Armenia keeps linking peace deal with border delimitation

PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenia continues to believe that its peace treaty with Azerbaijan should spell out a mechanism for delimiting the border between the two countries, a senior Armenian lawmaker said on Thursday, January 11, reacting to Baku’s efforts to delink the two issues.

“If this principle is not adopted and implemented, it will be unclear how the delimitation process will take place,” Sargis Khandanian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, told reporters, RFE/RL’s Armenian service reports.

Khandanian also made clear that Yerevan insists on using the most recent Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for ascertaining the long and heavily militarized Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

The leaders of the European Union and its key member states, France and Germany, backed this stance in a joint statement with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian issued after their meeting in Spain last October.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev reiterated Baku’s rejection of the proposed mechanism for border delimitation on Wednesday. He said that it favors the Armenian side.

“They [the Armenians] want to put aside maps of the 1960s, 1950s and 1940s and refer to the 1970s because our historical lands had been given to them by that time,” Aliyev said in a televised interview. “Therefore, we strongly opposed and oppose that.”

Echoing statements by other Azerbaijani officials, Aliyev said that the border should be delimited after the signing of the peace treaty. He did not cite any concrete delimitation mechanism acceptable to Baku.

Armenian analysts and opposition figures believe that Aliyev wants to leave the door open to Azerbaijani territorial claims to Armenia. They say this shows that Pashinian’s “peace agenda” regularly touted by him and his political allies cannot guarantee the country’s territorial integrity even after the September 2023 fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Azerbaijani leader on Wednesday 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.

Aliyev said that the return of those enclaves will top the agenda of an upcoming joint session of Armenian and Azerbaijani government commissions on border demarcation and delimitation. The office of Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian, the chairman of the Armenian commission, declined to comment on Aliyev’s claim. Meanwhile, some opposition lawmakers in Yerevan demanded explanations from the government.