Armenia has received no “concrete” proposal yet from Azerbaijan to hold direct negotiations at the border between the two countries, a senior Armenian lawmaker insisted on Monday.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said on December 28 that Baku has proposed such a meeting between him and his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan. The Armenian government has still not publicly responded to Bayramov’s statement.
“I think that no such proposal with a concrete venue and date [of the meeting] has been made to Armenia yet,” Sargis Khandanyan, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “When there is such a proposal Armenia will decide whether to accept or reject it. We can’t regard public statements as concrete proposals.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been scheduled to host Bayramov and Mirzoyan in Washington on November 20 for further negotiations on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Baku cancelled the meeting in protest against what it called pro-Armenian statements made by a senior U.S. State Department official.
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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 Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict before it can mediate more peace talks.
Louis Bono, a U.S. special envoy for the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace talks, was in Yerevan on Monday, meeting with Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council. Grigorian’s office gave few details of their talks.
Hajiyev declared last week that 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 told a German newspaper.
Khandanyan signaled that the Armenian side continues to prefer Western-mediated talks to direct contacts sought by Baku.
“We will be happy if any party, any mediator, who already has experience in organizing negotiations, initiates them,” he said.
Khandanyan added that the success of the peace process depends on Aliyev agreeing to formalize the key parameters of the peace treaty on which he and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan orally agreed during their 2022 and 2023 meetings in Brussels. Those include mutual explicit recognition of each other’s borders.
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.
Yerevan has said, at least until now, that the two sides should use Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for delimiting the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Its position has been backed by the European Union but rejected by the Azerbaijani side.