Friday, January 5, 2024
Baku Again Demands ‘Corridor’ Through Armenia
• Heghine Buniatian
AZERBAIJAN -- Hikmet Hajiyev, the head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department
of Azerbaijan's Presidential Administration, gives a press briefing in Baku,
February 26, 2021
Azerbaijan has renewed its demands for Armenia to open an extraterritorial
corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
A senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed that Yerevan has an
“obligation” to do so under the terms of the Russian-brokered ceasefire that
stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
The truce accord commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between
Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan. It says that Russian border guards will
“control” the movement of people, vehicles and goods. The transport links would
presumably pass through Syunik, the sole Armenian province bordering Iran.
The Armenian government has rejected Baku’s demands, saying that Azerbaijani
passengers and cargo cannot be exempt from Armenian border controls. It insists
on conventional transport links between the two South Caucasus states.
Iran also strongly opposes the so-called “Zangezur corridor” sought by Aliyev.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi reaffirmed Tehran’s stance when he met with a
visiting Azerbaijani official in October. Aliyev’s top foreign policy adviser,
Hikmet Hajiyev, said later in October that the corridor “has lost its
attractiveness for us” and that Baku is now planning to “do this with Iran
instead.”
But in an interview with Germany’s Berliner Zeitung newspaper published on
Thursday, Hajiyev said that the planned construction of a new road as well as a
railway connecting Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan via Iran does not mean that Baku
has abandoned the idea of the corridor passing through Armenia.
“The route through Armenia is Yerevan’s obligation which they must fulfill,” he
said.
Hajiyev confirmed that Baku wants to make sure that Azerbaijani people and
cargos travelling to and from Nakhichevan are not checked by Armenian border
guards or customs officers.
Aliyev has implicitly threatened to open the corridor by force, prompting stern
warnings from Iran. His renewed demands for the corridor follow what Armenian
and Azerbaijani officials call major progress made in talks on a bilateral peace
treaty.
Armenian opposition leaders dismiss Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s regular
assurances that the treaty will preclude another war with Azerbaijan. They also
say that he is willing to make disproportionate concessions to Baku and get very
little in return, a claim denied by Pashinian and his political allies.
The main purpose of the 2020 ceasefire cited by Hajiyev was to stop fighting in
Karabakh and prevent new hostilities. The deal led to the deployment of Russian
peacekeepers in Karabakh and gave them control over the Lachin corridor
connecting the region to Armenia.
Azerbaijan disrupted commercial and humanitarian traffic through the corridor in
December 2022 and set up a checkpoint there in April 2023 in breach of the
ceasefire. It went on to launch a military offensive in Karabakh in September
2022, forcing the region’s practically entire population to flee to Armenia.
At Least 223 Karabakh Armenians Killed During Azeri Offensive
Nagorno-Karabakh - A residential area in Stepanakert damaged by Azerbaijani
shelling, September 19, 2023.
At least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh were killed
during last September’s Azerbaijani military offensive that enabled Baku to
recapture the region, according to a senior Armenian official.
Five children were among the casualties, Argishti Kyaramian, the head of
Armenia’s Investigative Committee, told Armenian Public Television late on
Thursday. He said that five other civilians and 15 Karabakh Armenian soldiers
went missing during the 24-hour hostilities that broke out on September 19.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry has acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among
its military personnel involved in the operation. Its troops greatly outnumbered
and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from
Armenia. Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for
Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s ethnic Armenian residents to
flee to Armenia.
More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining
population, left their homeland in the space of a week. The hundreds of cars,
buses and trucks carrying them caused a massive traffic jam on a 50-kilometer
road leading to Armenia.
It reportedly took most refugees at least 30 hours to reach the Armenian border.
According to the Investigative Committee, 64 of them died during the arduous
journey due to a lack of medicine, medical aid and food.
A satellite image shows a long traffic jam of vehicles along the Lachin corridor
as ethnic Armenians flee from the Nagorno-Karabakh.
The exodus began amid chaotic scenes inside Karabakh blamed for a massive
explosion and fire at a fuel depot outside Stepanakert on September 25. The
blast left at least 218 people dead. Videos posted on social media showed
hundreds of cars parked near the depot, waiting to fuel up and head to Armenia.
The Armenian authorities maintain that Karabakh’s depopulation is the result of
“ethnic cleansing” carried out by Azerbaijan. In October, Armenia’s human rights
ombudswoman, Anahit Manasian, accused Azerbaijani troops of committing war
crimes during the assault.
“There are many bodies, including of civilians, transported from
Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia that carry signs of torture and/or mutilation,”
Manasian told reporters.
Baku denies forcing Karabakh residents to flee their homes and says the
Azerbaijani army did not target civilians during its offensive condemned by the
United States and the European Union.
U.S. Peace Efforts ‘Not Thwarted By Russia’
• Anush Mkrtchian
U.S. - State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller speaks during a news
briefing in Washington, July 18, 2023.
Russia is not torpedoing U.S. efforts to broker an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace
accord despite being strongly opposed to them, the U.S. State Department
insisted on Thursday.
Moscow has repeatedly claimed that the United States and the European Union are
seeking to drive it out of the South Caucasus, rather than end the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
In early December, the Russian Foreign Ministry also rebuked Armenia for
ignoring recent Russian offers to organize more peace talks with Azerbaijan. It
warned that Yerevan’s current preference of Western mediation may spell more
trouble for the Armenian people.
“Russia does not in any way prevent us from conducting the important diplomatic
efforts we think are necessary for Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we will continue
to pursue them,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told a news
briefing in Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to host the Armenian
and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in Washington on November 20 for further
negotiations on a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus nations. Baku
cancelled the meeting in protest against what it called pro-Armenian statements
made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and
Eurasia.
O’Brien visited Baku afterwards in what appears to have been a failed bid to
convince the Azerbaijani leadership to reschedule the cancelled meeting. Miller
indicated that no new date has been agreed for it yet.
“We’ll have an announcement to make when we have a meeting scheduled,” he said.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev,
said on December 19 that Washington must reconsider its “one-sided approach” to
the conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.
On December 28, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov revealed that Baku
has proposed that he and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan hold direct
talks at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Armenian government has still not
publicly responded to the offer.
In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published on
Thursday, Hajiyev said Baku and Yerevan do not need third-party mediation in
order to negotiate the peace treaty. “We are not against honest mediation in
principle but prefer direct discussions,” he said.
Armenian analysts have suggested that Baku does not want Western mediation
anymore because it is reluctant to sign the kind of agreement that would commit
it to explicitly recognizing Armenia’s borders and thus preclude Azerbaijani
territorial claims.
Yerevan has said, at least until now, that the two sides should use Soviet
military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for recognizing each other’s
territorial integrity and delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Its
position has been backed by the EU but rejected by the Azerbaijani side.
Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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