Presidential aide Hikmat Hajiyev says Azerbaijan wants peace and normalized relations with Armenia

Emil Lazarian
eureporter
Nov. 17 2023
 NOVEMBER 17, 2023

By

 Colin Stevens

Hikmat Hajiyev, assistant to the president of Azerbaijan on Foreign Policy Affairs, met with journalists in Brussels this week to discuss relations with Armenia after Karabakh's freedom. Armenia has occupied the region since 1991, declaring the Nagorno Karabakh Republic a de facto autonomous state.

Hajiyev stated Armenia's unlawful regime is disarmed and out of Azerbaijan.

This eliminates hurdles to an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal.

We believe this is a historic opportunity to end antagonism and hostility between two countries and construct durable peace based on Azerbaijan's five principles for Armenia.

“Then I think that Azerbaijan has also established a model of resolution of one of the most prolonged conflicts on the wider map of Eurasia.”

The Karabakh conflict has been one of the OSCE's issues since its founding, although it has not been resolved.

Because its aim was to maintain Armenia's occupation of Azerbaijan, the Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship Institute failed.

We've ended the military occupation and oppression. Thus, Azerbaijan now prioritizes peace and normalizing relations with Armenia.

“But any peace engagement requires two sides, and Armenia should show positivity and goodwill. We submitted the fifth updated peace treaty to Armenia, but they have not reacted in almost two months.

New realities have evolved in our region. Legality and legitimacy underpin these new realities.”

He then discussed Azerbaijan's future relations with Armenia. “We want to build a new regional security architecture based on justice, recognising each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, and ending all territorial claims.

We also encourage Armenia-Azerbaijan relations. I think we should reach peace. I think additional partners can support that agreement.”

He said, "First, peace and regional security are not in Brussels, Paris, Washington, Moscow, or anywhere. Peace is regional.”

During the so-called frozen dispute, some in the European Parliament felt Azerbaijanophobia or Islamophobia toward Azerbaijan.

“That’s also not that helpful for the EU’s ambitions or interests in regional resources,” Hajiyev said. The European Council recently made a statement criticizing Azerbaijan, which we find unnecessary. European institutions never treated Azerbaijan fairly while its territory was occupied.

"My question: why? For years, there was one approach toward separatist entities in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, but another against Azerbaijan.”

He added: "Some EU member countries, like France, have started a militarisation program in Armenia."

"We don't support militarization.

"A militarization program is unnecessary for Armenia. Armenian peace for its neighbours requires a peaceful program. I think militarization programs are bad.”"A militarisation program is unnecessary for Armenia. Armenian peace for its neighbours requires a peaceful program. I think militarization programs are bad.”

He noted that France is sending Armenia missile-capable military armed personnel carriers.

Armenia is also buying three French radar systems and “Mistral” short-range surface-to-air missiles.

"We consistently warned member states like France not to support separatism in Azerbaijan's territory. Second, don't promote Armenian revanchism or geopolitical games in our region. Unfortunately, this is true.”

He added: “We think that this is a historical opportunity and a historical momentum and that appropriate European institutions should also be part of the solution, not the problem, to advance a peaceful agenda in the region of the social crisis.”

https://www.eureporter.co/world/armenia/2023/11/17/presidential-aide-hikmat-hajiyev-says-azerbaijan-wants-peace-and-normalized-relations-with-armenia/#google_vignette

How to Define Genocide

Andranik Taslakhchian
The New Yorker
Nov 16 2023
A historian of the Holocaust examines Israel’s rhetoric and actions in Gaza.

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, the Times published an opinion piece by the historian Omer Bartov, which raised the question of whether Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening,” Bartov wrote. “That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse.” (More than eleven thousand Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. A State Department official testified before Congress that it is “very possible” that the figure is even higher than reported.)

Bartov, who was born in Israel and currently teaches at Brown University, is one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust, as well as German policy during the Third Reich. In numerous books and essays, he has sought to explain how Nazi ideology manifested throughout Hitler’s regime—and especially in its military. Bartov ended this latest piece by writing, “There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer.” I recently spoke by phone with Bartov. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how precisely to define genocide, the importance of establishing intent when labelling something a genocide, and why a focus on terminology can be important in preventing mass atrocities.

What distinguishes genocide from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing?

