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Azerbaijan resists a stronger ceasefire monitoring of the line of contact between the armed forces in the region of Karabakh conflict, the article of the senior expert on Caucasus at the Carnegie Center, Thomas De Waal published in the website of Carnegie Moscow Center, reads.

It is stated in the article that May 12 marked the 20th anniversary of the ceasefire of Nagorno Karabakh conflict. The war stopped, the Armenians secured a de facto victory, the expert states. Without peacekeeping forces, a “self-regulating ceasefire” came into force. However, the ceasefire has been broken with grim regularity.

“What is the accumulated death toll of 20 years? Sometimes the parties to the conflict have an interest in talking up the numbers, sometimes in concealing them. This week, an Azerbaijani journalistic organization called Doktrina came up with depressing figures. They are higher than anything I have seen, but worth taking seriously, as they have been compiled from both military sources and soldiers’ families in Azerbaijan,” the expert writes.

Doktrina said that over this period in the line of contact 610 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed, 710 soldiers and more than 40 civilians wounded. They reported that mines had killed 120 soldiers and wounded more than 200 soldiers. Deaths of civilians were also reported. De Waal noted that he didn’t have information about overall casualty figures from the Armenian side but “they are almost certainly very similar” to those of Azerbaijan. “There are reports of Armenian villagers dying near the Azerbaijani frontier—including one fatality last month,” the author writes.

According to him, the reason why deaths are barely recorded and hard to verify is largely attributable to the fact that there are only six international monitors from the OSCE covering the entire front line.

He refers to the OSCE Minsk Group U.S. Co-Chair James Warlick, who last week stressed the need of having stronger presence of OSCE on the ground for the casualty figures to go down. According to Warlick the current monitors don’t have either the mandate or the resources to stop the frequent casualties on the border.

“Azerbaijan has traditionally resisted a stronger ceasefire monitoring mandate on the grounds that this would only “normalize” a status quo it does not like. Although Baku does not put it in quite these words, as the losing side in the conflict it sees its ability to destabilize the Line of Contact as one rare bit of leverage over the Armenians,” the journalist emphasized.

According to De Waal, an agreement can be reached. Extra OSCE monitors could have a mandate that extends beyond the line of contact. They could monitor the ceasefire more vigilantly, as the Armenians want, and report on the situation in the territories of Karabakh as Baku wants.

“Whatever the merits of the arguments of each side, ordinary soldiers and civilians are the ones who pay the price for a lack of agreement on this front line,” the expert notes.