Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev seem to have been satisfied with their first conversation on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that took place in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe on Friday.
The two men spoke with each other during a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose grouping of a dozen former Soviet republics.
Pashinian said later on Friday that they agreed to stop ceasefire violations in the conflict zone which have again been on the rise lately.“In essence, we can say that there is an agreement to take measures to prevent violations of the ceasefire regime along the entire Armenia-Azerbaijan and Karabakh-Azerbaijan lines of contact,” he said in a video message aired through Facebook.
For that purpose, Pashinian went on, he and Aliyev agreed in principle to open a direct Armenian-Azerbaijani “communication line.” He cautioned, though, that the two sides need to work out practical modalities of such a channel.
Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, said nothing about these understandings when he commented on the Dushanbe contact on Monday.Instead, he repeated the official Azerbaijani line that the continuing Armenian “occupation of Azerbaijani lands” is the main cause of recurrent armed incidents.
In an interview with the Trend news agency, Hajiyev also said the conversation showed that Azerbaijan and Armenia, rather than Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian representatives, remain the main negotiating parties in the conflict. He noted in that regard that the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers met in New York on September 26.
“We assess that positively,” added the Azerbaijani official.
Since taking office in May, Pashinian has repeatedly called on Azerbaijan to talk directly to Karabakh Armenian leaders. He has said that he has no mandate to “negotiate on behalf of the Karabakh people.”
Baku has denounced those statements, ruling out any direct talks with the Karabakh Armenians.
Neither Pashinian nor the Aliyev aide mentioned the possibility of holding an Armenian-Azerbaijani summit in the weeks or months ahead.
Pashinian and Aliyev were first introduced to each other by Russian President Vladimir Putin when they attended in June the opening ceremony of the 2018 football World Cup hosted by Russia. They have held no formal negotiations yet.
The U.S., Russian and French mediators co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group issued on Thursday a joint statement on the New York talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers. They said the ministers “confirmed the importance of taking measures to intensify the negotiation process and to take additional steps to reduce tensions.”
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