There are clear differences in international law. War crimes were defined in 1949 in the Geneva Conventions and other protocols. They are serious violations of the laws and customs of war and international armed conflict, and they can be committed against either combatants or civilians. One aspect of this is the use of disproportionate force—that the extent of the harm done to civilians should be proportionate to your military goals. It could also be other things, such as the maltreatment of prisoners of war.

Crimes against humanity do not have a U.N. resolution, but they were defined by the Rome Statute, which is now the basis for the International Criminal Court. That talks about extermination or other crimes against civilian populations, and it does not have to happen in war, whereas war crimes obviously have to happen in the context of war.

Genocide is a bit of a strange animal because the Genocide Convention of 1948, on which it’s based, defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” And this “as such” matters because what it means is that genocide is really the attempt to destroy the group and not the individuals in that group. It can be accomplished by killing members of the group. It can also be accomplished by other means such as starving them or taking away their children, or something that will bring about the extinction of the group rather than killing its individuals.

Yes, I was going to ask about the word “destroy,” and whether it is very clear that that means “kill.”

No, it doesn’t. Now, usually, not just in the popular imagination but also in law, often the association is with killing. When Raphael Lemkin was coming up with this term—he was a Polish Jewish lawyer who came to the United States during the Holocaust—he spoke specifically about a cultural genocide, which is when you really just destroy the group as a group. So let’s say there may be Jewish people around, but they don’t know that they’re Jews anymore, or you take all their children away and therefore there won’t be a continuation of that group. It doesn’t necessarily mean killing. In Australia or Canada, where there was removal of children from Indigenous groups, that has been defined as genocide.

The current example that people often use is what’s happening to the Uyghur population in China, even though as far as we know there are no mass killing campaigns.

Yes, destroying their culture.

Is the term “ethnic cleansing” used more to talk about removing people from a certain territory?

Yeah, so the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing is roughly that in ethnic cleansing you want to move people from a territory that you want, and then they can go wherever they want. In a genocide, you target the group never mind where they are. But it should be said that ethnic cleansing actually does not have a clear definition in international law, and it comes under various other categories of crimes against humanity. There’s no convention on ethnic cleansing. And the last very important thing about it is that ethnic cleansing usually or often has preceded genocide. That actually happened in the genocide of the Herero, starting in 1904, and the genocide of the Armenians, starting in 1915. The Holocaust arguably began as ethnic cleansing, as removing Jews from territories controlled by Germany, and then when there’s no place to move them to, the Germans said, “Well, we might as well kill them.” So there is a connection between them.

The Herero were people in what is modern-day Namibia, and you are referring to the German behavior toward them, correct?

Right. The German Army is sent there to quell an uprising. The German general issues an extermination order. It’s the first modern extermination order. But what he’s basically telling them is that they should go to the Kalahari Desert, and obviously they are very likely to die there, especially because the Germans are busy plugging up all the watering holes there. So the genocide is accomplished by removing them from their territory into a desert. That is what the Ottoman authorities initially do to the Armenians. They just send them to the desert, through arid areas in what are now eastern Turkey, northern Syria, where many people die without being directly killed. That’s the overlap between certain genocides and ethnic cleansing.

Let’s say there’s a terrorist attack on a country and the country starts bombing the territory from where the terrorist attack originated, and where it was planned, and in the process of doing so starts killing a large number of civilians. What would be the things that you would look for to determine if crimes against humanity or, more specifically, genocide was taking place?

The first, most important thing is that the definition of genocide begins with the words the “intent to destroy.” You need to identify intent, so that if this army goes off to bomb that area from which the terrorists came and its intent is to destroy the group that attacked them in a terrorist act, and it says, “This whole group has to be wiped out because they are all bloody terrorists,” that is an intent that can be then added to the actions themselves to produce what might be genocide. Whereas if they go and they say, “O.K., these terrorists came from a particular group, they’re in a particular town, they have particular camps, and we are going to bomb that organization, and in the course of that, we may also kill a lot of civilians, but what we are interested in is killing those particular terrorists,” then it could become war crimes or even crimes against humanity, but it might not be genocide.

You write in your piece, “My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a ‘huge price’ for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers ‘into rubble.’ On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, ‘You must remember what Amalek did to you.’ As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to ‘kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.’ ” Can you talk more about this focus on what leaders say?

