Author: Raffi Khondkarian

                                        Monday, January 15, 2024


No Agreement Reached On Armenian-Azeri Talks In Washington
January 15, 2024
        • Harry Tamrazian

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosts the Armenian and Azerbaijani 
foreign ministers for talks in Arlington, Virginia, June 29, 2023.


Azerbaijan has still not accepted a fresh U.S. proposal to organize talks 
between the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers in Washington, a senior 
Armenian diplomat said at the weekend.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had originally been scheduled to host the 
two ministers on November 20. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov 
withdrew from the trilateral meeting in protest against what his office called 
pro-Armenian statements made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of 
state for Europe and Eurasia.

O’Brien visited Baku in early December in a bid to convince the Azerbaijani 
leadership to reschedule it. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign 
policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, said afterwards that Washington must reconsider its 
“one-sided approach” to the conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.

The U.S. State Department kept trying to organize the talks that would focus on 
an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Its special envoy for the 
Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process, Louis Bono, visited Yerevan for that purpose 
last week. Lilit Makunts, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, confirmed 
that no new date was set for the talks as a result.

“There is no clarity, no agreement at the moment,” Makunts told RFE/RL’s 
Armenian Service.

Significantly, Bono did not proceed to Baku from Yerevan. According to some 
Azerbaijani media outlets, Azerbaijani officials refused to meet with him. The 
U.S. embassies in both South Caucasus nations did not deny the snub.

Bayramov offered late last month to meet with Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan 
on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border without third-party mediation. Hajiyev said 
afterwards that Baku and Yerevan do not need third-party mediation in order to 
negotiate the peace treaty.

Armenian analysts have suggested that Baku does not want Western mediation 
anymore because it is reluctant to sign the kind of agreement that would 
preclude Azerbaijani territorial claims to Armenia.




Pashinian Rejects Azeri ‘Territorial Claims’
January 15, 2024
        • Ruzanna Stepanian
        • Karlen Aslanian

Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pasinian speaks at a meeting in Gavar, january 
13, 2024.


Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has accused Azerbaijan of undermining prospects 
for an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord with effective territorial claims to 
Armenia.

In a weekend speech, Pashinian pointed to Baku’s continuing reluctance to 
recognize his country’s borders certified by Soviet maps and renewed demands for 
an extraterritorial corridor to the Nakhichevan exclave that would pass through 
a strategic Armenian region.

“I consider recent statements from Baku to be a serious blow to the peace 
process. The first impression is that … Azerbaijan is trying to generate 
territorial claims against Armenia, which is unacceptable,” he told members of 
his Civil Contract party at a meeting held in the eastern town of Gavar.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his senior aides have said in recent 
weeks that Baku and Yerevan should sign a bilateral peace treaty before agreeing 
on how to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Aliyev made clear on January 
10 that Baku continues to reject Yerevan’s insistence on using the most recent 
Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for the border delimitation.

In that regard, Aliyev again accused Armenia of occupying “eight Azerbaijani 
villages.” He referred to several small enclaves inside Armenia which were 
controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in 
the early 1990s. For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger 
Armenian enclave. It also occupied other Armenian border areas following the 
2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Earlier this month Baku renewed its demands for the so-called “Zangezur 
corridor.” Aliyev insisted that people and cargo transported to and from 
Nakhichevan through Armenia’s Syunik province must be exempt from Armenian 
border checks. Another senior Azerbaijani official said on January 5 that 
Armenia has an “obligation” to do so under the terms of the Russian-brokered 
ceasefire that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

Pashinian countered that it contains no provisions calling for an 
extraterritorial corridor to Nakhichevan. He also charged that Azerbaijan and 
Russia effectively scrapped the truce accord with Baku’s September 19-20 
military offensive in Karabakh that restored Azerbaijani control over the region 
and forced its population to flee to Armenia.

“There is no way that document can no longer be valid for two parties [that 
signed it] but continue to be valid for the third party,” he said.

Meanwhile, Armenian opposition leaders on Monday portrayed the latest verbal 
exchanges between Baku and Yerevan as another vindication of their claims that 
the peace treaty touted Pashinian’s administration would not be a safeguard 
against another Armenian-Azerbaijani war. They said Pashinian’s stance is only 
encouraging Aliyev to seek further Armenian concessions even after the recapture 
of Karabakh.

