Among key principles that Azerbaijan wants to underlie the future peace accord with Armenia is mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual reaffirmation of the absence of territorial claims against each other and a legally binding obligation not to make such claims in the future.
The five-point proposal made by Azerbaijan also includes the principle of abstaining from threatening each other’s security, the need for the demarcation of the border and unblocking of transport links.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement today that responding to Azerbaijan’s proposals, official Yerevan has turned to the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship “to organize negotiations for the signing of a peace agreement between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan on the basis of the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Helsinki Final Act.”
Critics of the Armenian government as well as pundits fear that by negotiating around these principles and later signing a peace accord with Azerbaijan based on these principles Armenia will compromise on aspirations of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh for full independence or some other status outside Azerbaijan.
“Armenia has never had any claims regarding Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. It is about the people of Nagorno-Karabakh living safely in their native land, and this has been the whole context since the 1990s,” Eduard Aghajanian, head of the parliamentary foreign relations committee, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
According to the pro-government lawmaker, this is exactly what Armenia’s position at the negotiating table has been in the past 30 years.
As to whether it is possible to achieve the security for Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians within Azerbaijan, Aghajanian said: “I think that this should be discussed and the ultimate status should be decided as part of the process of finalizing the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement.”