There’s a huge amount of that coming out from Netanyahu, who usually is more careful with his words. The President of the state of Israel, too, said it wasn’t just Hamas but all the people of Gaza who are responsible. The Minister of Defense spoke about “human animals”—and it’s not always clear if he means Hamas or Gazans. That’s the kind of language that has been used in several genocides, where you dehumanize a group constantly. The Hutu were doing that about the Tutsi, the Nazis obviously were doing it about the Jews, and so forth. And just recently, Avi Dichter, who is a Likud minister, was saying, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” That’s a reference to the Nakba of 1948—the expulsion of the Palestinians. That’s a clear intent of ethnic cleansing.

When you see this kind of verbiage constantly being put out by people—politicians, generals, and so forth—it makes you worry. First of all, it filters down to the soldiers. It incites people to more and more violence. It dehumanizes the population that they’re fighting, and it’s in a situation where you are attacking an organization that is deeply entrenched within very congested areas with numerous civilians. So all of that obviously makes you worry that this can become something more systematic.

Does the destruction have to be about the group’s identity? Think of a leader who is very angry about a terrorist attack and just wants to get revenge and kill a lot of people, and doesn’t care who happens to be on the ground in the city he’s bombing versus someone who wants to kill people because they are members of the group.

Exactly. That is the distinction. And you can take an example. Let’s say, after the Second World War, we had the Nuremberg Tribunal, right? This was, among other things, victor’s justice. No one was being put on trial for carpet-bombing German and Japanese cities in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. What was the strategy of the Americans and the Brits in bombing cities in Germany, or America in firebombing and then nuclear-bombing Japanese cities? The goal was not to destroy the German people as such, or the Japanese people as such. The goal was to win the war, and they were doing it by all means possible, and they were doing it very brutally, and one might very well have found these actions to be war crimes subsequently. But the goal was not genocide in the sense that they had no interest in destroying the Japanese people and culture, or the German people. And, in fact, right after the war, they started rebuilding those countries. So that’s a distinction. Ethically, you may say, “War is horrible and people shouldn’t do all those things,” but those are the legal distinctions, and, to my mind, they actually matter. It’s important to make that distinction.

Why is it important?

It’s important to say, is this a first-degree murder or second-degree murder? Even when you’re talking about violence, about vile actions, it helps to tell the difference. In this case in particular, the Germans killed a lot of civilians and the Americans killed a lot of civilians. Is there a difference between the two? I think it’s important to make that distinction. It’s even important to make the distinction between the Soviets killing a lot of people and what the Germans did. All kinds of conservatives ignore this distinction these days, where there’s a new historiography saying, “Well, they were just like the Nazis.” The distinction is that if the Germans had ended the war as winners, they would’ve actually enslaved and murdered millions and millions and millions more people. After the Soviets won the war against Germany, very brutally, with a lot of rapes and all that, East Germany was a dictatorship. But they were not killing people en masse anymore, so they were not genocidal. That makes a difference, even on the scale of morality where both things may be horrible.

You said first- and second-degree murder, but maybe one analogy to draw would be hate crimes, which evoke a special revulsion, even if the utilitarian ends of a specific hate crime are the same as a regular crime.

Yes.

How do you think about a case where the intent may not be to destroy a people, but where those people are viewed as less human than you are, and you don’t care how many of them die. How do we think about that in the context of genocide?

Even if your intent is not to destroy the group as such, but functionally that’s what you’re doing, and much of your rhetoric is about treating those people as subhuman, then you are in that kind of gray zone between a well-planned, thought-out genocide, which is on the one extreme, and something that gradually becomes that. But it’s a fine distinction. I don’t think that the policymakers in Israel are actually thinking genocide. They’re using that language and they’re using policies that are pushing in that direction, but they’re not thinking of themselves as carrying out genocide.

Part of what is happening on the ground is if you displace large numbers of people from their homes, if you then cram them into a much smaller territory, you destroy the homes from which they came, if they receive not enough infrastructure, food, water, medical care, and they start dying in large numbers, your goal may have been to win a military campaign and to do it as ruthlessly and quickly as possible knowing that your political clock is running out, but the result begins to look more and more like genocide.

