RFE/RL – Pashinian On Defensive Over Baku’s Demands For ‘Return Of West Azeri

At least two of Pashinian’s main election challengers are seizing upon Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s repeated demands for Yerevan to ensure the return of Azerbaijanis who lived in Soviet Armenia until the late 1980s. Baku has said that as many as 300,000 Azerbaijanis must now be allowed to settle in Armenia.

That is essential for ending the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, Aliyev said in December two days after Pashinian again declared that peace has already been established between Armenia and Azerbaijan as a result of their U.S.-brokered agreements reached in Washington in August.

“The issue of the return of West Azerbaijanis will not be removed from Azerbaijan’s agenda until it is resolved,” Aliyev declared last June.

Armenian opposition groups claim that having already made major unilateral concessions to Baku, Pashinian would bow to these demands as well. The issue is used by two of those groups led by businessmen Samvel Karapetian and Gagik Tsarukian as a key line of pre-election attack on the ruling Civil Contract party.

“We will make Armenia the homeland of 10 million Armenians [around the world,] while Pashinian wants to make it the homeland of 3 million Armenians and 300,000 Azerbaijanis,” Karapetian told journalists on Wednesday.

Tsarukian also makes such claims during his pre-election meetings in various parts of the country.

“They [the Armenian government] have raised the property tax,” he said earlier this week. “Are they suggesting that people sell their houses and leave so that those 300,000 Azerbaijanis come, buy them and stay here?”

Pashinian dismissed the opposition allegations as “cheap political speculation.” He hit out at Karapetian whose Strong Armenia bloc is emerging as Civil Contract’s main challenger in the June 7 elections.

“I’m 100 percent sure that the oligarch [from the Russian city of] Kaluga doesn’t understand what he’s saying and why he’s saying it,” he told a news briefing in Yerevan. “He is saying what he is instructed to say.”

The allegations picked up by some media outlets intensified on Wednesday as an Azerbaijani government delegation led by Armenian-born Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev visited Armenia for further talks on the demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and establishment of bilateral commercial ties. Pashinian insisted that Aliyev’s demands for the “return of West Azerbaijanis” were not on the agenda of the talks.

“We have never discussed and are not discussing such an issue with Azerbaijan,” he said. “We are also not discussing with Azerbaijan the issue of the return of Armenians from Karabakh and Baku because discussions in both directions have a provocative effect on the current political situation and can inflame one another.”

Former President Robert Kocharian, who leads another major opposition group running in the elections, rejected this week Pashinian’s parallels between Aliyev’s demands and the Karabakh Armenians’ right to return to their homeland recaptured by Baku in 2023.

“The Artsakh issue is a totally different topic because Artsakh had a status in Soviet times and Artsakh’s self-determination was entirely within the framework of internationally accepted principles,” argued Kocharian.

Even before the unfolding election campaign, Armenian opposition leaders maintained that Baku will continue to make more demands on Yerevan despite unilateral concessions already made by Pashinian. They claimed that Aliyev’s ultimate goal is to end Armenia’s existence as a viable state.

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