Top official: Armenia suffers more due to lack of peace agreement with Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan seeks a peace agreement with Armenia based on the principles of international law, including delimitation of the border, mutual recognition of each other's territorial integrity, and renunciation of territorial claims.

Elchin Amirbayov, the assistant to the first vice-president of Azerbaijan, made the statement in an interview with EU Reporter, Report informs.

He said Armenia was suffering due to the lack of a peace agreement, as its borders with Azerbaijan and Türkiye were closed and trade routes that existed in Soviet times had been destroyed.

For Azerbaijan, it was also about the possible engagement of the European Union in its government’s efforts to bring life back to the territories liberated in the Second Karabakh War, fought with Armenia in 2020. Elchin Amirbayov described how 10,000 square kilometers of territory were completely devastated by war.

“You don’t see any single building that was untouched. All the cultural buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed completely. So that’s why we are looking for partners who can help us, at least to face the most important humanitarian challenge -that is de-mining. As a result of this conflict, Azerbaijan became one of the most contaminated territories in the world, with land mines and unexploded ordnance still there and still costing human lives.

What’s important is that because these lands are still not cleaned up, the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons and refugees cannot go back to their homes, even though these territories are no longer under foreign occupation. We cannot let them go back unless we are sure that this territory is safe,” he added.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has now told his parliament that his country recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and has called for a peace treaty to be signed. However, as recently as last September he denied that he would recognize Azerbaijan’s borders.

“We’re not sure about whether Pashinyan is serious or not because there is a discrepancy between his declarations on the one side and concrete actions he and his people are doing on the other,” Elchin Amirbayov said, adding that it made it very hard to engage fully with him.

A further incentive for signing a peace treaty was the possibility of reconstructing 42 kilometers of the railway across Armenia, linking Azerbaijan with its exclave of Nakhchivan and creating a new route to Türkiye, in addition to the existing line through Georgia. “This could also be an important confidence-building measure between the two nations… another reason to stick to the peace agreement that we hope will be soon signed”, Elchin Amirbayov noted.

Turning to Azerbaijan’s neighbors beyond the Southern Caucasus, Elchin Amirbayov said that in the last year or so Azerbaijan has upgraded relations with all five nations of Central Asia.

EU-Azerbaijan relations grew last year when Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Baku to sign an agreement to double Azerbaijan’s gas exports to Europe. It was an agreement reached in the context of the EU’s wish to end its dependence on Russian gas but Elchin Amirbayov emphasized that his country had more than oil and gas to offer as a reliable partner of the European Union.

“Besides the traditional role of energy exporter that Azerbaijan is known for, we are trying to play an important role in terms of connectivity, especially against the background of what’s going on with the war between Russia and Ukraine. The geoeconomic and geopolitical importance of what we call the Middle Corridor has increased”, he said.

There was also much more to be done within the energy sector. New investment in capacity was required to meet the commitment to pump the enhanced volumes of natural gas to Europe by 2027. Elchin Amirbayov was confident that commitment would be met but it was important to look beyond oil and gas as well.