Thursday,
EU Head To Host Another Armenian-Azeri Summit
Belgium - European Council President Charles Michel, Armenian Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev begin a trilateral
meeting in Brussels, April 6, 2022.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will fly to Brussels on Sunday for fresh talks
with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev that will be hosted by the European
Union’s top official, it was announced on Thursday.
Pashinian’s press office said he will meet with European Council President
Charles Michel separately before the trilateral talks. It gave no other details.
Michel will host the Armenian and Azerbaijan leaders for the second time in less
than two months.
He described the last Armenian-Azerbaijani summit held on April 6 as
“productive,” saying that Aliyev and Pashinian agreed to “move rapidly” towards
negotiating a comprehensive “peace treaty” between their nations.
Yerevan and Baku have still not reached agreements on the agenda and dates of
those negotiations. Nor have they started separate talks on demarcating the
Armenian-Azerbaijani border in line with other understandings reached in
Brussels.
Russia responded to the April 6 summit by accusing the West of trying to hijack
its efforts to make peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It has been trying to
regain the initiative in the peace process.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held on May 12 a trilateral meeting with
his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in Tajikistan. The Russian Foreign
Ministry said the three ministers “reaffirmed the commitment to strict
compliance with all provisions” of Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements brokered by
Moscow.
Pashinian’s office announced the fresh summit in Brussels amid daily opposition
demonstrations in Yerevan aimed at forcing the prime minister to resign. They
were sparked by his recent statements on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Speaking in the Armenian parliament on April 13, Pashinian said the
international community is pressing Armenia to scale back its demands on
Karabakh’s status and recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. He signaled
readiness to make such concessions, fuelling more opposition allegations that he
is intent on helping Baku regain full control over Karabakh.
U.S. Reaffirms Support For Prewar Karabakh Peace Formula
Armenia - U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy lays flowers on the graves of Armenian
soldiers killed during the 2020 war in Nagorno Karabakh and buried at the
Yerablur Military Pantheon, Yerevan, September 27, 2021.
The United States continues to stand for a “comprehensive settlement” of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict based on internationally recognized principles such as
self-determination of peoples, according to U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Lynne
Tracy.
“As I said earlier, we continue to believe that the key to a peaceful,
democratic, and prosperous future in the region is a negotiated, comprehensive,
and sustainable settlement of all remaining issues related to or resulting from
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” Tracy told the Armenpress news agency in an
interview published on Thursday.
“Self-determination of peoples is a key, though not the only, internationally
recognized principle to achieve this goal, and, in the context of a
comprehensive settlement of the conflict, the United States … recognizes the
role of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh in deciding its future,” she said.
In her words, the other guiding principles for such a settlement are territorial
integrity of states and non-use of force.
The three principles cited by Tracy were at the heart of a framework peace deal
that was first put forward by the U.S., Russian and French co-chairs of the OSCE
Minsk Group in 2007 and repeatedly amended by them in the following decade. The
proposed deal, known as the Madrid Principles, reportedly stipulated, among
other things, that Karabakh’s predominantly Armenian population would determine
the territory’s status in a future referendum.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly said that Azerbaijan’s victory
in the 2020 war in Karabakh put an end to the conflict. He has demanded that
Armenia recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh through a bilateral
peace treaty.
By contrast, U.S. and French officials have said that the Karabakh dispute
remains unresolved.
“Indeed, it is U.S. policy that the status of Nagorno-Karabakh remains to be
resolved,” Tracy told Armenpress, repeating her earlier statements criticized by
Baku.
“We encourage further peace negotiations and stand ready to engage bilaterally
and with like-minded partners, including through our role as an OSCE Minsk Group
Co-Chair,” she said.
The envoy also emphasized that “there is no military solution to the conflict.”
Armenian Police Stop Mass Arrests Of Protesters
• Robert Zargarian
• Artak Khulian
Armenia - Police officers guard a government building during an opposition
demosntration in Yerevan, .