Why did you want to write this piece now? You’ve explained why you think it’s morally important to recognize genocide as distinct from other things, but is there some more practical reason?

Yeah, look, the obvious reason is that when you study genocide, you always look back and say, “There were all these signs that it’s going to happen, and why was nobody doing anything about it, or at least warning that it’s about to happen?” And usually there were people issuing warnings. Instead of waiting until something happens, it’s better to warn.

The violence is on a very different scale from anything that has happened before in Gaza. The mentality is different. The rage is different. And once you start speaking about it, it may actually have an effect, both on those who can stop it on the outside, especially the American Administration, and on some people on the inside, who say, “Wait, I mean, we are getting ourselves into something that we didn’t intend to do.”

You served in the I.D.F., correct?

Yes, I did.

Where were you stationed and when?

Well, I was conscripted in January, 1973, so I served in the war of ’73, which I was lucky enough to spend on the Jordanian front. Happily, the Jordanians did not attack us in that war. And then I was transferred to the so-called Syrian Enclave. This was in the aftermath of the war, when the Israeli forces were deep in Syria. And so I spent several weeks in First World War-type positions, getting shelled every day and losing people around me.

Do you think serving changed your relationship to Israel?

No. No. There were two things that affected me. One was the outbreak of the 1973 war. When I was in high school, in the early seventies, and I was in a kind of progressive high school in Tel Aviv, we were already protesting against the occupation and marching and saying, “Occupation corrupts.” There were peace feelers being put out at the time by Egypt, by Anwar Sadat. Moshe Dayan, the former Defense Minister, famously said, “Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh,” meaning, “Better to keep Sinai. We don’t need the peace. We are strong enough, because look what we did to them in ’67.” And then the war happened. Three thousand Israeli soldiers were killed, ten thousand were wounded. Members of my generation carry that sort of P.T.S.D. to this day. And, in fact, October 7th, I think, woke that in many of them. They were really sort of shaken twice over because of what happened in ’73.

And so, the first thing that I thought about was that war. There were many of us who thought that war could have been avoided. The leadership suffered from what I call the euphoria of power. And that’s exactly what has happened now. War taught me that there are wars that can be avoided. You think you can keep what you have because you’re strong enough to be able to keep it, and eventually it blows up in your face.

The second thing was that I served a little bit as an occupation soldier. I was a platoon leader, walking down the street with a line of soldiers behind me in the sun. People are hiding behind their windows looking at you, and they’re terrified of you. You are a little scared of them, too, because you don’t know if they’re going to throw some grenade at you or whatever. You feel that you have no business being there. You feel like, “Why am I there?” I really distinctly remember that sensation. Several generations of young Israelis have spent most of the military service as policemen, policing an occupied population. What does that do to the occupied and what does that do to the occupier? There’s a mutual dehumanization going on that ends up with such horrors as we saw and we are still seeing. It’s a slow process, but it is that kind of moral corruption that I think I started sensing already as a very young man. ♦

  • Naomi Klein sees uncanny doubles in our politics.

  • Olivia Rodrigo considers the meanings of “Guts.”

  • Isabel Allende’s vision of history.

  • Julia Fox didn’t want to be famous, but she knew she would be.

  • John Waters is ready for his Hollywood closeup.

  • Patrick Stewart boldly goes there.

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Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-define-genocide?fbclid=IwAR0daoGKXJhF6R9LIVdzJq2T8prCmy_2PgdBC2tiDDUgSNm7OA967dgkxzg

Georgian, Armenian defence ministers sign cooperation deal

Lilit Nahapetian
Agenda, Georgia
Nov 17 2023

Georgian and Armenian defence ministers Juansher Burchuladze and Suren Papikyan on Friday signed a deal on cooperation between the ministries of the two countries.

The Georgian Defence Ministry said the signing took place as part of Burchuladze’s visit to Armenia, where the official and his counterpart reviewed the security environment in the Black Sea region.

The Georgian Minister told his colleague Georgia was “ready to promote peace” in the region.

The parties also discussed “current and future” defence cooperation between their states.

Armenia and Azerbaijan Have Agreed on Basic Peace Treaty Principles -TASS Cites Armenian PM

Christine Harutyunian
US News
Nov 18 2023
By Reuters


(Reuters) -Armenia and Azerbaijan have been able to agree on the basic principles for a peace treaty but are still "speaking different diplomatic languages", Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Saturday, according to Russia's TASS news agency.

