Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday appeared to make yet another overture to the demands put forth by President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan by offering Baku to sign the peace agreement while simultaneously dissolving the OSCE Minsk Group, a precondition being insisted on by Aliyev for the signing of accord.
Yerevan and Baku announced last month that all points of a peace agreement were agreed upon and the document was ready to be signed. Soon after that announcement was made by the foreign ministries of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Aliyev and other high-ranking Azerbaijani officials began to make additional demands on Yerevan, among them the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group and the need for Armenia to amend its constitution.
“Security is one of the key factors of human well-being, at least equal to bread. In strategic terms, the only reliable guarantee of ensuring security is peace,” Pashinyan told lawmakers on Tuesday.
“I am happy to record that the draft of the agreement on the establishment of peace and interstate relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been agreed to, and the negotiations for it are completed,” Pashinyan added.
“This means that we have entered the phase of discussions on the signing of the agreement, and I have announced that I am ready to put my signature—on behalf of the people of Armenia—on that agreement. At the official level, Azerbaijan is linking the signing of the agreement with two matters. The first of them is the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group organizations,” Pashinyan outlined.
“I have repeatedly said that this is an understandable agenda for the Republic of Armenia. If we are closing the page of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict—and we are doing that—what is the point of the existence of an organization dealing with the conflict? But the OSCE Minsk Group, at least de facto, has a broader context, and we want to be sure that Azerbaijan does not view the dissolution of the Minsk Group as a step towards closing the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict on the territory of Azerbaijan, and transferring [it] to the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia,” the prime minister went on to explain.
“To dispel this concern, we propose to Azerbaijan to sign the peace agreement and the joint petition addressed to the OSCE to dissolve the Minsk Group organizations simultaneously,” Pashinyan offered, emphasizing that his statement was an official proposal from Armenia’s government.
Pashinyan also accused Azerbaijan of attempting to hinder the resolution of the issues it has raised itself, “and this is what gives many experts reason to say that Azerbaijan is simply delaying under fabricated pretexts the signing of the peace agreement.”
The prime minister said that Aliyev’s insistence that Armenia’s Constitution contains territorial claims from Azerbaijan is baseless, since Armenia’s Constitutional Court ruled last fall that that the document contains no such stipulation.
“I believe that in order to take the right position on this issue, we must first try to proceed from the assumption that Azerbaijan is putting forward this issue as a sincere concern and not as an excuse not to sign the peace agreement, as a number of experts think,” Pashinyan said, adding that it is Azerbaijan’s constitution that, in fact, contains territorial claims from Armenia.
He explained that his government is not currently raising this matter during talks with Baku, because the text of the treaty, that was approved by both governments, “contains the necessary wording that resolves the issue by recording that the parties have no territorial claims from each other and undertakes not to put forward such claims in the future, with the understanding that the two countries recognize each other’s territorial integrity through the territories of the Soviet republics, as stated in the Almaty Declaration.”