Riot police on Thursday refrained from mass arrests of participants of daily
opposition demonstrations in Yerevan aimed at forcing Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinian to resign.
There were also virtually no clashes between security forces and protesters
marching through various parts of the city and briefly blocking roads.
The Armenian police made a record 414 arrests on Tuesday and detained a slightly
smaller number of people on Wednesday while unblocking the streets. They said
that nobody was arrested during similar protests organized by the country’s
leading opposition groups on Thursday morning.
“There were arrests but not on the scale that we saw in the previous days,” said
Ishkhan Saghatelian, an opposition leader.
Saghatelian linked the restraint shown by security forces to a meeting which he
and several other opposition figures held with the chief of the national police,
Vahe Ghazarian, late on Wednesday. They met as thousands of opposition
demonstrators stood outside the police headquarters in the center of Yerevan.
Armenia - Police officers arrest an opposition protester in Yerevan, May 18,
2022.
Saghatelian told the crowd after the meeting that Ghazarian promised to
investigate police officers accused by the Armenian opposition of using
disproportionate force against protesters. One officer has already been
suspended and a dozen others are also facing criminal proceedings, he cited the
police chief as saying.
No policemen are understood to have been formally charged so far. One of them
was caught on camera punching a protester two weeks ago.
By contrast, law-enforcement authorities have arrested more than a dozen
opposition activists on charges stemming from the ongoing “civil disobedience”
campaign. Most of them are accused of assaulting police officers or government
supporters. The opposition rejects the accusations as politically motivated.
Baku, Yerevan Disagree On Agenda Of Peace Talks
• Heghine Buniatian
Belgium - Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan speaks to RFE/RL in
Brussels, .
Azerbaijan has not yet accepted Armenia’s counterproposals regarding the agenda
of official negotiations on a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus
states, according to Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan.
In March, Baku presented Yerevan with five elements which it wants to be at the
heart of the treaty. They include a mutual recognition of each other’s
territorial integrity.
The Armenian government said they are acceptable to it in principle but should
be complemented by other issues relating to the future of status of Karabakh and
the security of its ethnic Armenian population.
Mirzoyan reaffirmed this position on Wednesday when he visited Brussels to
co-chair, together with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep
Borrell, a session of the Armenia-EU Partnership Council.
“It’s crucial and principal for us to discuss the issue of the rights and
security of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and, accordingly, the status of
Nagorno-Karabakh,” he told RFE/RL before the meeting. “We also think that it is
important to continue these negotiations on the peace treaty in the frames of
and according to the mandate of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship.”
“So far we haven’t heard a positive reaction from Azerbaijan to these points,”
he said. “But you know that efforts are being made to make these negotiations
possible.”
Tajikistan - The foreign ministers of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan meet in
Dushanbe, May 12, 2022.
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov dismissed last week that the
document presented by Yerevan, saying that it “can’t be called proposals.”
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
discussed the matter in detail at their April 6 talks in Brussels hosted by
European Council President Charles Michel. The latter said they agreed to “move
rapidly” towards negotiating a peace deal.
Borrell acknowledged that the two sides are “very far” from achieving that. He
said the EU stands ready to assist in the signing and implementation of such an
accord.
Belgium - EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell meets with Armenian Foreign
Minister Ararat Mirzoyan in Brussels, .
Aliyev and Pashinian also agreed to set up before the end of April a joint
commission on the delimitation and demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani
border.
Mirzoyan said last week that the commission will hold its first session in
Moscow on May 16-17. The meeting did not take place, however.
The Armenian minister said on Wednesday that the two sides disagree on
unspecified “technicalities” of the commission’s work. “Hopefully in the
upcoming days and weeks we will finally have this meeting,” he added.
Aliyev claimed on Wednesday that the first meeting of the commission was
originally scheduled for April 29 but that the Armenian side cancelled it at the
last minute. He said Yerevan also turned down a “preliminary” Azerbaijani
proposal to hold the meeting on May 7-11.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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