Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s latest warning against the creation of a land corridor through Armenia to Azerbaijan’s Azerbaijani exclave was addressed to not only Baku but also Yerevan, Armenian analysts said on Wednesday.
In a statement, Khamenei’s official website cited him as telling Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Tehran on Tuesday that Iran “views the Zangezur corridor as detrimental to Armenia.”
“Imam Khamenei emphasized that foreign powers should not impose restrictions on the relationships between countries and their neighbors,” added the statement.
The so-called “Zangezur corridor” would connect Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan as well as Turkey through Syunik, the sole Armenian region bordering Iran. Iranian leaders have repeatedly warned against attempts to strip the Islamic Republic of the common border and transport links with Armenia.
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Yerevan has rejected, at least until now, Baku’s demands for people and goods moving between Nakhichevan to the rest of Azerbaijan to be exempt from Armenian border controls. Still, Pashinyan declared in September 2022 that he is open to outsourcing customs and border administration there to a foreign company.
Some Armenian pundits claimed earlier this year that Baku and Yerevan are discussing such an arrangement in their ongoing peace talks. Armenian officials have not confirmed or denied that,
“There are some preliminary agreements between Armenia and Azerbaijan that some private international organization should control the so-called corridor,” Sergei Melkonian, an analyst with the APRI Armenia think-tank, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “It would not be called a corridor but they understand very well in Iran that it will be a corridor.”
“At first, some international private company will control it. Then there will be some sort of joint control. Then little by little Azerbaijan will carry out a resettlement [of ethnic Azerbaijanis] there, and Iran will lose its border [with Armenia,]” Melkonian said, commenting on Khamenei’s statement.
Dzyunik Aghajanian, a retired Armenian diplomat critical of Pashinyan’s administration, likewise claimed that outsourcing border control in Syunik would be the first step towards eventual Azerbaijani-Turkish control of the transport links to Nakhichevan and the effective elimination of the Armenian-Iranian border.
“That means [from Tehran’s perspective] being encircled by enemy powers, something which Iran obviously cannot accept,” said Aghajanian.
The Armenian government’s press office did not cite Khamenei’s warning or the corridor issue as a whole in its short readout of Pashinyan’s meeting with Iran’s top leader. It said the two men expressed confidence that their countries will continue to further deepen their “warm and friendly relations.”
The Azerbaijani demands for the extraterritorial corridor are strongly backed by Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 13 described the opening of the corridor as “the final step” towards an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.