The Armenian National Assembly held an extraordinary closed-door session, requested by opposition parties, to debate border demarcation procedures in the disputed territories. Baku now insists on the “restitution” of eight towns in the Tavowš region, while Yerevan claims that Azerbaijan has “fully or partially” occupied 31 of its towns.
Yerevan () – The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been behind us for months, although there is still a lot of tension in Armenia over the management of the numerous refugees from Artsakh, but relations with Azerbaijan have failed to achieve true stability, with constant border skirmishes, mutual accusations of “provocations” and claims of towns, cities and lands. The president of the Yerevan Parliament, Alen Simonyan, reiterated once again in recent days that “there is no talk of ceding more Armenian territories to Azerbaijan”, in response to Baku's claims to hand over some population centers.
The Armenian National Assembly then held an extraordinary session behind closed doors, requested by the opposition parties Armenia and I Have Honor, which represent a third of the deputies, to debate the demarcation of borders and demarcation procedures between the two eternally feuding countries. . Negotiations in this regard have never begun, which has made it impossible to conclude any peace agreement until now. Deputy Prime Minister Mger Grigoryan stated that “until the problems of security, social coexistence and the principles of law are resolved, no decision can be made to start delimitation talks.”
The opposition demanded a debate open to the public, but the majority party of the Civil Agreement imposed secrecy for reasons of “national security”, forcing deputies to hand over their mobile phones and excluding from the chamber all those who did not have access to information secret The thorniest issue concerns the willingness expressed by the Yerevan government to give up during the negotiations a part of the Tavowš region, in the northeast of the country, whose capital is the city of Idževan, which the opposition considers “a violation of international norms and the Constitution itself”. According to Baku, there are eight towns in the area under Armenian control that should actually be assigned to the Azerbaijani administration.
As noted by Azerbaijani Deputy Prime Minister Šakhin Mustafaev, four of these villages (Baganis-Ajrim, Ašagy-Askipara, Khejrimly and Gyzylgadžily) “belong to Azerbaijan and must be liberated immediately”, while for the other four (Jukhary-Askipara – in Armenian Verin-Voskepar, Sofulu, Barkhdarly, Kjarki – in Armenian Tigranašen) an agreed evaluation is required, while their “release” is considered necessary. On the Armenian side, it is claimed that Azerbaijan has “fully or partially” occupied 31 Armenian villages, and Simonyan stated that “we are ready to return the Azerbaijani enclaves, only if Baku returns our Artsvašen (in Azerbaijani Baškend), which itself occupies much more territory than all the Azerbaijani peoples in our territory”.
In fact, at the beginning of March a demarcation commission was established, headed by the two deputy prime ministers Grigoryan and Mustafaev, which held seven preventive meetings, in which the legal regulations necessary to start the negotiation process were drawn up. On March 18, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pašinyan visited the Tavowš region and met with residents of the villages of Voskepar, Baganis and Kirants, informing them that “the demarcation is moving into the operational phase, and we must do everything possible so that war does not break out again. The residents of the area had asked the prime minister not to return the border towns to Azerbaijan, threatening to block the roads and organize an autonomous defense of the entire region.
In the continuous game of sides, Armenians and Azerbaijanis each time propose different names of settlements, already confusing in their linguistic variants, and border zones calculated differently in terms of extension, so that the border would in any case be a crazy labyrinth between mountains and valleys. Often, these places and their names evoke ancient conflicts or other historical memories of the two peoples, on the border between Christianity and Islam and between Europe and Asia, where peace has always been only a hope for the future.
