President Aliyev Highlights Main Obstacles to Peace Treaty with Armenia

President Ilham Aliyev highlighted the status of the peace negotiations with Armenia, noting the significant progress achieved since 2020 along with the obstacles to a successful outcome.

The two sides have agreed on 15 of the 17 articles included in the draft peace agreement, President Aliyev said. The Armenian side may apparently accept the two remaining articles, potentially paving the way for the treaty’s finalization.

“One of them is about refraining from filing international lawsuits against each other. I think this is a mutually acceptable article. We have recently completed a damage analysis, a very detailed one. We spent four years on it and it documents everything. The damage caused to us during the years of occupation exceeds 150 billion dollars. So, I think that refraining from mutual lawsuits would be mutually acceptable,” President Aliyev said in a recent interview with Rossiya Segodnya International News Agency.

The second issue concerns the non-deployment of foreign representatives on borders. Azerbaijan has raised concerns over the presence of European observers on the Armenian side of the border, stating it has evolved into a NATO-affiliated mission.

Initially agreed upon during an October 2022 quadrilateral meeting involving Azerbaijan, Armenia, France, and the European Council, the mission was supposed to consist of 40 EU observers for two months. However, the mission’s duration and size have expanded without Azerbaijan's consent, now exceeding 200 personnel, including representatives from non-EU NATO-member states like Canada.

The idea of a European mission was advanced by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. Initially, it was proposed to operate in the border territories of Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, in an EU-mediated meeting in Prague in October 2022, the two nations agreed to facilitate a civilian EU mission on the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan, with Baku rejecting its deployment on Azerbaijani territory and agreeing to cooperate with the mission only as far as it concerned.

Obstacles to lasting peace agreement

President Aliyev said Azerbaijan has also identified two further requirements for a lasting agreement with Armenia, including amendments to the latter’s Constitution and dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group.

“The Armenian Constitution contains a reference to the Declaration of Independence, which, in turn, includes territorial claims against Azerbaijan and declares the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region as part of Armenia. Therefore, changing the Constitution is not a whim of ours but an objective necessity,” he noted.

The preamble in the Constitution of Armenia mentions a 1990 declaration of the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. The declaration cites an Act from 1989 for the unification between Armenia and the internationally recognized Karabakh (Garabagh) region of Azerbaijan. Thereby, it constitutes a territorial claim against Azerbaijan and sets ground for a possible conflict in the future should a new government in Yerevan interpret it as a legal claim.

Azerbaijan has also called for the formal dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group, established to address the Karabakh conflict. Despite its inactivity, the group remains formally intact, requiring Armenia’s agreement to terminate.

“Our question is this: if Armenia has recognized Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan and the Minsk Group was created to solve the Karabakh issue, why is it still needed? So, Armenia's reluctance to liquidate it and to apply together with us to the OSCE for its abolition demonstrates that the plans of the revanchists are quite serious. This is essentially it. If all this is resolved, there will be no more obstacles to signing the peace treaty,” President Aliyev elaborated.

In the early 1990s, the OSCE Minsk Group assumed the role of mediator in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the latter’s Karabakh (Garabagh) region. Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Armenia launched a full-blown war against Azerbaijan, which ended in a ceasefire in 1994. The bloody war led to the occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territories by Armenia. Over 30,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis were killed, and one million others were expelled from their lands in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Armenia.

At the height of the war in 1993, the United Nations adopted four resolutions demanding immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenia’s forces from the occupied lands. However, Armenia did not abide by the resolutions, dashing hopes for a political solution and simultaneously preparing for the next military phase of the conflict.

Diplomats from the US, France, and Russia have served as the Minsk Group’s co-chairs as part of international efforts to find a durable solution to what once was one of the most dangerous regional conflicts. Despite the decades-long shuttle diplomacy conducted by the group co-chairs, negotiations remained dead in the water without any breakthrough.

Before the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war, the Minsk Group’s unproductive activity repeatedly triggered a severe backlash from the Azerbaijani authorities. Shortly after the war, President Aliyev said the group failed to resolve the conflict despite its internationally recognized mandate.

The fate of the Minsk Group was reportedly put under question by the mediating countries, namely the US and France, in April 2022. At the time, Washington and Paris refused to continue cooperation with Moscow within the “troika” format due to the invasion of Ukraine. The decision also derailed Armenia’s attempts to involve the group in the peace agreement talks with Azerbaijan.

Following the one-day local anti-terrorist operation by the Azerbaijan Armed Forces on September 19-20, 2023, the illegal Armenian separatist regime in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan was ousted and it subsequently dissolved itself. With the full restoration of sovereignty, Azerbaijan's authorities have definitively rejected the involvement of the OSCE Minsk Group in any peace-building process, deeming it outdated and ineffective.