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| Formation | 24 March 1992 |
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| Purpose | Encourage a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh |
Membership | |
Co-chairs |
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| Website | www.osce.org/mg |
The OSCE Minsk Group was created in 1992 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), now Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), to encourage a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Helsinki Additional Meeting of the CSCE Council on 24 March 1992, requested the Chairman-in-Office to convene as soon as possible a conference on Nagorno-Karabakh under the auspices of the CSCE to provide an ongoing forum for negotiations towards a peaceful settlement of the crisis on the basis of the principles, commitments and provisions of the CSCE. The Conference is to take place in Minsk. Although it has not to this date been possible to hold the conference, the so-called Minsk Group spearheads the OSCE effort to find a political solution to this conflict.
On 6 December 1994, the Budapest Summit of Heads of State or Government decided to establish a co-chairmanship for the process. The Summit participants also expressed their political will to deploy multinational peacekeeping forces as an essential part of the overall settlement of the conflict.
Implementing the Budapest decision, the Hungarian Chairman-in-Office Marton Krasznai issued on 23 March 1995, the mandate for the Co-Chairmen of the Minsk Process. [1]
The main objectives of the Minsk Process are as follows:
The Minsk Group is headed by a co-chairmanship consisting of France, Russia and the United States. Furthermore, the Minsk Group also includes the following participating states: Belarus, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Turkey as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan. On a rotating basis, the OSCE Troika is also a permanent member. [2]
The co-chairmen of the Minsk Group are: Ambassador Brice Roquefeuil [3] of France, Ambassador Igor Khovaev [4] of the Russian Federation, and Ambassador Andrew Schofer [5] of the United States.
The Minsk Conference on Nagorno-Karabakh is attended by the same participating States that are members of the Minsk Group. The Conference is headed by the Co-Chairmen of the Minsk Conference.
In early 2001, representatives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, France, Russia and the United States met in Paris and in Key West, Florida. [6] The talks in Key West however were largely kept secret and were not followed upon.
On 7 October 2002 during the CIS summit in Chișinău, the usefulness of the Minsk Group in peace negotiations was brought up for discussion by both the Armenian and the Azerbaijani delegations. According to them the ten-year-long OSCE mediation had not been effective enough. [7]
On 19 December 2015, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held a summit in Bern, Switzerland under the auspices of the Co-Chairs. The Presidents supported ongoing work to reduce the risk of violence and confirmed their readiness to continue engagement on a settlement. [8] The last summit between Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan, organized by Minsk Group, took place on October 16, 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland. The presidents agreed to take appropriate actions in order to reinforce the negotiations process and decrease tensions on the Line of Contact. [9] [10] [11] [12]
After the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijani government took a position that OSCE Minsk Group should no longer be dealing with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as "it has been resolved". Ilham Aliyev in his interview to the local media on January 12, 2022 said that after 30 years of experience, the Minsk Group co-chairs "are on the verge of retirement" and therefore "he wishes them good health and a long life". [13] The format where Russia, the US, and France worked as a team for a long period stalled due to geopolitical confrontation between Russia and the West. Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov on April 8, 2022 said “Our so-called French and American partners in this group, in a Russophobic frenzy and in an effort to cancel everything related to the Russian Federation, said that they would not communicate with us in this format." [14] This, however, did not create a peacekeeping vacuum, as European Union has intensified its efforts to provide reconciliation between Armenia with Azerbaijan. [14] [15] In April 2022, the Russian, French and American co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group visited Armenia. [16] Karen Donfried, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, said on 20 June 2022 that even if Azerbaijan does not support OSCE Minsk group process, the United States and France will continue participating in it, and that will include cooperation with Russia. [17] Sergei Lavrov stated during his visit to Azerbaijan on 24 June 2022 that the OSCE Minsk Group ceased its activities at the initiative of the U.S. and France. Azerbaijan's foreign minister Jeyhun Bayramov also noted that interaction between the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group has been completely paralyzed and that the peace process cannot be held hostage to and be guided by a non-existent format. [18] [19] Ilham Aliyev declared during a state-sponsored press conference in Shusha on 21 July 2023, that Azerbaijan will never accept any revival of the OSCE Minsk Group, saying that "We don't have very good memories of their actions" and that steps to revive the Minsk Group negotiating format are practically impossible, likening the format to a "broken vase". [20] After the Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh on 19–20 September 2023, which led to the dissolution of the de facto Republic of Artsakh, Aliyev called for officially abolishing the OSCE Minsk Group and a number of other OSCE mechanisms on 16 February 2024. [21]
