In a written message to the participants of two international conferences held in Baku on Wednesday, Aliyev said Armenia must apologize for its “war crimes,” provide the “maps of mass graves” of Azerbaijanis killed during the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh and punish those responsible for their deaths.
“This is one of the effective ways to build peace and trust … If Armenia really wants to achieve peace with Azerbaijan, it must strongly condemn the atrocities committed against captured Azerbaijanis,” he said without elaborating on the allegation.
Aliyev also claimed that Yerevan is refusing to give Baku any information about as many as 4,000 Azerbaijanis who he said went missing in Karabakh during the 1991-1994 war. The Azerbaijani government had given different numbers of missing persons at different times, raising questions about their credibility.
Shortly after the 2020 Karabakh war, the Armenian side handed over to Baku the bodies of 51 soldiers killed during the six-week hostilities as well as the remains of 140 other Azerbaijanis who had died in the early 1990s.
Gagik Melkonian, a senior Armenian parliamentarian representing the ruling Civil Contract party, pointed to this fact on Thursday when he commented on Aliyev’s latest demands. He dismissed them as an excuse to “constantly drag out the signing of the peace agreement.”
“They will come up with something else tomorrow,” Melkonian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Speaking at a security forum in Poland on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan similarly complained that the Azerbaijanis continue to “come up with new preconditions” for the peace accord. He claimed that they “just don’t want to sign the document” and may be planning to attack Armenia. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry rejected Mirzoyan’s remarks as “disinformation.”
The document cited by Mirzoyan would contain at least 13 of the 16 articles of a draft peace treaty which Yerevan says have been fully agreed by the two sides. Baku has repeatedly rejected an Armenian proposal to remove the remaining sticking points from the text and try to settle them in the future. It has also made clear that Armenia must change its constitution before it can make peace with Azerbaijan.
In July, Aliyev again described much of modern-day Armenia as “western Azerbaijan” and said Yerevan must ensure the safe return of ethnic Azerbaijanis who had fled it in the late 1980s. He made a similar statement earlier this week.
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Aliyev has no intention to sign any agreement before clinching more far-reaching concessions from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. They say that Pashinian’s appeasement policy is only encouraging the Azerbaijani strongman to make more demands on Yerevan.