Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan continued to defend on Wednesday his controversial decision to hand over contested border areas to Azerbaijan, saying that he is stripping Baku of a reason to invade Armenia.
“As long as the border is not delimited there may be some reason for conflict,” Pashinyan told Armenian Public Television. “This is why we start [the delimitation process] from places with the greatest potential for conflict, in order to keep the situation as manageable as possible.”
“Many say that we are surrendering four villages to Azerbaijan,” he said. “I will say that we are taking the four villages from Azerbaijan as an argument for internationally legitimizing its aggressive policy towards Armenia.”
Read also
Pashinyan’s political opponents maintain that the unilateral concessions will on the contrary encourage Azerbaijan to demand more territory from Armenia and take or threaten military action for that purpose.
The border areas in question are adjacent to several villages in Armenia’s northern Tavush province. Many of their residents are strongly opposed to their handover, saying that it would leave their communities dangerously exposed to Azerbaijani attacks.
Hundreds of them have been holding a nonstop protest outside one of those villages, Kirants, in a bid to scuttle the process. They have been joined by Yerevan-based opposition activists and people from other parts of the country.
The areas which Pashinyan’s government agreed to give up used to be occupied by small Azerbaijani villages captured by Armenian forces in 1991-1992. For its part, Azerbaijan seized at the time large swathes of agricultural land belonging to several Tavush villages. None of that land will be given back to Armenia under the terms of a border deal reached by Yerevan and Baku on April 19.
Pashinyan was careful not to express confidence that Azerbaijan will agree to withdraw from there as a result of the border delimitation process. He stressed only that the process will be based on a 1991 declaration in which newly independent Soviet republics recognized their Soviet-era borders.