Monday, January 15, 2024
No Agreement Reached On Armenian-Azeri Talks In Washington
January 15, 2024
• Harry Tamrazian
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosts the Armenian and Azerbaijani
foreign ministers for talks in Arlington, Virginia, June 29, 2023.
Azerbaijan has still not accepted a fresh U.S. proposal to organize talks
between the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers in Washington, a senior
Armenian diplomat said at the weekend.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had originally been scheduled to host the
two ministers on November 20. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov
withdrew from the trilateral meeting in protest against what his office called
pro-Armenian statements made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of
state for Europe and Eurasia.
O’Brien visited Baku in early December in a bid to convince the Azerbaijani
leadership to reschedule it. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign
policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, said afterwards that Washington must reconsider its
“one-sided approach” to the conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.
The U.S. State Department kept trying to organize the talks that would focus on
an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Its special envoy for the
Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process, Louis Bono, visited Yerevan for that purpose
last week. Lilit Makunts, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, confirmed
that no new date was set for the talks as a result.
“There is no clarity, no agreement at the moment,” Makunts told RFE/RL’s
Armenian Service.
Significantly, Bono did not proceed to Baku from Yerevan. According to some
Azerbaijani media outlets, Azerbaijani officials refused to meet with him. The
U.S. embassies in both South Caucasus nations did not deny the snub.
Bayramov offered late last month to meet with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan
on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border without third-party mediation. Hajiyev said
afterwards that Baku and Yerevan do not need third-party mediation in order to
negotiate the peace treaty.
Armenian analysts have suggested that Baku does not want Western mediation
anymore because it is reluctant to sign the kind of agreement that would
preclude Azerbaijani territorial claims to Armenia.
Pashinian Rejects Azeri ‘Territorial Claims’
January 15, 2024
• Ruzanna Stepanian
• Karlen Aslanian
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pasinian speaks at a meeting in Gavar, january
13, 2024.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has accused Azerbaijan of undermining prospects
for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord with effective territorial claims to
Armenia.
In a weekend speech, Pashinian pointed to Baku’s continuing reluctance to
recognize his country’s borders certified by Soviet maps and renewed demands for
an extraterritorial corridor to the Nakhichevan exclave that would pass through
a strategic Armenian region.
“I consider recent statements from Baku to be a serious blow to the peace
process. The first impression is that … Azerbaijan is trying to generate
territorial claims against Armenia, which is unacceptable,” he told members of
his Civil Contract party at a meeting held in the eastern town of Gavar.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his senior aides have said in recent
weeks that Baku and Yerevan should sign a bilateral peace treaty before agreeing
on how to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Aliyev made clear on January
10 that Baku continues to reject Yerevan’s insistence on using the most recent
Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for the border delimitation.
In that regard, Aliyev again accused Armenia of occupying “eight Azerbaijani
villages.” He referred to several small enclaves inside Armenia which were
controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in
the early 1990s. For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger
Armenian enclave. It also occupied other Armenian border areas following the
2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Earlier this month Baku renewed its demands for the so-called “Zangezur
corridor.” Aliyev insisted that people and cargo transported to and from
Nakhichevan through Armenia’s Syunik province must be exempt from Armenian
border checks. Another senior Azerbaijani official said on January 5 that
Armenia has an “obligation” to do so under the terms of the Russian-brokered
ceasefire that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Pashinian countered that it contains no provisions calling for an
extraterritorial corridor to Nakhichevan. He also charged that Azerbaijan and
Russia effectively scrapped the truce accord with Baku’s September 19-20
military offensive in Karabakh that restored Azerbaijani control over the region
and forced its population to flee to Armenia.
“There is no way that document can no longer be valid for two parties [that
signed it] but continue to be valid for the third party,” he said.
Meanwhile, Armenian opposition leaders on Monday portrayed the latest verbal
exchanges between Baku and Yerevan as another vindication of their claims that
the peace treaty touted Pashinian’s administration would not be a safeguard
against another Armenian-Azerbaijani war. They said Pashinian’s stance is only
encouraging Aliyev to seek further Armenian concessions even after the recapture
of Karabakh.
“If those two key provisions -- the border delimitation and the unblocking of
regional transport links -- are left out of the treaty, it will not eliminate
the existing threats [to Armenia’s security] in any way,” said Tigran Abrahamian
of the Pativ Unem bloc. “That could lead to an escalation of the situation,
including the outbreak of fighting, at any moment.”