“If those two key provisions -- the border delimitation and the unblocking of 
regional transport links -- are left out of the treaty, it will not eliminate 
the existing threats [to Armenia’s security] in any way,” said Tigran Abrahamian 
of the Pativ Unem bloc. “That could lead to an escalation of the situation, 
including the outbreak of fighting, at any moment.”

“If Nikol Pashinian had normal structures that would assess the 
military-political situation in a proper and timely way, they would quickly see 
that Azerbaijan's offer of peace is a deception,” said Seyran Ohanian, the 
parliamentary leader of another opposition bloc, Hayastan.




Armenian Road Deaths Up In 2023
January 15, 2024
        • Artak Khulian

Armenia - The scene of a car accident in Yerevan, March 31, 2023.


The number of officially registered traffic deaths in Armenia rose by about 17 
percent to 362 in January-November 2023 amid a continued expansion of the 
country’s new, Western-funded road police.

Official statistics publicized on Monday by the chief of the national police 
service, Aram Hovannisian, also shows a 6.3 percent year-on-year increase in the 
number of all vehicle accidents.

Hovannisian and other senior officials from the Armenian Ministry of Interior 
said that a key reason for the increased number of fatalities and other traffic 
violations is that the Patrol Service was only recently expanded to all regions 
of Armenia. They expressed confidence that the new police force will reverse the 
upward trend this year.

The Patrol Service was set up in 2021 with financial and technical assistance 
provided by the United States and the European Union. It was meant to introduce 
Western standards in road policing, street patrol and crowd control.

Critics regularly accuse newly trained officers of the Patrol Service of 
incompetence. The first chief of the Patrol Service, Artur Umrshatian, was 
sacked in February 2023 after his subordinates took more than 20 minutes to stop 
a car racing chaotically through Yerevan’s main square.

Lenient and inconsistent road policing seems to be another factor. In 
particular, anecdotal evidence suggests that most Armenian motorists have 
stopped fastening their seat belts over the past few years. Few of them are 
fined for such violations.

Armenia - The first division of the Patrol Service is inaugurated in Yerevan, 
July 8, 2021.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian officials 
regularly portray the Patrol Service as a successful example of police reforms 
carried out by the current authorities in Yerevan.

Deputy Interior Minister Arpine Sargsian on Monday listed the creation of the 
service among “big achievements” of those reforms. The mostly structural changes 
have already produced “quite serious results,” she told a joint news conference 
with Interior Minister Vahe Ghazarian and Hovannisian.

During the 2018 “velvet revolution” that brought him to power, Pashinian 
repeatedly lambasted Armenia’s former government for aggressively enforcing 
traffic rules with fines. His government forgave thousands of car owners that 
had refused to pay such fines and also reduced most of the legal penalties for 
traffic violations. But it toughened some of them after traffic deaths surged 
from 279 in 2017 to 343 in 2018.

Armenia’s overall crime rate has also increased since 2018. The police recorded 
35,052 various crimes in January-November 2023, up by 5.3 percent year on year. 
The increase was primarily driven by drug trafficking cases which more than 
doubled in the eleven-month period.

The rapid rise in such cases observed in recent years is widely blamed on 
increasingly accessible synthetic drugs mainly sold through the internet. It has 
prompted serious concern from not only opposition politicians but also 
parliament deputies from Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. Meeting with those 
lawmakers last October, Ghazarian called for criminalizing drug addiction in the 
country.





Azeri Court Upholds Jail Term For Karabakh Armenian
January 15, 2024

Azerbaijan -- Vagif Khachatrian goes on trial in Baku, October 13, 2023.


An appeals court in Azerbaijan confirmed on Monday a 15-year prison sentence 
given to an ethnic Armenian from Nagorno-Karabakh who was arrested by 
Azerbaijani security services last summer during his aborted medical evacuation 
to Armenia.

