Now a tourist mecca hosting 1.6 million overnights a year, Key West provided a surreal setting for Powell’s diplomatic theater. The cruise ship Ecstasy had just docked, according to signs around town, and middle-aged tourists in Bermuda shorts packed the streets, the imitation trolleys and the T-shirt emporiums. But down at the “Little White House,” the West Indian-style residence that was Harry Truman’s favorite hideaway, the statesmen-at least those on view-were clad in suits and ties.
There was the president of Armenia, Robert Kocharian; the president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, and a host of other diplomats from their countries. Their mission? To try to bring peace to Nagorno-Karabakh after 12 years of war and, of late, a fragile ceasefire. But the drama of the day was occurring elsewhere-on an island off the coast of China. And Powell was playing a crucial role in both, simultaneously.
For reporters tagging along, the two dramas were mesmerizing and, as they intermingled, a little confusing. Take the tug of war over the crew of the damaged American reconnaissance plane now held in Hainan, China. Powell, a cool-headed manager who was once chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed the human side as he described the landing of the American spy plane. “We have nothing to apologize for,” Powell said. “We did not do anything wrong…. Our airplane was in international airspace, an accident took place and the pilot, in order to save 24 lives, including his own, under circumstances we now have determined must have been hair-raising, safely got that plane on the ground.”
Yet the real news was revealed by an aide traveling with the secretary on his Air Force jet after the half-day on the ground in Key West. This was that Chinese representatives in talks on Hainan Island had referred to the collision between a Chinese fighter plane and the EP-3E spy plane as an “accident.” This suggested that the dispute could be readily resolved following an accident investigation.
Powell took a different tack in the talks over the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Christian Armenians that declared independence in 1989 from the mostly Muslim Azerbaijan. The war raged from 1992 to 1994, and Armenians now control a substantial part of Azerbaijani-claimed territory, including Karabakh. This was a central issue in the discussion, which may go on for six days, but the State Department spokesman who is Key West to handle all press inquiries as the talks continue behind closed doors said he was not sure how much Azerbaijani territory Armenia occupies. (Armenians say 15 percent; Azerbaijanis say 20 percent.)
What was going on? Powell invited reporters to join him on his plane in a bid to focus the spotlight on these negotiations-the first time in his two months in office that he sought attention for a diplomatic process in which the United States is playing a leading role. But the spotlight got redirected. First there was an open-air news conference where nearly every question was about China. That also occurred on board his plane. The centerpiece of the first day’s negotiations here was a plenary or kick-off session. Mysteriously, although the Little White House was but eight blocks away, the sound could not be piped into the press room due to a technical failure. Stories filed, reporters were told to board the vans headed for the Chica Naval Air Station. There they sat on Powell’s aircraft, waiting and watching as a Naval surveillance aircraft-a small version of the EP-3E-practiced aircraft-carrier-style landings on the old airstrip.
Luckily, the last reporter to leave had happened by an Azerbaijani diplomat and obtained a copy of Aliyev’s plenary speech. Suddenly the characters took on life. There was a no-holds-barred verbal assault on Armenia, charging genocide, ethnic cleansing, displacement of 1 million Azerbaijanis, an eighth of the population, and occupation of a fifth of the territory. The United Nations had passed resolutions “but not bother itself to follow up,” Aliyev said, and the mediators had been “busy mediating, without exerting the necessary influence over the process of negotiations in compliance with the norms of international law.” His charge that the United States and its co-chairs, Russia and France, had been “passive” and showed “indecisiveness” was a direct rebuke.
But Powell had earlier declared that the U.S. saw its role as “facilitating a mutually acceptable settlement,” with no mention of even mediation. President Kocharian’s reply was as pointed as it was brief: Armenia would neither take part in a propaganda campaign nor tutor those attending the negotiations, he said.
Are these talks heading for resolution? A top American official asserted that the process was “moving forward.” Powell, meanwhile, moved on himself, back to Washington to take a starring turn in what’s clearly become the most important drama on the world’s diplomatic stage.
