The declaration was signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and other newly independent ex-Soviet in Kazakhstan’s former capital which was then called Alma-Ata. It committed them to recognizing each other’s Soviet-era borders.
The Armenian government wants that it to be at the heart of a resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. The document is mentioned in a border delimitation agreement signed by the two sides in August. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has said this means that Baku agreed to recognize Armenia’s borders.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry offered, however, a very different interpretation of the Alma-Ata Declaration at the weekend when it accused the Armenian side of not abandoning territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
“The Alma-Ata Declaration has nothing to do with the question of where the borders of CIS member states lie and which territories belong to which country,” the ministry said through its spokesman, Aykhan Hajizade.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry expressed serious concern at that statement on Monday. The ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, said it “may mean that Azerbaijan itself has territorial claims to Armenia and just wants to create a smokescreen to cover them up with accusations directed at Armenia.”
Edmon Marukian, an Armenian politician who worked as ambassador-at-large until March, on Tuesday portrayed Hajizade’s statement as further proof of what he sees as a complete failure of Pashinian’s negotiating strategy.
“When you unilaterally cede your levers to the opposite side and get nothing in return, you go bankrupt,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman’s statement testifies to that.”
Marukian criticized Pashinian’s government for agreeing not to attach to the border deal any maps that will serve as a basis of the delimitation process. This means, he said, that “there is no certainty about what Azerbaijan means when it claims to recognize Armenia’s territorial integrity.”
“That uncertainty will lead to escalations and new unilateral concessions [by Armenia,]” added Marukian, who resigned as ambassador-at-large just weeks before Pashinian controversially ceded four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan.
The absence of agreed maps is one of the reasons why the two opposition alliances represented in the Armenian parliament criticize the deal, saying that it cannot be a safeguard against Azerbaijani aggression.
Yerevan insisted until this year that Armenia and Azerbaijan should use Soviet military maps drawn in the 1970s to delimit and demarcate their long border. Baku opposed that. It now rejects Pashinian’s persistent offers to sign a partial peace accord that would leave several key issues unresolves.
Pashinian’s domestic critics say he is desperate to secure such a deal in hopes of misleading Armenians and increasing his chances of holding on to power. They also claim that Azerbaijan has no intention to make peace with Armenia before clinching more far-reaching concessions from Pashinian.