The 68-year-old Vagif Khachatrian was among Karabakh patients escorted by the 
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenian hospitals for urgent 
treatment. He was detained at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor 
and then charged with killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani 
residents at the start of the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

During his trial, Khachatrian repeatedly denied any involvement in the alleged 
killings of 25 Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh village of Meshali captured by 
Karabakh Armenian forces in December 1991. He had lived in another village close 
to Meshali during and after the 1991-199 war.

A military court in Baku sentenced him to 15 years in prison on November 7. 
Khachatrian, who refused to be represented by an Azerbaijani 
government-appointed lawyer during the trial, appealed against the verdict. The 
appeal was predictably rejected by the higher Azerbaijani court.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry condemned the “sham trial” late last year. It 
demanded the immediate release of Khachatrian and other “Armenian POWs and 
civilians still held hostage in Baku.”

They include eight former political and military leaders of Karabakh who were 
arrested at the Azerbaijani checkpoint during the mass exodus of the region’s 
ethnic Armenian population resulting from Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military 
offensive. They are facing various grave accusations rejected by the Armenian 
government as well as current Karabakh officials.


Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2024 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

 

                                        Friday, January 5, 2024


Baku Again Demands ‘Corridor’ Through Armenia

        • Heghine Buniatian

AZERBAIJAN -- Hikmet Hajiyev, the head of the Foreign Policy Affairs Department 
of Azerbaijan's Presidential Administration, gives a press briefing in Baku, 
February 26, 2021


Azerbaijan has renewed its demands for Armenia to open an extraterritorial 
corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.

A senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed that Yerevan has an 
“obligation” to do so under the terms of the Russian-brokered ceasefire that 
stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

The truce accord commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between 
Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan. It says that Russian border guards will 
“control” the movement of people, vehicles and goods. The transport links would 
presumably pass through Syunik, the sole Armenian province bordering Iran.

The Armenian government has rejected Baku’s demands, saying that Azerbaijani 
passengers and cargo cannot be exempt from Armenian border controls. It insists 
on conventional transport links between the two South Caucasus states.

Iran also strongly opposes the so-called “Zangezur corridor” sought by Aliyev. 
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi reaffirmed Tehran’s stance when he met with a 
visiting Azerbaijani official in October. Aliyev’s top foreign policy adviser, 
Hikmet Hajiyev, said later in October that the corridor “has lost its 
attractiveness for us” and that Baku is now planning to “do this with Iran 
instead.”

But in an interview with Germany’s Berliner Zeitung newspaper published on 
Thursday, Hajiyev said that the planned construction of a new road as well as a 
railway connecting Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan via Iran does not mean that Baku 
has abandoned the idea of the corridor passing through Armenia.

“The route through Armenia is Yerevan’s obligation which they must fulfill,” he 
said.

Hajiyev confirmed that Baku wants to make sure that Azerbaijani people and 
cargos travelling to and from Nakhichevan are not checked by Armenian border 
guards or customs officers.

Aliyev has implicitly threatened to open the corridor by force, prompting stern 
warnings from Iran. His renewed demands for the corridor follow what Armenian 
and Azerbaijani officials call major progress made in talks on a bilateral peace 
treaty.

Armenian opposition leaders dismiss Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s regular 
assurances that the treaty will preclude another war with Azerbaijan. They also 
say that he is willing to make disproportionate concessions to Baku and get very 
little in return, a claim denied by Pashinian and his political allies.

The main purpose of the 2020 ceasefire cited by Hajiyev was to stop fighting in 
Karabakh and prevent new hostilities. The deal led to the deployment of Russian 
peacekeepers in Karabakh and gave them control over the Lachin corridor 
connecting the region to Armenia.

Azerbaijan disrupted commercial and humanitarian traffic through the corridor in 
December 2022 and set up a checkpoint there in April 2023 in breach of the 
ceasefire. It went on to launch a military offensive in Karabakh in September 
2022, forcing the region’s practically entire population to flee to Armenia.




At Least 223 Karabakh Armenians Killed During Azeri Offensive


Nagorno-Karabakh - A residential area in Stepanakert damaged by Azerbaijani 
shelling, September 19, 2023.


