Who to trust, Pashinyan or Aliyev?

Lusine Shahverdyan,

After the meeting in Brussels, the President of Azerbaijan once again spoke about the Zangezur Corridor, stating that Azerbaijan had succeeded in convincing Armenia (via Armenia to Nakhichevan) of the inevitability of opening a road. “Earlier Armenia was against the opening of the highway, but we were able to convince that it is inevitable, they agree.” Azerbaijani President Ilham Ali made such a statement in an interview with Spanish El Pais. “So there is an agreement. We are now discussing the legal regime of these corridors, in particular, the “Zangezur Corridor”, which passes from Azerbaijan to Armenia, and then to the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan. “We still have some unresolved issues,” Ali said. According to him, both countries accept the fact that the opening of the corridor must take place.

“I think both countries agree that this should happen. By the way, during the trilateral meeting in Sochi initiated by President Putin last month, we adopted a declaration, which openly spoke about the opening of communications. And so it will be. By the way, the airspace has already been activated. “Now the planes of” Azerbaijani Airlines “operating the Baku-Nakhichevan flight have started passing through the airspace of Armenia,” Ali said.

Today, most of the deputies of the ruling Political Contract categorically refused to refer to Aliyev’s statements. Armen Khachatryan, elected from Syunik, does not imagine a corridor with any status. “That says it all,” he said, not continuing the conversation. The representative of national minorities Rustam Bakoyan advised to accept Nikol Pashinyan’s statements instead of Aliyev’s statements that there was not and will not be a corridor issue.

Pashinyan’s former speaker, CP MP Arman Yeghoyan first taught lessons not to take Aliyev’s words so seriously, following Pashinyan’s statement. When we countered that Pashinyan often lies, today he can say one thing, tomorrow it will become clear that the reality is the opposite, he insisted that there will be no corridor from Armenia’s point of view. “We will not allow it. Yes, Aliyev wants a corridor, we do not. There is a clash of opinions. There was an announcement to open the railway on a parity basis, that is, in the same way, they transport cargo, we transport it in the same way. What do you call this now – a corridor or a kitchen, or a passage or a sidewalk? ” We insisted that it was about the corridor ․ “Armenia will be in control of any square centimeter of land inside Armenia. Armenia will decide how that control will be. Therefore, there will be no corridor, “he said.

To our clarifying question, is it possible for Armenia to entrust the control of the corridor to the Russian border guards, Yeghoyan avoided a direct answer ․ “Now the Russian border guards are standing at our airport, they are standing on the Armenia-Iran border if you consider it extraterritorial management, it is not extraterritorial management.” We tried to counter that the Russian border guards were standing on the border, and here we are talking about the road passing through Syunik, and in fact, that road will be under the control of representatives of another state, or, as Yeghoyan says, under exterior control, Yeghoyan tried to wash his hands. First of all, I do not know whether that way will be or not, we have not reached there yet, it is about excluding extraterritoriality. ”

Former Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) MP, political scientist Arman Abovyan does not believe that only the railway was discussed during the four-hour meeting in Brussels, according to Abovyan. that the road to be received by Azerbaijan in Syunik should be equivalent to the Lachin corridor. In other words, Azerbaijani trucks and other vehicles must cross the Armenian border without the RA customs point. Otherwise, Ali threatens to set up a customs point in Lachin.
“All the similar meetings of Nikol Pashinyan in the post-war period, including the one in Brussels, show that Nikol Pashinyan is legitimizing the consequences of the second Artsakh war, that is, they are playing in a field that is completely beneficial for Azerbaijan and this is not news,” Abovyan said. .