The bitter political rhetoric between Armenia and Azerbaijan (and Turkey) at the level of heads of state has sharply intensified lately, with acute political claims and even insults uttered. This suggests that another round of negotiations on the Karabakh conflict and the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations have proved a fiasco.

Two weeks have passed since Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov conveyed to his Russian counterpart the answer of President Ilham Aliyev on President Dmitry Medvedev’s latest proposal on the Karabakh settlement. Last week it was reported that Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan had also responded to the Kremlin proposal. However, it is still not known whether the presidents agreed to accept the proposals and what the proposals are all about.

The absence of any assessment and enthusiasm in public statements of the South Caucasus leaders shows that the Medvedev proposals must have been rejected. And although unofficially there is a talk about a forthcoming tripartite meeting in Sochi, the tougher rhetoric of the rival nations’ presidents leaves no hope for agreement to be reached between them.

This was indirectly confirmed by Sargsyan, who during a joint press conference with the visiting Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski, in Yerevan on Thursday, in fact, acknowledged the failure of the Kazan meeting in late June, stressing that it was the fault of Azerbaijan.

“I wouldn’t call the Kazan meeting a fiasco, even though, as I said, both we and the international community had a lot of expectations from that meeting. It’s just that what happened should have happened, something I talked about at the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. First of all, I mean the absence of an appropriate atmosphere. And that atmosphere should be improved in the first instance -- you cannot poison your own people every day and do it at every level,” said Sargsyan, referring to the Azerbaijani leadership’s anti-Armenian rhetoric.

“I don’t know if you, for example, followed international news yesterday and if you know what statements were made by the president of Azerbaijan regarding the Armenian people? Is this a statement of a normal person, let alone a country’s leader? The demand of the Karabakh Armenians and the Armenian people in general is one: the problem must be resolved in accordance with international law and principles of this law set forth in a document called the ‘Madrid principles’ that were proposed to the parties by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing states - the United States, France and Russia. We have no other demands. That is, our demands are consonant with the requirements of the international community,” stated the Armenian leader.

In his remarks, Sargsyan also pointed out Karabakh’s higher democratic standard as compared with Azerbaijan.

“Elections take place in Nagorno-Karabakh and these elections are held in accordance with international standards, and this is what they [Karabakhis] and we are proud of. Three presidential elections have taken place in Nagorno-Karabakh, presidents were elected three times and none of them inherited power,” said Sargsyan in a clear jab at Ilham Aliyev’s getting into office after his father Heydar Aliyev’s death in 2003.

At a meeting with some Diaspora students last weekend Sargsyan implied that it was up to the younger generation of Armenians to pursue the claims over historically Armenian lands that are part of modern-day Turkey.

The statement sparked a barrage of criticism and indignant statements in Turkey and its regional ethnic cousin Azerbaijan. At a joint press conference with visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Baku earlier this week, President Aliyev said: “The Armenians believe that they have solved the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. They are wrong. Nagorno-Karabakh was and still is an Azeri land. Time will come when Azerbaijan, peacefully or militarily, will restore its sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. But making territorial claims to such a great country as Turkey?! It simply indicates that something is missing in the minds of these people. They need to wake up from their sleep, get back to the real world and at least compare themselves with Turkey. You cannot compare an elephant and an ant.”

This increasingly bitter rhetoric against the backdrop of a growing likelihood of early elections in Armenia may indicate that the Karabakh conflict settlement has been suspended indefinitely.