The signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty is conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution, a senior aide to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said in a newspaper interview published on Tuesday.
“We are very close with Armenia to finalizing a peace agreement, but we need to ensure this peace is sustainable,” Elchin Amirbayov told the Korea Times daily. “The remaining obstacle is Armenia’s constitutional territorial claim on a part of Azerbaijan. Once that is resolved, we can move forward.”
Aliyev has repeatedly set this precondition in recent months and especially after forcing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to cede four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan in April. Baku specifically wants Yerevan to remove from the Armenian constitution a reference to a 1990 declaration of independence which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast.
The only legal way to remove that reference is to enact a new constitution through a referendum. Pashinian announced plans to do that earlier this year, leading his domestic detractors to claim that he is bowing to yet another Azerbaijani demand.
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Pashinian appeared to alter his rhetoric last Friday in a statement congratulating Armenians on the 34th anniversary of the 1990 declaration’s adoption. He said that “contrary to various interpretations” the constitutional reference in question “does not mean that the entire content of the Declaration of Independence is included in the Armenian constitution and that the content of these two documents is identical.”
The Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiation process was reportedly on the agenda of Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov’s latest talks with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan held in Ankara on Tuesday. No details of the talks were immediately made public.
Bayramov flew to the Turkish capital one week after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Baku during which he offered to help broker the peace treaty between the two South Caucasus states. Putin reiterated the offer in a subsequent phone call with Pashinian. The latter’s response is still not known.
Unlike Yerevan, Baku has welcomed this and previous Russian peace initiatives. Still, Amirbayov told the Korea Times that it does not want any third country to play a “direct role” in the peace process.