At least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh were killed 
during last September’s Azerbaijani military offensive that enabled Baku to 
recapture the region, according to a senior Armenian official.

Five children were among the casualties, Argishti Kyaramian, the head of 
Armenia’s Investigative Committee, told Armenian Public Television late on 
Thursday. He said that five other civilians and 15 Karabakh Armenian soldiers 
went missing during the 24-hour hostilities that broke out on September 19.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry has acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among 
its military personnel involved in the operation. Its troops greatly outnumbered 
and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from 
Armenia. Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for 
Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s ethnic Armenian residents to 
flee to Armenia.

More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining 
population, left their homeland in the space of a week. The hundreds of cars, 
buses and trucks carrying them caused a massive traffic jam on a 50-kilometer 
road leading to Armenia.

It reportedly took most refugees at least 30 hours to reach the Armenian border. 
According to the Investigative Committee, 64 of them died during the arduous 
journey due to a lack of medicine, medical aid and food.

A satellite image shows a long traffic jam of vehicles along the Lachin corridor 
as ethnic Armenians flee from the Nagorno-Karabakh.

The exodus began amid chaotic scenes inside Karabakh blamed for a massive 
explosion and fire at a fuel depot outside Stepanakert on September 25. The 
blast left at least 218 people dead. Videos posted on social media showed 
hundreds of cars parked near the depot, waiting to fuel up and head to Armenia.

The Armenian authorities maintain that Karabakh’s depopulation is the result of 
“ethnic cleansing” carried out by Azerbaijan. In October, Armenia’s human rights 
ombudswoman, Anahit Manasian, accused Azerbaijani troops of committing war 
crimes during the assault.

“There are many bodies, including of civilians, transported from 
Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia that carry signs of torture and/or mutilation,” 
Manasian told reporters.

Baku denies forcing Karabakh residents to flee their homes and says the 
Azerbaijani army did not target civilians during its offensive condemned by the 
United States and the European Union.




U.S. Peace Efforts ‘Not Thwarted By Russia’

        • Anush Mkrtchian

U.S. - State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller speaks during a news 
briefing in Washington, July 18, 2023.


Russia is not torpedoing U.S. efforts to broker an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace 
accord despite being strongly opposed to them, the U.S. State Department 
insisted on Thursday.

Moscow has repeatedly claimed that the United States and the European Union are 
seeking to drive it out of the South Caucasus, rather than end the 
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

In early December, the Russian Foreign Ministry also rebuked Armenia for 
ignoring recent Russian offers to organize more peace talks with Azerbaijan. It 
warned that Yerevan’s current preference of Western mediation may spell more 
trouble for the Armenian people.

“Russia does not in any way prevent us from conducting the important diplomatic 
efforts we think are necessary for Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we will continue 
to pursue them,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told a news 
briefing in Washington.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to host the Armenian 
and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in Washington on November 20 for further 
negotiations on a peace treaty between the two South Caucasus nations. Baku 
cancelled the meeting in protest against what it called pro-Armenian statements 
made by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe and 
Eurasia.

O’Brien visited Baku afterwards in what appears to have been a failed bid to 
convince the Azerbaijani leadership to reschedule the cancelled meeting. Miller 
indicated that no new date has been agreed for it yet.

“We’ll have an announcement to make when we have a meeting scheduled,” he said.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, 
said on December 19 that Washington must reconsider its “one-sided approach” to 
the conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.

On December 28, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov revealed that Baku 
has proposed that he and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan hold direct 
talks at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. The Armenian government has still not 
publicly responded to the offer.

In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published on 
Thursday, Hajiyev said Baku and Yerevan do not need third-party mediation in 
order to negotiate the peace treaty. “We are not against honest mediation in 
principle but prefer direct discussions,” he said.

Armenian analysts have suggested that Baku does not want Western mediation 
anymore because it is reluctant to sign the kind of agreement that would commit 
it to explicitly recognizing Armenia’s borders and thus preclude Azerbaijani 
territorial claims.

Yerevan has said, at least until now, that the two sides should use Soviet 
military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for recognizing each other’s 
territorial integrity and delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Its 
position has been backed by the EU but rejected by the Azerbaijani side.



Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2024 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.