In 2015, Azay Guliyev, an Azerbaijani MP, proposed including of Turkey and Germany to the co-chairmanship, [22] whereas Azerbaijani foreign affairs expert Rusif Huseynov proposed Kazakhstan as an additional co-chair in the Minsk Group as a "big actor in the post-Soviet area with population culturally similar to the Azerbaijanis, but a member of several Kremlin-led organizations together with Armenia" with previous experience in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. [23]
According to Matthew Bryza, former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, the EU would make more sense as a co-chair, because it would represent more of Europe and has experience mediating similar conflicts in the Balkans. [24]
Former US co-chair of the Minsk Group Richard E. Hoagland, reflecting on his work with the Minsk Group, wrote that "very, very little ever got accomplished" by the group. He suggested that the Minsk Group redefine its mission, e.g. by enabling reconstruction to its approved mandate, otherwise it may continue as "an intriguing backwater of international diplomacy". [25] According to Carey Cavanaugh, another former US co-chair of the Minsk Group, the organization’s consensus-based decision-making process and its rotating leadership rendered it “structurally flawed” to act as a peacemaker, and the United Nations would have been a better option to facilitate peace. [26]
Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, suggested that France leaves its co-chair position in favour of another European country with "more balanced relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan", such as Germany or Sweden, or an EU-wide position. [27]
For analyst Laurence Broers, the Minsk Group’s future remains unclear, with its failure caused by factors like the normative ambiguity of its attempts to balance the countervailing principles of self-determination and territorial integrity; its secretive, narrow and top-down modus operandi; and its default to performative over substantive diplomacy since 2011, when occasional summits in far-away capitals with little or no interaction in between made the peace process alien to Armenian and Azerbaijani societies. Broers considers the Minsk Group to be "an artifact of the post-Cold War unipolar world" in the settings of growing multipolar world. [28]
In Azerbaijan, OSCE's Minsk group is not popular, the presence of large Armenian diasporas in three co-chair countries - Russia, France, and the United States, strategic alliance between Russia and Armenia raising questions about fairness of the group. [29] Criticism of the group for inefficiency started back in Heydar Aliyev's era, followed by his son and successor Ilham Aliyev. [30]
During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, France received particularly harsh criticism in Azerbaijan, [31] to the point of being viewed as "unworthy" to hold the position of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair. [31] After the French senate passed a resolution calling for recognition of independence of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan's parliament passed a resolution calling for France to be expelled from the Minsk Group. [27]
On January 12, 2022, Azerbaijan’s leader Ilham Aliyev stated that Azerbaijan would prevent the attempts of the OSCE Minsk Group to deal with the Karabakh issue, as he considered it to be "resolved". He pointed at "the lack of unity among the co-chairs, and the absence of an agenda agreed between them", and approval of that agenda by Azerbaijan and Armenia. [32]
The region of Nagorno-Karabakh and areas around it are considered to be some of the most heavily mined regions of the former Soviet Union. Mines were laid from early 1990s by both Azerbaijani and Armenian forces during and after the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The worst-affected areas are along the fortified former contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces, in particular in the districts of Aghdam, Fuzuli and Jabrayil. According to military experts from both Azerbaijan and Armenia, the ground in those areas is covered with "carpets of land mines." The region has the highest per capita rate in the world of accidents due to unexploded ordnance.
Relations have always been strong between Azerbaijan and Turkey, the only two predominantly Turkic countries located west of the Caspian Sea. Former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev often described the two as being "one nation, two states."
There are no diplomatic relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The two neighboring states had formal governmental relations between 1918 and 1921, during their brief independence from the collapsed Russian Empire, as the First Republic of Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan; these relations existed from the period after the Russian Revolution until they were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union, becoming the constituent republics of Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan. Due to the five wars waged by the countries in the past century—one from 1918 to 1921, another from 1988 to 1994, and the most recent in 2016, 2020 and 2023 —the two have had strained relations. In the wake of hostilities, social memory of Soviet-era cohabitation is widely repressed.
