Friday, February 4, 2022
European Leaders Organize Fresh Talks Between Aliyev, Pashinian
Armenia - French President Emmanuel Macron holds a video conference with
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and
European Council President Charles Michel, February 4, 2022.
French President Emmanuel Macron and European Council President Charles Michel
held a virtual meeting with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan on Friday.
The video conference came about two months after Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinian’s two face-to-face meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
which were separately hosted by Macron and Michel in Brussels.
“They took stock of progress achieved since the [December] meetings held in the
sidelines of the Eastern Partnership Summit, in particular recent releases of
detainees, ongoing joint efforts to search for missing persons, as well as the
upcoming restoration of railways tracks,” Macron and Michel said in a joint
statement on the video conference.
“The heads of State and Government agreed that this meeting offered a valuable
opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues,” added the statement.
Pashinian’s office reported that the four leaders discussed efforts to reduce
tensions along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and open transport links between
the two South Caucasus states as well as international organizations’ access to
Karabakh.
“Prime Minister Pashinian stressed the need for a long-term settlement of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the signing of a peace treaty under the aegis of
the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group,” it said.
Neither statement mentioned any concrete agreements reached by Aliyev and
Pashinian.
The two leaders pledged to de-escalate border tensions and restore
Armenian-Azerbaijani rail links at their December 14 trilateral meeting with
Michel. But they failed to patch up their differences on the status of a highway
that would also connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave via Armenia’s
southeastern Syunik province.
Belgium - European Council President Charles Michel meets with Armenian Prime
Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels,
December 14, 2021.
Aliyev said ahead of the Brussels talks that people and cargo passing through
that “Zangezur corridor” must be exempt from Armenian border controls. Pashinian
rejected the demand.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said late on Thursday that Yerevan has presented
Baku with new proposals regarding “the opening of the roads.” The ministry
spokesman, Vahan Hunanian, did not disclose them.
“We have not received any response from the Azerbaijani side to these proposals
yet,” Hunanian said in written comments. “Armenia is ready to start implementing
these proposals as soon as possible.”
The comments came in response to Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov’s
claims that Yerevan is obstructing the launch of the cross-border transport
links. Hunanian said the claims are “paradoxical” in light of what Pashinian
stated earlier on Thursday.
Pashinian announced further progress towards the planned construction of the
45-kilometer Syunik railway. He said senior Armenian and Russian officials
discussed “practical” details of the project on Wednesday.
Next Turkish-Armenian Talks Set For February 24
• Tatevik Sargsian
Armenia - Armenia's deputy parliament speaker Ruben Rubinian (left) and Turkish
diplomat Serdar Kilic.
Turkish and Armenian envoys will meet in Vienna on February 24 for the second
round of negotiations on normalizing relations between their countries.
The two sides announced the date and venue of the meeting in identical
statements issued late on Thursday. They said nothing about its agenda.
The Turkish daily Sabah reported last month that Ankara would like the talks to
be held in Turkey or Armenia.
The first meeting between Serdar Kilic, a veteran Turkish diplomat, and Ruben
Rubinian, a deputy speaker of the Armenian parliament, took place in Moscow on
January 14. The foreign ministries of the two neighboring nations described the
talks as “positive and constructive.” They said the special envoys agreed to
continue the dialogue “without preconditions.”
Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan on Wednesday voiced cautious optimism
over the success of the process welcomed by Russia, the United States and the
European Union.
Earlier, the Turkish government invited Mirzoyan and Rubinian to an
international conference that will be held in Turkey in March. Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinian signaled last week that Yerevan will likely accept the
invitation.
Ankara has for decades linked the establishment of diplomatic relations with
Yerevan and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border to a resolution of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict acceptable to Azerbaijan. Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu has repeatedly made clear that his government will coordinate
the Turkish-Armenian normalization talks with Baku.
“We will naturally continue to advance the course and all stages of these
meetings through a dialogue with our Azerbaijani brothers,” Cavusoglu’s deputy,
Yavuz Selim Kiran, said on Thursday.
Speaking at an event in Ankara marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment
of Turkish-Azerbaijani diplomatic relations, Kiran noted the resumption this
week of charter flights between Istanbul and Yerevan.
Armenian Opposition Won’t Field Presidential Candidate
• Karlen Aslanian
Armenia - Senor lawmakers from the opposition Hayastan and Pativ Unem alliances
talk during a parliament session in Yerevan, August 24, 2021.
