The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov, on Friday kicked off two days of talks in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, on a peace deal between the two countries.
Prior to the talks the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers held separate meetings with their Kazakh counterpart, Murat Nurtleu, who is hosting the talks and later joined the two top diplomats in their meeting.
Ahead of the closed-door talks, Mirzoyan emphasized Armenia’s commitment to the peace process and reflected that the House of Friendship, where Friday’s meeting was held, served as the venue for the 1991 Alma Ata document that defined the post-Soviet borders and is currently being pushed by Yerevan to be the basis for the border delimitation process between the two countries.
“It is very symbolic that we are meeting today in this beautiful city of Almaty, and furthermore, in the same ‘House of Friendship’ building where the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration was signed. I would like to remind you that this is the document which was signed by the then-former USSR republics, among others recognizing the former administrative borders as interstate borders between independent countries,” Mirzoyan said.
“It is important that during past two years both the Prime-Minister of Armenia and the President of Azerbaijan, on several platforms, have reconfirmed their commitment to the Alma-Ata Declaration, reconfirmed the recognition of territorial integrity based on the Alma-Ata Declaration as well as reconfirmed that the process delimitation of borders should be carried out based on the Alma-Ata Declaration. In principle, it means that during the delimitation process, the borders which existed at the moment of dissolution of the USSR should be reproduced on the ground,” added Mirzoyan.
“I want to emphasize again that Armenia’s efforts are aimed at peace, at concluding a peace treaty. We are engaged in the peace process very constructively, and even more, we should go beyond signing the peace treaty and open the transport communications in the region,” the Armenian foreign minister stressed.
“We should, we can do that with the understanding that all the infrastructures should remain and operate under the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the states through the territory of which they will be passing, and all the border crossing procedures should be agreed upon in accordance with the principle of reciprocity,” Mirzoyan added.
For his part, Bayramov expressed confidence that he and Mirzoyan “will work productively in the next two days to find solutions to outstanding issues.”
Bayramov also stressed the importance of an April 19 agreement, as a result of which Armenia ceded four villages in the Tavush Province, as the start of the border delimitation process.
The move has sparked wide-spread protests in Armenia, with tens of thousands of Armenians, led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, the Primate of the Tavush Diocese, advancing the “Tavush for the Homeland” movement.
Mirzoyan and Bayramov are expected to continue their talks in Almaty on Saturday.
