YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Armenia’s government insisted on Tuesday that it will not cede any extraterritorial land corridors to Azerbaijan as a result of the latest talks between the leaders of the two states hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev met in the Russian city of Sochi on Friday one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the six-week war over Nagorno-Karabakh. They reported further progress towards the opening of transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan envisaged by the ceasefire.
In particular, Putin said a trilateral task force dealing with the matter will meet in Moscow this week to announce “decisions which we agreed today.” He did not elaborate.
The truce accord commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan exclave. Armenia should be able, for its part, to use Azerbaijani territory as a transit route for cargo shipments to Russia and Iran.
Aliyev has repeatedly claimed that the deal calls for a special “corridor” that will connect Nakhichevan to the rest of Azerbaijan via Armenia’s Syunik province. Commenting on the Sochi talks over the weekend, he declared that the “Zangezur corridor is becoming reality.”
The Armenian Foreign Ministry effectively denied that on Tuesday. The ministry spokesman, Vahan Hunanyan, said a joint statement issued by Aliyev, Pashinyan and Putin at Sochi “refuted propaganda notions about a ‘corridor’ or the logic of a corridor.”
Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan, the Armenian co-chair of the Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani task force, likewise insisted that the three leaders discussed conventional cross-border transport links, rather than “exterritorial roads” implied by Aliyev.
“In case of the unblocking of roads, both the railway and highways [passing through Armenian territory] will be under Armenia’s full jurisdiction and control,” Grigoryan told the “Hraparak” daily.
Accordingly, he said, cargo shipments to and from Nakhichevan will be subject to Armenian customs controls and other border checks.
The assurances came amid continuing Armenian opposition allegations that Pashinian agreed to make more concessions to Baku at the expense of Armenia’s territorial integrity. A senior opposition lawmaker, Armen Rustamyan, suggested on Monday that Aliyev’s latest statement about the “Zangezur corridor” is the result of his unpublicized “oral understandings” with Pashinyan.
Visiting Yerevan on November 5, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk said the trilateral working group has agreed that Armenia and Azerbaijan will “retain sovereignty over roads passing through their territory.” The Russian Foreign Ministry also reported such an agreement.
This is insanity no matter what label is given to this passage which will connect one enemy-occupied Armenian territory to another. It will link the criminal artificial Azerbaijan republic invented on occupied Armenian homeland to occupied Armenian territory of Nakhijevan which was illegally confiscated from Armenia in 1921 and depopulated entirely of indigenous Armenian population by enemy’s racist policies deliberately aimed at driving them out of their homeland.
It was only sixteen years ago that in 2005 the sadistic Azerbaijani army desecrated and erased the last remnants of the Armenian presence there by destroying a 1,300 year old ancient Armenian cemetery in Julfa and replaced it with a military training camp to train new Azerbaijani criminals to kill Armenians AND here we are facilitating its linkage to artificial Azerbaijan whose criminals leadership ordered that destruction.
Even more important and destructive than that is the fact that this linkage also connects terrorist Turkey to criminal Azerbaijan via occupied Nakhijevan and through this passage Turkey will gain access to Central Asia and beyond. This is a long-awaited gift to the terrorist leaderships of Turkey and Azerbaijan and no matter how you try to distort and twist its labeling to misinform and mislead the Armenian population it is nothing but a pan-Turanic passage, պան-թուրանական միջանցք in Armenian, which we must never allow to become reality.
This is what happens when an uninformed and politically gullible population, under the disguise of false democracy, elects an incompetent and unpatriotic leader who treats these critical events imposed on the Armenians nothing but a business transaction.
Very well said Ararat.
Unfortunately we have learned not to trust our government’s official statements.
Armenians cannot and should never allow that corridor to happen.
Strade di transito non significa cedere territori altrimenti i turchi non avrebbero insistito sul “corridoio di terreno” che è ben altra cosa.
This is not about giving up territory because that can never happen under any circumstances. This is about giving passage through Armenian territory to two terrorist enemy states. Why would Armenian leaders even consider facilitating a land passage that will bring two enemy states closer together by an uninterrupted transit route which will cause even closer collaboration between the two against Armenia in the future than they already have? The idea should be to block such a passage than unblock it. What part of bringing two enemies closer together through Armenian territory don’t Armenian leaders understand? Armenians must NEVER trust the Turks under any circumstances. The only time the Armenians can and should trust the Turks is when they don’t exist in the region anymore!
Apres Ararat. Sometimes when you want to deny something, you Gould set such preconditions that the enemy will refuse. How about a corridor to Hopa, where Armenia would have access to the Mediterranean? Right through Kars and Ardahan. It would be what Erdogan is wanting: free trade. Surly Erdogan will refuse. And then we would too.
DOES PRESIDENT ARMEN SARKISIAN KNOW WHAT HIS PRIME MINISTER IS DOING???????????? LAST TIME, MISTER PRESIDENT SAY HE HAD NO IDEA NIKOL SIGN PAPERS AFTER ARTSAKH WAR!!!!!! IS ARMEN SARKISIAN AWAKE????????
This is absolute madness! Have we not learned a single lesson from our past and present history?
Might is right, Armenia have no might, Pashinyan is doing the best he can, under these circumstances it is left very limited choices to Armenia, talk is cheap, where is the might, who is going to fight, war needs money, from where is the money going to come, where is America, where is the West, they are just talking and trying to use diplomacy while on the ground Azerbaijan and Turkey day in day out they are killing and harassing Armenians, as I said, talk is cheap.
You are right talk is cheap and we saw how cheap all Pashinyan’s talks turned out to be in the moments of truth. He led his movement under the slogan “դուխով”, meaning “հոգով ու համարձակ” a foreign word used for an Armenian movement, and we witnessed a year ago he was the one without any “դուխ” himself!