After Baku withdrew from an approaching U.S. held conference due to reportedly “biased” remarks made by a US State Department official, Washington has reaffirmed its help for peace deals between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
State Department official Matthew Miller reiterated that Washington” continues to support peace deals to resolve the issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia” during a press briefing on November 16.
Whether they are present or not, we do encourage the two parties to participate in those discussions, and that would continue to be our policy, he continued.
The remarks were made after Baku declared on November 16 that it would not take part in the prepared standardization negotiations with Yerevan this month.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated in a statement that it “does not consider it possible to keep the suggested conference in Washington on November 20, 2023, at the level of the foreign ministers of Armenia.”
The Foreign Ministry claimed that the decision was made in response to James O’Brien, the secretary U.S. secretary of state for European and Asian affairs, who made what it called “one-sided and biased remarks” about Azerbaijan’s thunder offensive in September that led to Baku retaking control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
WATCH: On September 19, after Azerbaijani causes attacked Nagorno- Karabakh, Cultural Iranian Rafik Sarkisian rode his favorite horse from that location to security in Armenia. Before a native Iranian family took in the worn-out 60-year-old, he had been traveling for more than 24 hours.
Nothing will be standard for Azerbaijan following the events of September 19 until we see improvement on the harmony track, O’Brian declared at a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on November 15.
We’ve canceled a number of high-level appointments and denounced Baku’s behavior, O’Brian continued.
The remarks, according to the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, “were a punch to bilateral and multilateral relations between the United States.”
The September offensive put an end to cultural Armenian rule in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is recognized as a part of Azerbaijan worldwide.
The place, which had been a lot ethnic Armenian colony since the fall of the Soviet Union, has seen two wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the last three decades.
The area was originally ruled by cultural Iranian forces, backed by the country’s military, during separatist conflict that ended in 1994. But in a fight in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed portions of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as the surrounding land that Armenian forces had taken during the earlier issue.
The majority of the ethnic Armenians in the area—nearly 100,000—fled to Armenia after the most recent Azerbaijani offensive properly gave Baku control over the remaining areas.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry also stated in its statement from November 16 that” like a punitive approach by the United States could result in the loss of the US’ counseling role.”
The same day, Yerevan’s “political did to sign, in the coming weeks, a peace deal with Azerbaijan remains unwavering,” according to Nikol Pashinian, the prime minister of Armenia.
Ilham Aliyev, the president of Pashinian and Azerbaijan, has conducted several rounds of negotiations through EU counseling, despite Baku’s withdrawal from two meetings scheduled by the European Union in September.
Aliyev even declined to participate in the negotiations with Pashinian that were to be controlled by Charles Michel of the European Council, Olaf Scholz of Germany, and Emmanuel Macron of France that exact month.
Yerevan cited France’s alleged “biased place” against Armenia as the justification for skipping those negotiations in Spain.