The two countries have been at odds for decades, most notably over the breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku's forces recaptured in September, prompting a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from it.

But Pashinyan said there had been some progress in talks over a peace treaty even though he was cited as saying that the two countries still often struggled to agree on some things.

"We have good and bad news about the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process," TASS quoted Pashinyan as saying in Yerevan.

"It is good that the basic principles of peace with Azerbaijan have been agreed.

Related: 

A Timeline of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

"This happened through the mediation of the head of the European Council Charles Michel as a result of my meetings with Azerbaijan's president in Brussels," Pashinyan said.

"The most important bad news is that we still speak different diplomatic languages and very often do not understand each other," Pashinyan said.

Pashinyan said Armenia had also proposed swapping all Armenian prisoners for all Azerbaijani prisoners, TASS reported.

(Reporting by Alexander MarrowEditing by Andrew Osborn)

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-11-18/armenia-and-azerbaijan-have-agreed-on-basic-principles-for-peace-treaty-tass-cites-armenian-pm 

US senate votes unanimously to suspend Azerbaijan’s military assistance

Raffi Khondkarian
Nov 17 2023
The Biden administration has balked at authorizing additional military assistance to Baku in the wake of the September Nagorno-Karabakh war, and lawmakers are pushing for a two-year moratorium.

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in the US Senate on Thursday voted unanimously in favor of a bill that would halt US military aid to Azerbaijan for the next two fiscal years.

If passed by the House and signed by the president, the bill, known as the Armenian Protection Act of 2023, would block the State Department’s ability to issue a waiver required under existing law in order for the United States to send military aid to Baku.

The measure, introduced by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), received bipartisan support.

Why it matters: The vote is Congress' clearest move yet to block US military assistance to Baku in the wake of its swift military takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh in September.

Last month, 91 lawmakers from both chambers penned a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for economic sanctions against Azerbaijani government officials for Baku’s “military attacks and brutal blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee Jack Reed (D-RI) and the then-chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez (D-NJ), urged Blinken in their own letter not to extend the administration’s waiver in response to Azerbaijan’s invasion of the until recently predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave on Sept. 19. 

The Biden administration has balked at renewing the waiver, known as a Section 907, for the October 2001-enacted exemption to a 1992 law restricting US government aid to Azerbaijan until it takes “demonstrable steps to cease all blockades and other offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh."

On Thursday, the State Department's top official for European and Eurasian Affairs, Ambassador James O’Brien, told House lawmakers during a hearing that the Biden administration had no plans to issue a new Section 907 waiver.

US administrations have repeatedly issued the waiver since the exemption was introduced in 2002, citing national security concerns. From 2002-2020, Washington provided about $164 million in security assistance to Azerbaijan, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

What happened: Azerbaijan invaded the Nagorno-Karabakh region following a 10-month blockade of the Lachin corridor connecting the Armenian-majority enclave to Armenia.

The modern roots of the conflict date back at least to 1920, but it was largely frozen during the rule of the Soviet Union. Armenia took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor in 1994, though the disputed territory is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

More than 100,000 people fled toward Armenia in the span of a week amid Azerbaijan's assault in September. The move was widely condemned, including by the United States and members of the European Parliament. Armenian officials and Western experts characterized the result of the invasion as ethnic cleansing. 

“The Armenian Protection Act of 2023 is simple: It would hold Azerbaijan accountable for these actions,” Peters said Thursday. “As a result of Azerbaijan’s failure to meet the terms of our agreement, it would prevent the United States from sending military aid for a period of two years.”  

“The [Biden] administration already has the authority to cut off this support, but as this conflict has unfolded, they have not taken public action,” he said.

Know more: Read Amberin Zaman's dispatch from southern Armenia in the immediate aftermath of the exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh in October.


