Elchin Amirbayov, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s envoy for special assignments, complained about the Karabakh-related section of the website when he spoke to RFE/RL. Amirbayov listed its description of Karabakh as “an integral part of historical Armenia” among documents and statements which he said testify to continuing Armenian territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
“The Armenian side acknowledges that this is the fact, but nothing is being done,” he was quoted as saying in an RFE/RL article published last Thursday.
The website section was no longer accessible on Monday. The Armenian Foreign Ministry declined to clarify whether access to it was blocked under Azerbaijani pressure. The ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, said only that the section was “not removed from the website” and that its content “will be displayed in due course.”
The Armenian government stopped championing the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination a year before Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian declared last May that Yerevan recognizes Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh. Pashinian’s political opponents believe that this paved the way for last September’s Azerbaijani military offensive that restored Baku’s control over the territory and forced its ethnic Armenian population to flee to Armenia.
They accused Pashinian of planning further far-reaching concessions to Baku after he declared last month that Armenia needs a new constitution reflecting the “new geopolitical environment” in the region. Analysts believe that Pashinian first and foremost wants to get rid of a preamble to the current Armenia constitution enacted in 1995.
The preamble makes 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. Aliyev said on February 1 that Armenia should remove that reference if it wants to make peace with his country. Pashinian denied afterwards that he is planning to enact the new constitution at the behest of Azerbaijan.
Aliyev regularly describes Yerevan and other parts of Armenia as “historical Azerbaijani lands.” He made clear last month that Baku continues to oppose using the most recent Soviet maps to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and renewed his demands for an extraterritorial corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave passing through a strategic Armenian region. Armenian and European Union officials said his comments amount to territorial claims to Armenia.
