of this people their rights and their needs for security. Having lived under Azerbaijani tutelage the people of Karabagh are very sensitive to these kinds of signals that they receive. If they are not mentioned because they are ignored and therefore non-existent, it doesnղt very well signal to them that their future can be conceived to be secure in any relationship that involves Azerbaijan.

  The second point I would like to make has to do with this Stability Pact. We well know that after the relative success of such an arrangement in South Eastern Europe there are multiple competing, imaginative or otherwise, stability Pact proposals for the south Caucasus. There were as you know in Istanbul multiple proposals in this direction and it is quite nice that at least four countries are claiming proprietary interest in having proposed such a Pact. It means that, yes, in fact there is need for some kind of co-operative stability arrangement between the countries of the South Caucasus, between all the countries of the region.

Concerning our attitude toward what the distinguished Minister said, it is for us somewhat disappointing that this Pact is conceived to be able to create stabilization without co-operation. Azerbaijan has been in that sense quite frank, insisting that there is no co-operation prior to the resolution of all the conflicts. That insistence, though it may make good copy, particularly for one's own domestic consumption, it is not realistic to assume that one can move towards the kind of changing attitudes, disposition and predisposition toward peace and compromise if every form of co-operation is somewhat outlawed, resisted and made to look illegitimate. We agree with the distinguished Swiss ambassador   that regional, local, small scale cooperative cross-border ventures are exactly what countries that have gone through a ling period of hostility, animosity and suffering need in order to rebuild confidence and trust and security and to actually get to renew old, prior relationships.

  In that particular context we are, for instance, rather disappointed that last week there was an incident in our western neighbor in Turkey, where in the city and province Kars some local businessmen and the mayor had invited some Armenian public officials from the city of Giumri to come and participate in a seminar on the construction of peace. It is disappointing because while so invited and I put it in quotation marks ՁBy the local authorities and the businessmenձ at the last minute having arrived with due visas, they were turned back, the word is sent back, deported, it is not the technicality that matters. Because the distinguished Ambassador of Azerbaijan to turkey had insisted that these Armenians had no right to come because there was not, yet any peace between Armenian and Azerbaijan.

  We would suggest that the atmosphere of mutual understanding and reasonable compromise would benefit enormously by not making it more difficult for small-scale human contacts across borders. Armenia has indicated its readiness, has not refused it; it invites journalists and others into Armenia from Azerbaijan and we would hope that spirit somewhat sooner or later catches on and contaminates the Azerbaijani public attitude.

  I would like to conclude with two points on the Minsk process. We also are deeply committed to the Minsk process, we await continuously that perhaps the Co-chairs will make their own contribution by creating the conditions for and the elements of a mutually satisfactory solution always inspired by and getting their signals from the on going dialogue between our two Presidents. It's been a long process, it's been a slow process and the Minsk Co-chairs have as much to be frustrated by the occasional reversals they have encountered when they have approached our two countries as we have to be frustrated with sometimes the slowness of their pace.

  And finally I would like to say that we are very ambivalent about the propaganda that has to be always accompanying this conflict. It is a tough conflict, a difficult conflict, it has been going on for a long time and I can simply say that as long as we realize that legitimacy does not reside exclusively only on one side, we will continue to believe that propaganda statements can not substitute for the reality that exists on the ground. The OSCE should be a forum that essentially rids discourse of its propagandistic content and brings us back to not unilateral declarations based on a highly selective and partial list of certain OSCE commitments. The OSCE should force upon us a more inclusive respect for all the principles and commitments of the OSCE, not simply those that are purely convenient to one side or the other.

  Thank you Madam Chairperson