India-Armenia holds 10th Foreign Office Consultations, discusses bilateral relations

Emil Lazarian
Nov 18 2023
ANI
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Secretary (West), Sanjay Verma, co-chaired the 10th India-Armenia Foreign Office Consultations in New Delhi, said MEA in a press statement on Saturday. In the meeting, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia, Mnatsakan Safaryan, led the Armenian delegation and both sides discussed a wide range of issues covering all aspects of bilateral relations, including political, trade and economic consular, cultural, people-to-people ties, with an emphasis on energy, agriculture, connectivity and capacity building, said MEA press release.

Moreover, both sides also exchanged views on regional and global issues of mutual interest, including cooperation in the multilateral fora and the Indian side appreciated Armenia's participation in the Voice of Global South Summit. As per the Ministry, the next India-Armenia would be hosted in Armenia.

Bilateral dialogue between India and Armenia is conducted through the mechanism of Foreign Office Consultations (FOC) and Inter-Governmental Commission on Trade, economic, scientific, technological, cultural and educational Cooperation (IGC). The 7th IGC and 8th FOC were held in Yerevan on 01 April 2016. The 9th round of FOC was held in a virtual format on 18 February 2022. The 8th session of the India-Armenia IGC was held in Yerevan on 04 July 2022, according to the Ministry. (ANI)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/international/2717205-india-armenia-holds-10th-foreign-office-consultations-discusses-bilateral-relations



Turkish Press: Armenia, Azerbaijan found common ground on basic principles of peace settlement, claims Premier Pashinyan

Emil Lazarian
Anadolu Agency, Turkey
Nov 18 2023
Elena Teslova 

MOSCOW

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan claimed on Saturday that his country has managed to reach an agreement with Azerbaijan over the basic principles of a peace settlement.

However, the two countries continue to speak "different diplomatic languages" because of that they do not understand each other, Pashinyan said at the opening of the parliamentary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Armenia's capital of Yerevan.

The Armenian leader also said the two countries' protracted conflict over the Karabakh region is taking its toll.

Pashinyan's remarks came the day after a UN International Criminal Court hearing on Armenia's lawsuit against Azerbaijan.

Armenia accuses Baku of violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination due to the recent escalation of tensions in Karabakh, though UN agencies earlier categorically stated that they had not recorded any cases of Azerbaijan's discriminatory attitude toward Armenians.

Earlier in September, Armenia ratified the Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court, with the goal of suing Azerbaijan over its actions in Karabakh.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

Most of the territory was liberated by Azerbaijan during a war in the fall of 2020, which ended after a Russian-brokered peace agreement and also opened the door to normalization.

This September, the Azerbaijani army initiated an anti-terrorism operation in Karabakh to establish a constitutional order, after which illegal separatist forces in the region surrendered.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/armenia-azerbaijan-found-common-ground-on-basic-principles-of-peace-settlement-claims-premier-pashinyan/3057843

Armenian PM warns of threat of military aggression from Azerbaijan

Alex Nanijanian
The Kyiv Independent
Nov 18 2023

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Azerbaijan may be preparing for military aggression against his country as the term "Western Azerbaijan," has become increasingly popular in public discourse in Azerbaijan.

During a Nov. 18 speech at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Yerevan, Pashinyan claimed Azerbaijan media, schools, and universities had started calling Armenia this way, warning the rhetoric could signal Baku's desire to start an offensive military operation.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned a select group of lawmakers that Azerbaijan might be planning to invade Armenia in the coming weeks, Politico reported on Oct. 13.

Officials familiar with the discussion told Politico that Blinken spoke about the possibility of an invasion in a conference call on Oct. 3.

The call addressed officials' questions about the U.S. response to Azerbaijan's September offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh.

During the call, Blinken reportedly told lawmakers that the State Department will not renew an established agreement that permits the U.S. to offer Azerbaijan military aid. The agreement has been renewed every year since 2002 but lapsed in June.

In the same conversation, Blinken warned that Azerbaijan may invade southern Armenia.

Of particular concern is the southern region of Syunik, which Azerbaijan calls the Zangezur Corridor and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly referred to as "Western Azerbaijan."

In mid-September, the Azerbaijani military launched a lightning offensive against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, an unrecognized Armenian state within the territory of Azerbaijan. Local authorities eventually surrendered in a ceasefire mediated by Russia.

A formal decree was later signed, dissolving all official institutions of the breakaway state from Jan. 1, 2024. Following Azerbaijan's victory, around 100,000 people have left Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia.

