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 deals to resolve the issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia” during a press briefing on November 16.
Whether they are present or not, we do inspire 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 normalization negotiations with Yerevan this month.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated in a statement that it “does not consider it possible to keep the proposed meeting in Washington on November 20, 2023, at the level of the foreign ministries 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 Western and European 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 typical with Azerbaijan after the activities 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 have canceled several high-level appointments and denounced Baku’s activities, 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.
Over the area, which had been a lot ethnic Armenian colony since the fall of the Soviet Union, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two war in the last three years.
First, ethnic 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, Yerevan’s “political did to hint, 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 intervention, despite Baku’s withdrawal from two meetings scheduled by the European Union in September.
Aliyev even declined to participate in a round of talks with Pashinian that were to be controlled by Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron that same month.
Yerevan claimed that France skipped those discussions in Spain due to its alleged “biased place” against Armenia.
