Aliyev outlines new limits of Armenian sovereignty

Immediately after the meeting of the foreign ministers within the 3+3 regional cooperation format, official Baku delivered a blow not only to the negotiation process with Armenia but also to Nikol Pashinyan. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Elchin Amirbayov, the representative of the President of Azerbaijan for special assignments, said that Baku wants to sign peace not with Nikol Pashinyan but with Armenia. “Territorial claims of Armenia to Azerbaijan have been from day one the cause of the conflict and need to be addressed once and forever. While we respect the desire for a peace agreement as soon as possible, our main goal is that peace should be lasting and irreversible. Without constitutional amendments in Armenia, this will be impossible. If a new government in Armenia were to come to power, they could decide that the peace agreement contradicts the Armenian constitution. Since their constitution has supreme legal force and holds more legal authority than a peace agreement, a new government could declare the agreement invalid.

Azerbaijan wants to sign peace not with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan but with Armenia,” the Azerbaijani official said.

Amirbayov’s statement has several political implications at once. Firstly, in this way, Ilham Aliyev tells Nikol Pashinyan that official Baku perceives him as a “repaid bond,” and today Azerbaijan’s demands are addressed to the new, future leadership of Armenia, to those who, in Baku’s perception, must bring what Pashinyan started to an end.

The members of the Civil Contract Party, who today, in the fight against the head of the Armenian Investigative Committee, defend their right to enjoy the benefits of their political position with impunity, will not tell you that Elchin Amirbayov’s statements are another evidence of Armenia’s rapid loss. In fact, Baku believes that it has the right to interfere not only in having a referendum on changing the Constitution in Armenia (claiming to write the text of this very Constitution), but also believes that it can appoint an “operator” of this process, which may not be Nikol Pashinyan.

Figuratively speaking, at this rate, the sovereignty of Armenia can be reduced to the level of issues that can be solved by the HOA or a housekeeping manager. Theoretically, Pashinyan will be able to decide which deer to breed in the Yerevan zoo, but whether there will be deer in the Yerevan zoo and whether Yerevan will have a zoo will not be up to him to decide.

Amirbayov’s wording about “peace not with Pashinyan, but with Armenia” proves that what we said months earlier turned out to be correct. Unlike Pashinyan’s government and his team, official Baku knows that the Armenians fought for Artsakh not because it was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Armenia. The Armenians fought for Artsakh, and this is why it was enshrined in the fundamental documents of the Armenian state. Accordingly, Baku strives so strongly and irrevocably to “lower the bar of the sovereignty and statehood of the Republic of Armenia” so that there is no chance for the normal functioning of state institutions in the future. Not to mention the desire to completely absorb Armenia.

The human factor has always played, is playing, and will continue to play an important role in politics. It can often define interstate relations as well. Thus, with his current statement about “signing peace not with Pashinyan, but with Armenia” and accordingly with the population of the country, with its citizens, Aliyev responds to Pashinyan’s statements from 2019-2020, when he repeatedly stated his readiness “to enter into dialogue with Azerbaijani people if dialogue with Aliyev fails.” Today, Aliyev is trying to do what Pashinyan himself had said years earlier but could not do (as well as many other things that he said).

It will not be surprising if soon Ilham Aliyev repeats the trick of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently addressed the people of Iran, saying that “Iranians deserve better.”

Think about it…