France, the Caucasus, and Nagorno-Karabakh – Richard Giragosian

Jane Topchian
rfi
France – Nov 18 2023
By David Coffey – RFI
In this edition of Paris Perspective, we look at the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the ethnic cleansing of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and France's influence in the Caucasus.

At the beginning of November, Germany insisted that European mediation was the best option for Armenia and Azerbaijan to reach a lasting peace agreement.

The Caucasus neighbours have been locked in a decades-long conflict for control of Azerbaijan's Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku reclaimed in a lightning offensive in September.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev have held several rounds of peace talks under EU mediation and both leaders have said a peace treaty could be signed in the coming months.

However, last month, Aliyev refused to attend a round of peace talks with Pashinyan in the Spanish city of Granada, over what he said was France's "biased position".

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had been scheduled to join European Council President Charles Michel as mediators at those talks.

So far, there has been no visible progress in EU efforts to organise a fresh round of negotiations.

From a brutal war in 1988 to the 2020 conflict in which over 6,000 people were killed in 6 weeks of fighting what lies behind the animosity between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave?

For Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center think-tank based in the Armenian capital Yerevan, the hostile reationship between Yerevan and Baku is very much a construct of Soviet-era political machinations.

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"Nagorno-Karabakh has historically been an Armenian populated region that has been very much used as a pawn by Moscow. It was used by the Soviet Union to actually divide and rule in terms of keeping-up a contentious potential conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan," he explains.

After seven decades of Soviet rule, there was an eruption of violence even before the implosion of the USSR.

"The outbreak of violence was largely due to the onset of Gorbachev's reforms – Glasnost, Perestroika, the new degree of openness and examining taboos.

"What we saw was the eruption of nationalism that occurred between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," says Giragosian.

The conflict was also unique at the time, as it was the first to erupt within the borders of the Soviet Union.

"During the Gorbachev period," he explains, "it was especially significant because the conflict tended to distort the development of independent Armenia and Azerbaijan, in terms of conflict economics and the fact that [they] were already locked in war upon gaining independence."

Fast-forward to November 2020, and the two countries agreed to end a spike in hostilities that killed thousands over a six week period, signing a Russian-brokered peace agreement where Armenia – the loser – agreed to give up control of over 20 percent of territory captured by Azerbaijan.

Two thousand Russian peacekeepers were then deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh, but the most recent Azeri offensive against Armenian separatists in the enclave revealed the failure of Russia's mission to the region. 

"The war of 2020 was especially significant for several reasons," Giragosian explains. "First, it marked the emergence of a genuine military capacity by Azerbaijan to not only defend itself but to retake lost territory. It was also significant because it marked an end to years of Armenian arrogance and complacency."

Giragosian blames both sides for too many missed opportunities for compromise.

"Armenia, in many ways, was overly self-confident. But the most important casualty from 2020 was not the loss of territory, nor the loss of life, it was the demise of deterrence," he states.

"This ushered in a new period of insecurity on the ground, but for the Russian position, the Russians drafted and imposed their own ceasefire on both countries, and then failed to be able to uphold the terms. This is why Azerbaijan imposed a nine month blockade [on the enclave] and effectively seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh."

But for the think-tank director, it's the humiliation and weakness of the Russian peacekeepers that's most interesting – "Azerbaijan has become very good at challenging and defying the Kremlin," he tells Paris Perspective. 

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Recent images coming out of Nagorno-Karabakh drew many comparisons with the 1915 Armenian genocide, bringing to the fore the question of national identity as residents of the enclave are defacto Azerbaijani citizens.

Baku maintains that the people of “Artsakh” or the Armenian population of Karabakh have the same rights as Azeris, but what is the reality on the ground?

"First of all, even prior to the most recent escalation, there was little faith and no confidence in Azerbaijani promises, largely because of the historical record.

"During the Gorbachev period through to the 90s, there were a number of anti-Armenian massacres and egregious human rights violations. The situation has only gotten worse in recent years," Giragosian underlines. 

What was remarkable about the September 2023 conflict was the speed and success of the Azerbaijani military offensive and how easy it was for them to drive out the Armenian population. 

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So, was Azerbaijan's military objective to purge the enclave of all Armenians? 

