[ad_1]
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has urged Armenia and Azerbaijan to return to the negotiating table and seek a political solution to their decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.
“There is no other way for long-term peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan than the negotiation table,” Baerbock said on November 3 during a visit to Yerevan.
Mediation efforts led by European Council President Charles Michel “are a bridge that can show the fastest way to peace,” Baerbock said after talks with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan.
Yerevan and Baku have made progress on the various problems, including demarcation, she said, and that has “raised hope that you can come to a peaceful solution.”
Mirzoyan acknowledged Germany’s efforts to achieve peace in the region but also said Azerbaijan had broken its promise to not engage in hostilities.
“Armenia has the will to take the path of peace in the region,” he said, but he also noted humanitarian problems, Armenian prisoners of war, and the need to recognize the territorial sovereignty of both countries.
Baerbock is in the Caucasus for a two-day visit that comes six weeks after a lightning offensive by Azerbaijani forces retook the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh following decades in which Yerevan-backed ethnic Armenians controlled the Azerbaijani territory.
More than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia after the Azerbaijani offensive in mid-September, virtually emptying out the territory.
The German Foreign Office said Baerbock was scheduled to visit a reception facility for Nagorno-Karabakh’s refugees while in Armenia.
Baerbock will continue on to Baku for a meeting with Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Ceyhun Bayramov and other officials.
Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Paruyr Hovhannisian earlier on November 3 touted Baerbock’s visit to discuss possible peace efforts and to honor victims of Ottoman-era mass killings as “important [and] perhaps historic.”
Hovhannisian told the Armenian parliament that the stop “shows Germany’s commitment to invest in the [peace] process as a weighty member of the European Union.”
Hours after her arrival on November 3, Baerbock laid a wreath at a memorial to the victims in 1915-16 of mass killings of more than 1 million ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in a tragedy over which Turkey has expressed regret but resisted acknowledging as a “genocide.”
German lawmakers joined many other countries in 2016 by passing a resolution describing it as a genocide.
The Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict that remained open since the 1990s has for years threatened to escalate into war that could drag in Russian, Turkish, or Iranian forces in an area where Europe and the West also remain heavily engaged.
Nagorno-Karabakh initially came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by the Armenian military, as the Soviet Union crumbled in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. During a war in 2020, however, Azerbaijan took back parts of Nagorno-Karabakh along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed during the earlier conflict.
Last month, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev raised his country’s flag in the main city of Nagorno-Karabakh, known as Xankendi to Azeris and Stepanakert to the territory’s ethnic Armenians.
Baerbock’s trip follows comments on November 2 where she said enlarging the European Union by accepting more Eastern European countries into the bloc was a geopolitical necessity but will require “deep” reforms of its institutions.
“The great European question of this time is not whether but how we should make the [European] Union stronger,” Baerbock said at a conference in Berlin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “will continue to try to plow an imperial trench through Europe, which will not only separate Ukraine from us, but also Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans,” Baerbock said.
With reporting by dpa
[ad_2]
