Baku Responds to Armenia’s Proposals for Peace Treaty – FM Ararat Mirzoyan

YEREVAN — Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan spoke today about the course of negotiations with Azerbaijan on a draft peace treaty.

“As you know, we submitted to Azerbaijan our proposals on the normalization of relations and received their answers only yesterday. So discussions are continuing. We hope to reach an agreement on this issue as soon as possible. The mediation efforts of our international partners can also play an important role in this process,” Mirzoyan told Armenpress.

Mirzoyan declined to disclose the proposals which he presented to his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov in Washington on November 7. Nor did he say whether they were accepted by the Azerbaijani side.

Earlier this year, Baku put forward five key elements of the peace treaty acceptable to it. They include mutual recognition of each other’s territorial integrity.

In response to these proposals Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said earlier they were acceptable. However, according to him, the Azerbaijani proposals did not fully reflect the entire agenda of the existing problems.

He said for the Armenian side it was fundamentally important that the rights and freedoms of the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) were clearly guaranteed, and the status of Nagorno-Karabakh was finally clarified.

“For us, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not a territorial issue, but a question of rights. As we have already reported, the Armenian side responded to the Azerbaijani proposal emphasizing this position,” Mirzoyan said.

The Armenian side’s proposals touch upon such issues as territorial claims, guarantees to Artsakh Armenians, trilateral statements between Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, negotiations on the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace agreement.

The approach of the Armenian side is that these two packages be combined and negotiations started around a peace treaty to find a long-term solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The Azerbaijani reply reported by Mirzoyan came two days after Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev cancelled a meeting with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan which was due to take place in Brussels on December 7. He complained that Pashinyan wants French President Emmanuel Macron to also participate in it along with European Union chief Charles Michel.