Hikmet Hajiyev, a senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, said at the weekend that the invitation was sent to the Armenian Foreign Ministry. He called it an “illustration of Azerbaijan’s goodwill.”
As of Tuesday evening, the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan did not say whether Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan will accept the invitation.
Andranik Kocharian, a senior Armenian pro-government lawmaker, said the acceptance is contingent on Azerbaijan demonstrating its commitment to peace with Armenia.
“They should change their rhetoric and seek peace the way we do,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Kocharian did not explicitly say whether that means Baku should drop its preconditions for the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty or free the Armenian prisoners, including eight former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, remaining in Azerbaijan. He said only that their continuing captivity is an “obstacle to achieving peace.”
Armenia dropped its objections to Azerbaijan’s bid to host the United Nations summit last December as part of a deal that led to the release of 32 Armenian soldiers and civilians held in Azerbaijani captivity.
Another aide to Aliyev suggested in May that the two South Caucasus nations sign the peace treaty during the global forum. However, Aliyev has repeatedly made that conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution which he says contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. He also declared on Saturday that Yerevan must ensure the safe return of ethnic Azerbaijanis who had fled Soviet Armenia in the late 1980s.
Armenian opposition leaders say that Pashinian has already made far-reaching concessions to Azerbaijan as well as Turkey for the sake of clinging to power. They have strongly condemned his decision earlier this year to hand over several border areas to Azerbaijan without securing any Azerbaijani territorial concessions in return.
Pashinian has said that the land transfer is necessary for preventing Azerbaijani aggression against Armenia. His detractors maintain, however, his appeasement policy could only have the opposite effects. The Armenian Foreign Ministry itself claimed on June 19 that Azerbaijan may be planning to unleash a “new aggression” against Armenia after hosting COP29.