The two opposition forces represented in Armenia’s parliament have decided not
to nominate a candidate for the new president of the republic who will be
elected by lawmakers in the coming weeks.
In a joint statement released on Friday, the Hayastan and Pativ Unem alliances
slammed the presidential candidate fielded by the ruling Civil Contract party
and said they do not want to legitimize his almost certain election.
The candidate, Vahagn Khachatrian, has served as minister of high-tech industry
in Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s cabinet since August. Khachatrian was
officially nominated on Wednesday ten days after former President Armen
Sarkissian unexpectedly stepped down.
Civil Contract controls enough parliament seats to install the 62-year-old
economist as head of states. He will have largely ceremonial powers.
The opposition statement claimed that Khachatrian is a partisan figure who does
not correspond to constitutional provisions requiring the presidency to be a
“really neutral institution consolidating the society.” It said such
consolidation is especially necessary now that Armenia is facing “extremely
serious internal and external challenges.”
“But this regime, which has put the country on the brink of destruction and
split the society, decided to stick to its practices and to be guided by only
parochial, rather than national, interests,” added the statement.
Hayastan and Pativ Unem therefore “will not participate in any way in the
election of the president of the republic,” it said.
Speaking with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service later in the day, Khachatrian said he
regrets the opposition decision. He expressed readiness to meet with opposition
leaders and discuss their concerns.
Asked whether he will try to win the backing of opposition lawmakers ahead of
the vote, Khachatrian said: “I just don’t know ways of doing that.”
New Poll Finds Growing Pessimism In Armenia
Armenia - A view of Yerevan and Mount Ararat, 17 February 2013.
Armenians have grown more pessimistic since last year’s parliamentary elections,
with only one in three of them thinking that their country is on the right track
now, according to a U.S.-funded opinion poll.
The nationwide poll released this week also found that most of them do not
expect major economic benefits from the possible opening of Armenia’s borders
with Turkey and Azerbaijan.
It was commissioned by the Washington-based International Republican Institute
(IRI), financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and
conducted by an Armenian polling organization in late November and early
December.
According to IRI, 46 percent of 1,512 randomly interviewed people felt that
“Armenia is heading in the wrong direction,” up from 34 percent in the previous
survey conducted last July shortly after the snap elections won by Prime
Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. The capital Yerevan had the
highest percentage of such respondents.
The proportion of those who anticipate positive change in the country fell from
41 percent to 34 percent in that period. It stood at 62 percent in late 2019.
Civil Contract won the June 2020 polls with about 54 percent of the vote,
according to their official results. Pashinian regularly cites that victory in
response to opposition criticism of his policies and accusations of misrule.
The latest IRI poll suggests that 61 percent of Armenians believe their country
is “governed in the interest of some groups,” rather than the majority of the
population. Just under a fifth of those polled were “very satisfied” with the
work of the prime minister’s office, with another 30 percent only “somewhat
satisfied.”
Of all state institutions, the office of the outgoing human rights ombudsman,
Arman Tatoyan, had the highest approval ratings, followed by the Armenian
police, local governments and the military.
Tatoyan has been increasingly critical of Pashinian’s administration, accusing
it of undermining judicial independence and bullying opposition groups that
defeated the ruling party in recent local elections.
Respondents were also asked about what they see as the key challenges facing
Armenia more than one year after the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Their most
frequent answers were “territorial, border issues” (28 percent) and “national
security” (15 percent).
Armenia - An Armenian soldier stands guard on the border with Azerbaijan,
November 12, 2021.
“With the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and a history of military
confrontation in the region, Armenians are understandably concerned about
national security and threats along the [Armenian-Azerbaijani] border,” said
Stephen Nix, director of IRI’s Eurasia Division. “They would like to see a
resolution to these long-standing territorial issues.”
Pashinian, who is blamed by his political opponents for Armenia’s defeat in the
six-week war, has repeatedly promised to usher in an “era of peaceful
development.” He has stressed the importance of having economic links with
Azerbaijan and Turkey, saying that they will significantly benefit the Armenian
economy,
The IRI poll shows most Armenians do not share the prime minister’s view.
According to its findings, only 5-6 percent of them think that the economic
impact of open borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey will be “definitely positive.”
More than two-thirds of respondents described Turkey as “the greatest economic
threat to Armenia.”
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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