Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, who is in Qatar, gave an interview to Al Jazeera Monday, during which he touched upon the processes taking place in the South Caucasus, the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict, Armenian-Turkish relations, and several other topics. Below is the text of an excerpt from this interview.
You speak in a very positive language, while Armenia's relationship with neighboring countries is generally bad with the exception of Iran, and some are actually surprised that Iran, the Islamic Republic, stood by you in the face of Azerbaijan, the Muslim country? How do you explain this situation?
We have four neighbors, we have very good relations with two of them; I mean Georgia and Iran. Iran is a friendly country for us, which also has good relations with Azerbaijan, we do not intend not to have good relations with countries that have good relations with Azerbaijan. But now we have very close ties with Iran, by the way, we hope that by cooperating with Iran we will be able to expand our bilateral relations with Qatar as well. We are now working to develop communications between Iran and Armenia, and we are currently in the process of constructing a very strategic highway called North-South, which connects our border with Georgia to the border with Iran. We hope that as a result of this program, our economic relations with Iran will develop. By the way, the Eurasian Economic Union, I have already said that Armenia is a member of it, has a free trade agreement with Iran, which is very important in the context of our bilateral relations.
Let me to conclude this meeting with a question about your tour in the Arab region, what is your expectation from the Arabs?
I should mention that there is a very warm attitude towards the Arab world in Armenia, because we have traditional relations. Now I hope for the growth of bilateral trade between Armenia and Qatar, because there is a very positive political environment in our bilateral relations with this wonderful country.