Yerevan, Baku make conflicting statements on prisoner swap proposal
By BBC Monitoring
Armenia and Azerbaijan have made conflicting statements on the proposed prisoner swap between the sides. Azerbaijan said it made the "humane proposal" rejected by Armenia and the latter said that there had been no such proposal from Azerbaijan and that there were no prisoners in Armenia or Karabakh.
Baku's 'humane proposal'
On 1 November, Azerbaijan's state-owned news agency Azartac reported that the country's State Commission for Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons held a meeting, where its chairman Madat Quliyev said that Yerevan had not responded to Baku's "humane proposal", which implied releasing under the "all-for-all" principle persons currently held by Azerbaijan and Armenia and registered with the Red Cross. The move was said to also imply persons, who could be detained in the future, proposing to hand them over to the sides within a short period of time.
On 2 November, the Azerbaijani privately-owned pro-government website Haqqin.az quoted Ismayil Axundov, a senior official with the state commission, as saying that each party to the conflict currently had three people from the opposing side.
The report cited the commission as saying that Azerbaijan had sentenced two detained Armenian soldiers – Arsen Baghdasarov and Karen Ghazaryan – to prison terms after finding them guilty of crimes against Azerbaijani citizens. As regards yet another Armenian, called Zaven Karapetyan, his investigation has been completed and handed over to a court, the report said.
It added that the Armenian military held three Azerbaijani hostages – Dilqam Asgarov, Sahbaz Quliyev, and Elcin Huseynzada.
Yerevan says no proposal from Baku
However, Armenia denied receiving an "all-for-all" prisoner swap proposal from Azerbaijan, the Aysor.am news website reported.
On 6 November, Yerevan-based News.am quoted acting Armenian Defence Minister David Tonoyan as denying that Yerevan had received an official prisoner swap proposal from Azerbaijan. He said he had learnt about it from the media and added that there were no prisoners of war in Armenia or Nagorno-Karabakh, noting that the issue could be discussed if prisoners of war appeared in Armenia or Karabakh.
"This is an absolute lie. We have not received a proposal like that," the report quoted Gabriel Balayan, Armenia's acting deputy defence minister, as telling reporters on 8 November.
Balayan added that such proposals normally came in via the Red Cross. He also denied that there were any prisoners of war in his country or in Azerbaijan's Armenian-held breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
"I cannot even imagine what this is all about, given the fact that there are no prisoners of war in Armenia or Artsakh [Karabakh]. We work openly. If there was an initiative like that from Azerbaijan, I believe that the Red Cross, which is in good control of the situation, realises that it is meant for domestic consumption, and there are no real grounds for it," he said.
Baku says proposal made in 2016
On 6 November, Azartac said the state commission released a statement to respond to Tonoyan. The commission said it had sent a letter to the Red Cross on 29 April 2016, proposing that an agreement be drafted on the immediate return of persons held by both sides and the return in the future, within no later than three days, of persons held hostage and corpses. The statement said the Red Cross forwarded the proposal to Armenia and work was being done on a draft agreement.
Also, the state commission was said to have met in Baku in 2017 and 2018 with an international working group for searching for missing persons and releasing prisoners of war and hostages in the Karabakh conflict zone. The two sides discussed a speedy release of persons held by the parties under the "all-for-all" principle. The co-chairs of the working group, who visited Armenia and Karabakh, delivered the proposal to Armenia's relevant agencies over the past two years and it was discussed, the commission said.
The co-chairs of the working group phoned the Azerbaijani state commission to tell it that they planned meetings with the relevant state commissions of both countries to be held in Georgia's Tbilisi in November 2018 to coordinate topics to be discussed. The Azerbaijan commission told the co-chairs that it was ready for the meeting provided the main question to be discussed would be a speedy release of persons currently held by the sides.