Meeting up with Tom de Waal in Yerevan earlier this month, we joked that journalists should now avoid the cliché term “window of opportunity” when it comes to continuing peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Well, this news item from RFE/RL avoids the phrase, but once again refers to perhaps unrealistic hopes that a framework peace agreement can be signed before next year’s presidential election i.e within the next four months.

International mediators said they still hope to broker a framework peace accord on Nagorno-Karabakh before the presidential elections in Armenia and Azerbaijan as they began yet another round of regional shuttle diplomacy on Wednesday.

The chief U.S. Karabakh negotiator, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza, insisted that the conflicting parties are “very close” to fully agreeing on the basic principles of a Karabakh settlement proposed by the OSCE Minsk Group.

President Robert Kocharian said earlier this month that despite substantial progress made in Armenian-Azerbaijan peace talks, the conflict is unlikely to be resolved before the Armenian and Azerbaijani elections.

“Unlikely means less than 50 percent,” Bryza told RFE/RL before he and the Minsk Group’s French and Russian co-chairs went into talks with Kocharian and Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian. “It can mean 49 percent, 48 percent, which is maybe not much different than ‘likely.’”

[…]

“Whether the agreement comes before the elections or shortly after, we are, as we say in American English, in the ballpark and it’s time to put the ball in the net,” he said.

Baku and Yerevan are understood to have already accepted the main points of the Minsk Group’s existing peace plan. It calls for a gradual resolution of the conflict would enable Karabakh’s predominantly Armenian population to decide the disputed region’s status in a referendum years after the liberation of surrounding Azerbaijani territories. Diplomatic sources privy to the negotiating process say the parties still disagree on practical modalities of the proposed referendum as well as the timetable for Armenian withdrawal from those territories.

Sorry, but 48-49 percent doesn’t give me much hope for even a framework deal, especially if it comes at a time of heightened internal political tension in Armenia when Karabakh is just the issue that could push the situation over the edge. Anyway, let’s see, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe Serzh could be forced to concede more in return for international support during the election, but the internal political ramifications might be too much even for him to handle.