“Every Western Azerbaijani has the right to return to the land of their ancestors,” deputy parliament speaker Ziyafet Askerov said during a “festival-conference” on their “return to Western Azerbaijan” organized by Azerbaijan’s government in the Nakhichevan exclave.
“Return is the legal, historical and moral right of Western Azerbaijanis as these lands are our ancient territories,” he added, according to Azerbaijani media.
Azerbaijani Education Minister Emin Amrulayev also addressed the even held in Ordubad, a town close to the Armenian border. He said “the topic of Western Azerbaijan” is of strategic importance to Baku.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev continued to voice such demands even after he and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian initialed an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington last August. Pashinian’s domestic critics say the demands make mockery of Pashinian’s regular claims that peace has already been established between the two nations. They claim that Aliyev’s ultimate goal is to end Armenia’s existence as a viable state.
Throughout the election campaign, the two main Armenian opposition forces said that Pashinian will allow as many as 300,000 Azerbaijanis to settle in Armenia if he wins reelection. The Armenian premier reacted angrily to those claims.
Baku rekindled the issue just three days after Aliyev’s top foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, visited Armenia and met with the secretary of the country’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian. Pashinian said on Wednesday that he initiated their talks in order to “manage” what he described as the risk of another Armenian-Azerbaijani war increased by the Armenian opposition’s performance in the June 7 elections.
Despite winning the elections, according to their official results, Pashinian’s Civil Contract party fell short of a two-third majority in the parliament needed for enacting a new Armenian constitution demanded by Baku. Opposition leaders say the purpose of Hajiyev’s visit was to discuss this and other concessions promised by Pashinian.
Aliyev’s demands sharply contrast with Pashinian’s categoric refusal to champion the right of Nagorno-Karabakh’s displaced ethnic Armenian population to return to its homeland recaptured by Azerbaijan in 2023. Pashinian has repeatedly said in recent months that discussing the repatriation of the Karabakh Armenians and other refugees from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict would be “dangerous for the peace process.”