“Zhoghovurd” reports that President Serzh Sarkisian responded angrily on Tuesday to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev’s claim that Yerevan is abandoning “preconditions” for resuming substantive peace negotiations on resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. “The reaction from Sarkisian’s spokesman was emotional,” writes the paper. “Calling Aliyev’s statement a provocation and an attempt to sully the atmosphere, the spokesman [Vladimir Hakobian] accused him of deceiving the international community and his own people. In other words, Armenia denied giving up on the [2016] agreements on [OSCE] monitoring and investigations along the Line of Contact.”
As “Zhamanak” points out, Armenian officials have repeatedly said that the Karabakh peace process cannot move forward without the implementation of the agreed safeguards against ceasefire violations. “The parties’ current stated readiness to negotiate raises the question of which of them will give in. On the other hand, it is natural that each side claims, for propaganda considerations, that the other will be making concessions.”
“Haykakan Zhamanak” quotes Prime Minister Karen Karapetian as saying in Tehran on Tuesday that the Armenian and Iranian government have agreed to “restart” bilateral relations and not to revisit issues of mutual interests that have not produced concrete results. The paper says this statement is “noteworthy” because Karapetian himself seriously restricted Iran’s access to Armenia’s Russian-dominated natural gas market when he managed the national gas distribution network in the 2000s.
“Aravot” says that most major Armenian political forces are now far more passive than they were as recently as one year ago. “People who were expressing confidence that they will win a majority in the parliament now have no desire to appear before TV cameras,” writes the paper. “They do not event want to claim that in fact they won the [April 2017] elections and got no seats in the parliament only because the election results were falsified.”
(Tigran Avetisian)
Facebook Forum