According to the 2012 U.S. Global Leadership Report, 53% of Azerbaijanis approve of U.S. leadership, with 27% disapproving and 21% uncertain.
The 2008 Mardakert clashes began on March 4 after the 2008 Armenian election protests. It involved the heaviest fighting between ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh since the 1994 ceasefire after the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
The Armenian-occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh were areas of Azerbaijan, situated around the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO), which were occupied by the ethnic Armenian military forces of the breakaway Republic of Artsakh with military support from Armenia, from the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994) to 2020, when the territories were returned to Azerbaijani control by military force or handed over in accordance to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire agreement. The surrounding regions were seized by Armenians under the justification of a "security belt" which was to be traded for recognition of autonomous status from Azerbaijan.
The Bishkek Protocol was a provisional ceasefire agreement, signed by the representatives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, and Russia on May 5, 1994, in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
The Tehran Communiqué, also known as the Joint statement of the heads of state in Tehran is the joint communiqué mediated by Iranian President, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and signed by the acting President of Azerbaijan, Yagub Mammadov and President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian on May 7, 1992 with an intention to end the four-year-long hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a former autonomous oblast of the Azerbaijan SSR.
The 2010 Mardakert clashes were a series of violations of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War ceasefire. They took place across the line of contact dividing Azerbaijan and the ethnic Armenian military forces of the unrecognized but de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Both sides accused the other of violating the ceasefire regime. These were the worst violations of the cease fire in two years and left Armenian forces with the heaviest casualties since the Mardakert clashes of March 2008.
The Madrid Principles were proposed peace settlements of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, proposed by the OSCE Minsk Group. The OSCE Minsk Group was the only internationally agreed body to mediate the negotiations for the peaceful resolution of the conflict prior to the renewed outbreak of hostilities in 2020. Senior Armenian and Azerbaijani officials had agreed on some of the proposed principles but made little or no progress towards the withdrawal of Armenian forces from occupied territories or towards the modalities of the decision on the future Nagorno-Karabakh status.
The Prague Process was a series of negotiations between 2002 and 2007 over Nagorno-Karabakh between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministries. It was followed by the Madrid Principles.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 62/243, titled "The Situation in the Occupied Territories of Azerbaijan", is a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly about the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was adopted on March 14, 2008 at the 62nd session of the General Assembly. It became the seventh United Nations document concerning Nagorno-Karabakh and the third and last United Nations General Assembly document on it.
The Baker rules refer to a set of negotiation process principles identifying who the parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are. Armenia and Azerbaijan are identified as the principal parties and the Armenian community and Azerbaijani community of Karabakh are identified as interested parties.
The 2012 border clashes between the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan took place in early June. The clashes resulted in casualties on both sides.
The political status of Nagorno-Karabakh remained unresolved from its declaration of independence on 10 December 1991 to its September 2023 collapse. During Soviet times, it had been an ethnic Armenian autonomous oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a conflict arose between local Armenians who sought to have Nagorno-Karabakh join Armenia and local Azerbaijanis who opposed this.
The 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, also known as the Four-Day War, April War, or April clashes, began along the former Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact on 1 April 2016 with the Artsakh Defence Army, backed by the Armenian Armed Forces, on one side and the Azerbaijani Armed Forces on the other.
Relations between Azerbaijan and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) began when Azerbaijan joined OSCE’s predecessor, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), on January 30, 1992. This was the first European organization Azerbaijan joined. The CSCE transformed into the OSCE shortly afterwards in 1995.
The Lachin offensive was a military operation launched by Azerbaijan against the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh and their Armenian allies along the Armenia–Azerbaijan border during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, with the suspected goal of taking control of the Lachin corridor. The offensive began in mid-October, when the Azerbaijani forces advanced into Qubadlı and Laçın Districts after capturing Zəngilan. On 25 October, the Azerbaijani forces seized control of the city of Qubadlı.
The 2022 Armenian protests were a series of anti-government protests in Armenia that started on 5 April 2022. The protests continued into June 2022, and many protesters were detained by police in Yerevan. Protestors demanded Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan resign over his handling of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. On 14 June 2022, the opposition announced their decision to terminate daily demonstrations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan after failing to achieve popular support.
Armenia–OSCE relations began when Armenia joined the OSCE's predecessor, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), on 30 January 1992. The CSCE transformed into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) shortly afterwards in 1995.
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