“If Nikol Pashinian had normal structures that would assess the
military-political situation in a proper and timely way, they would quickly see
that Azerbaijan's offer of peace is a deception,” said Seyran Ohanian, the
parliamentary leader of another opposition bloc, Hayastan.
Armenian Road Deaths Up In 2023
January 15, 2024
• Artak Khulian
Armenia - The scene of a car accident in Yerevan, March 31, 2023.
The number of officially registered traffic deaths in Armenia rose by about 17
percent to 362 in January-November 2023 amid a continued expansion of the
country’s new, Western-funded road police.
Official statistics publicized on Monday by the chief of the national police
service, Aram Hovannisian, also shows a 6.3 percent year-on-year increase in the
number of all vehicle accidents.
Hovannisian and other senior officials from the Armenian Ministry of Interior
said that a key reason for the increased number of fatalities and other traffic
violations is that the Patrol Service was only recently expanded to all regions
of Armenia. They expressed confidence that the new police force will reverse the
upward trend this year.
The Patrol Service was set up in 2021 with financial and technical assistance
provided by the United States and the European Union. It was meant to introduce
Western standards in road policing, street patrol and crowd control.
Critics regularly accuse newly trained officers of the Patrol Service of
incompetence. The first chief of the Patrol Service, Artur Umrshatian, was
sacked in February 2023 after his subordinates took more than 20 minutes to stop
a car racing chaotically through Yerevan’s main square.
Lenient and inconsistent road policing seems to be another factor. In
particular, anecdotal evidence suggests that most Armenian motorists have
stopped fastening their seat belts over the past few years. Few of them are
fined for such violations.
Armenia - The first division of the Patrol Service is inaugurated in Yerevan,
July 8, 2021.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian officials
regularly portray the Patrol Service as a successful example of police reforms
carried out by the current authorities in Yerevan.
Deputy Interior Minister Arpine Sargsian on Monday listed the creation of the
service among “big achievements” of those reforms. The mostly structural changes
have already produced “quite serious results,” she told a joint news conference
with Interior Minister Vahe Ghazarian and Hovannisian.
During the 2018 “velvet revolution” that brought him to power, Pashinian
repeatedly lambasted Armenia’s former government for aggressively enforcing
traffic rules with fines. His government forgave thousands of car owners that
had refused to pay such fines and also reduced most of the legal penalties for
traffic violations. But it toughened some of them after traffic deaths surged
from 279 in 2017 to 343 in 2018.
Armenia’s overall crime rate has also increased since 2018. The police recorded
35,052 various crimes in January-November 2023, up by 5.3 percent year on year.
The increase was primarily driven by drug trafficking cases which more than
doubled in the eleven-month period.
The rapid rise in such cases observed in recent years is widely blamed on
increasingly accessible synthetic drugs mainly sold through the internet. It has
prompted serious concern from not only opposition politicians but also
parliament deputies from Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. Meeting with those
lawmakers last October, Ghazarian called for criminalizing drug addiction in the
country.
Azeri Court Upholds Jail Term For Karabakh Armenian
January 15, 2024
Azerbaijan -- Vagif Khachatrian goes on trial in Baku, October 13, 2023.
An appeals court in Azerbaijan confirmed on Monday a 15-year prison sentence
given to an ethnic Armenian from Nagorno-Karabakh who was arrested by
Azerbaijani security services last summer during his aborted medical evacuation
to Armenia.
The 68-year-old Vagif Khachatrian was among Karabakh patients escorted by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenian hospitals for urgent
treatment. He was detained at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor
and then charged with killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani
residents at the start of the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
During his trial, Khachatrian repeatedly denied any involvement in the alleged
killings of 25 Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh village of Meshali captured by
Karabakh Armenian forces in December 1991. He had lived in another village close
to Meshali during and after the 1991-199 war.
A military court in Baku sentenced him to 15 years in prison on November 7.
Khachatrian, who refused to be represented by an Azerbaijani
government-appointed lawyer during the trial, appealed against the verdict. The
appeal was predictably rejected by the higher Azerbaijani court.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry condemned the “sham trial” late last year. It
demanded the immediate release of Khachatrian and other “Armenian POWs and
civilians still held hostage in Baku.”
They include eight former political and military leaders of Karabakh who were
arrested at the Azerbaijani checkpoint during the mass exodus of the region’s
ethnic Armenian population resulting from Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military
offensive. They are facing various grave accusations rejected by the Armenian
government as well as current Karabakh officials.
Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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