Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - On Monday, Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia , and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaija...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - On Monday, Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, traded new accusations. Pashinyan said that Azerbaijan was not following through on a treaty that would end 30 years of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The region in question is a mountainous part of Azerbaijan that has been controlled by ethnic Armenians since the 1990s. In 2020, the dispute over the region turned into a six-week war, during which Azeri troops took back large chunks of territory. After Russia worked out a truce, the two sides agreed to work on a peace plan.
Pashinyan was quoted by Russian and Armenian news outlets as saying that Azerbaijan was politicising peace efforts, like building a rail link between Azerbaijan and its western enclave of Nakhichivan through Armenia.
Pashinyan said that more than 50 Armenian servicemen were being charged with treason. He has been the target of large protests in recent weeks from people who say he has given up too much on Karabakh.
Even though Pashinyan and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev have met several times in the past 18 months, they have made little progress toward a peace treaty.
"Azerbaijan refuses to talk and accuses Armenia in public of being unwilling to talk," Pashinyan was quoted as saying at an online news conference. "There's only one thing I can say about it: it's done to make a new war against Armenia seem right."
Russia's TASS news agency reported that Pashinyan told reporters about the accusations against Armenian officers that "There are a lot of things going on behind closed doors that the public doesn't know about... More than 50 service members are accused of spying and betraying their country."
The TASS report didn't say anything else.
Last week, Aliyev said that Armenia wasn't doing anything about the treaty.
After meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Azerbaijani media reported that he said Armenia was not meeting its "legal obligations" to let free access for building the rail line.
Aliyev was stopping progress on the issue, according to Pashinyan, by tying it to the return of war prisoners to Armenia.