"Yes," says Giragosian, "but what was interesting is their real objective was to have a protracted period [of conflict] for domestic political dividends within Azerbaijan."

Baku essentially expected a longer, protracted campaign "to maintain power that has a lack of legitimacy".

One could almost say that, politically, they were the victim of their own success, but "with dangerously high expectations," Giragosian adds. 

But what he finds interesting about the exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh – where the Armenian population was forced to leave with little more than they could pack into their cars – is that the refugees aren't looking to rebuild their lives in their ethnic homeland.

"Coming to Armenia, the core population of the last remnants of 100,000 Armenians are not necessarily keen to stay in Armenia. Many are now looking to go to Russia or European countries, because many of the Armenians from Karabakh have never lived in Armenia," Giragosian points out.

"I moved to Armenia over 15 years ago, and I'm as alien or foreign to the local Armenian experience as they are. And that's something we failed to understand," he underlines.

There is a massive Armenian diaspora in France, and Paris recently marked the 20th anniversary of its recognition of the genocide committed by the “Young Turk” administration in 1915. But in light of the recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, has France done enough to support Armenia and counter its isolation in the region?

Giragosian believes Paris has stepped up to the mark. 

"To be fair, French engagement has actually exceeded expectations. But at the same time, it's the EU's engagement that's both more significant and more effective than simple French actions."

He outlines that while President Macron's commitment to Armenia is important, a wider European context is necessary for sustaining the resilience of Armenia.

"The French will be announcing a package of military assistance to Armenia in the coming weeks, designed to provide a defensive capacity for Armenia. But it's the EU's engagement [that is important] because they're not trying to mediate the conflict, they are simply trying to facilitate a negotiated peace treaty.

"My worry is the day after and what is in store to ensure a lasting durable peace. That remains an open question and one in which France – within the EU – can actually work toward," Giragosian says.

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So when the peace talks really do get in motion, what will work in Armenia's favour and what kind of end game will create a lasting peace?

"Let me be provocative," Giragosian quips. "I think the real challenge now is less the peace treaty, and more Russia, for Armenia.

"If we look at the peace treaty – the specific elements – Nagorno-Karabakh is no longer an issue," he says.

Border demarcation, the restoration of trade and transport, the opening of road and railway links are all significant aspects of a bilateral peace agreement – which are positive in terms of moving beyond conflict – but the real challenge is Russia.

"In terms of Armenia now seeking greater room to manoeuvre, we're not seeking to replace Russia [as an ally], but we're seeking to offset Russia. For Armenia, Russia has emerged as a more serious challenge as an unreliable, so-called partner," Giragosian concludes.

Watch the full video here.

Written, produced and presented by David Coffey.

Recorded by Cécile Pompeani and Nicolas Doreau 

Edited by Erwan Rome

FULL INTERVIEW: Paris Perspective #41: France, the Caucasus and ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh – Richard Giragosian

Listen to the interview at 

https://www.rfi.fr/en/podcasts/paris-perspective/20231118-paris-perspective-41-france-the-caucasus-and-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-nogorno-karabakh-%E2%80%93-richard-giragosiank

Baku accused EU of interfering into Karabakh Armenian revival

Mary Lazarian
MEHR News Agency, Iran
Nov 18 2023

TEHRAN, Nov. 18 (MNA) – The Azerbaijani foreign ministry has slammed the European Union for interfering in the process of the reintegration of Armenians in Karabakh into Azerbaijani society.

"We consider an EU official’s remarks on the initiative of establishing an international mechanism for ensuring the rights and security of Armenian residents of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region as interference into the process of reintegration in Azerbaijan," the ministry’s spokesperson Ayhan Gadjizade said in a commentary, TASS reported.

European External Action Service (EEAS) Spokesman Peter Stano said in an interview with the Armenpress news agency earlier on Friday that the European Union demands that Azerbaijan guarantee the safe return of Armenians to Karabakh. He also said that the EU demands international access and international presence in Karabakh as part of these guarantees.

The Azerbaijani foreign ministry spokesperson stressed that Karabakh is an integral part of Azerbaijan and will ensure the rights and security of the Armenian population of this region in conformity with its constitution.

Once again, we reiterate Azerbaijan’s firm commitment to the normalization of relations with Armenia and the peaceful agenda, he said.

SD/PR