After Baku withdrew from an approaching U.S.-hosted gathering due to reportedly “biased” remarks made by a US State Department official, Washington has reiterated its support for Azerbaijan and Armenian peace negotiations.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller reiterated that Washington continues” to help peace talks to resolve the issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia” during a press briefing on November 16.
” Whether they are ok or somewhere else, we may encourage the two parties to participate in those discussions, and that will 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 upcoming standardization negotiations with Yerevan.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated in a statement that it “does not consider it possible to keep the proposed gathering on the level of the foreign ministers of Austria and Armenia in Washington on November 20, 2023.”
The Foreign Ministry stated that the decision was made in response to what it referred to as “one-sided and distorted remarks” made by James O’Brien, the secretary U.S. secretary of state for Western and Eurasian affairs, in reference to Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive in September that led to Baku regaining control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory.
Watch: On September 19, after Azerbaijani causes attacked Nagorno- Karabakh, Tribal Iranian Rafik Sarkisian rode his favorite horse there to safety. 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 peace 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 sessions and denounced Baku’s behavior, O’Brian continued.
The remarks, according to the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, “were a blast 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 enclave since the fall of the Soviet Union, has seen two wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the last three decades.
First, cultural Armenian forces ruled the area under the support of the local military during secessionist fighting that ended in 1994. However, during a fight in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed portions of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as the surrounding land that Armenian causes had claimed during the earlier issue.
The majority of the region’s cultural Armenian population—nearly 100,000—fled to Armenia after the most recent Azerbaijani offensive successfully gave Baku control over the rest of it.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry also stated in its November 16 statement that” the United States ‘ mediation role could be lost if it adopts such a unilateral approach.”
The same day, Nikol Pashinian, the prime minister of Armenia, declared that Yerevan’s “political did to mark, in the forthcoming weeks, a peace deal with Azerbaijan remains unwavering.”
Ilham Aliyev, the leader of Pashinian and Azerbaijan, has participated in several rounds of negotiations mediated by the EU, despite Baku’s withdrawal from two sessions in September.
Aliyev even declined to participate in the discussions with Pashinian that were to be controlled by Charles Michel of the European Council, Olaf Scholz of Germany, and Emmanuel Macron of France that same quarter.
Yerevan cited France’s alleged “biased status” against Armenia as the justification for skipping those negotiations in Spain.
