Weekly update
25 March
Azeri troops have unlawfully advanced further into the territory of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), local authorities warned Saturday. In violation of the 9 November 2020 trilateral statement, the Azerbaijani forces breached the line of contact in the Shushi-Lisagor section on March 25 and secured some “positional advance”, the official Information Center of Nagorno Karabakh reported. The Nagorno Karabakh authorities immediately notified the Russian peacekeepers on this yet another violation by Azerbaijan. “The authorities expect the peacekeeping contingent to take practical steps for eliminating the consequences of this violation and preventing new violations,” the Information Center said in a statement. “Azerbaijan’s false claim on the alleged use of the Stepanakert-Ghaybalishen-Lisagor mountain road for arms shipments is simply a pretext for their own renewed aggressive and destructive actions. They ambushed and killed three on-duty police officers and injured another on March 5 under this same pretext.
https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1107223.html
24 March
International diplomacy in the Caucasus is picking up speed as Armenians brace for what many believe will be a new Azerbaijani offensive. In the last several days United States Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called the leaders of both countries, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hosted his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan in Moscow, Iran’s deputy foreign minister visited Yerevan and France’s foreign minister announced plans for an April visit to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. It comes as Azerbaijan is making ever more specific threats to Armenia based on unconfirmed “provocations” that Baku is blaming Yerevan for. The two sides are increasingly digging in on the most contentious issue between them: the fate of the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani blockade of the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia and the outside world, known as the Lachin Corridor, is now more than three months old with no end in sight. Blinken called Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on March 20, and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev the next day.
https://eurasianet.org/international-diplomacy-picks-up-amid-rising-fears-of-violence-in-karabakh
23 March
The status of Nagorno-Karabakh must be settled as part of any final peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and this will require a joint effort of Russia and the West in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Ruben Vardanyan, the ousted state minister of the unrecognized territory, told bne IntelliNews in an interview. “It needs to be a joint effort of Russia and the West in the UNSC,” the Armenian-born billionaire says. He admits that the “difficult relations” between East and West might obstruct this but says “in spite of differences in other areas [this could be a] good example of common ground”. There have been indications that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan might be prepared to cut a separate peace deal with Azerbaijan – which has held the upper hand militarily since the 2020 war – and leave the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to reach its own settlement with Baku. Vardanyan says the two disputes have to be handled as one. “This has to be one deal,” says Vardanyan. “There are so many inter-connected issues, I don’t see how they can separate this issue.” He also warns that any attempt by the Yerevan leadership to stop being the protector of Nagorno-Karabakh would be a big political mistake.
https://www.intellinews.com/interview-ruben-vardanyan-ousted-state-minister-of-nagorno-karabakh-273755/
21 March
The Armenian parliament rejected on Tuesday an opposition proposal to speak out against Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh and to voice support for the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination. The main opposition Hayastan alliance drafted a relevant parliamentary statement on the 100th day of Azerbaijan’s continuing blockade of the Lachin corridor. The document says Baku’s actions show that Karabakh cannot be a part of Azerbaijan and that self-determination of its ethnic Armenian population is the only way to ensure its security. The parliamentary majority representing the ruling Civil Contract party refused to even debate the opposition initiative during an ongoing session of the National Assembly. According to Artsvik Minasian, a senior Hayastan lawmaker, its leaders objected to the draft statement’s references to “the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic” and self-determination. The rebuff sparked bitter recriminations and insults between pro-government and opposition deputies. Hayastan’s Andranik Tevanian accused the ruling party of breaking its 2021 election campaign pledge to strive for Karabakh’s self-determination in the international arena.
https://www.azatutyun.am/a/32327805.html
20 March
Distinguished scholars from the United States and abroad concluded a two-day conference at UCLA’s Fowler Museum on the Armenian diaspora in India. The lecture series, aptly entitled “Armeno-Indica Four Centuries of Togetherness and Familiarity” was originally scheduled to occur in 2021 to mark the bicentenary of the establishment of the Armenian College in Kolkata India, but was postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sponsors of the collaborative meeting included the Fowler Museum, the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, The Promise Armenian Institute UCLA, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research. Scholars from the United States and abroad participated in the lecture series, which perused the cultural identity of the Armenians in India, The event detailed the identity of the Armenians as maritime traders and community builders from the time of the European colonial expansion to the present-day.
https://asbarez.com/armeno-indica-conference-wraps-up-at-ucla/
19 March
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, during a March 18 visit to the village of Talish in northern tip of Nagorno Karabakh seized by Azerbaijan during the 2020 Artsakh war, said Armenia must recognize Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan before any peace treaty can be signed. “There is one condition for them to live comfortably on an area of 29,000 square kilometers – Armenia must accept our conditions, officially recognize Karabakh as the territory of Azerbaijan, sign a peace treaty with us and carry out delimitation work according to our conditions. Only under these circumstances can they live comfortably on an area of 29,000 square kilometers, which is all they want now,” Aliyev said according to a statement released by his office. Aliyev, his wife and daughter visited Talish to view what is described as “repair and restoration work.” Aliyev is also quoted as warning Armenia and its international backers to stop making territorial claims against Azerbaijan. In response, the Armenian Foreign Ministry accused Baku of resettling those areas of Nagorno Karabakh it seized in the 2020 war with Azerbaijanis in an attempt to eliminate all Armenian traces from those lands.
https://hetq.am/en/article/154229
18 March
Over the weekend, the official facebook page for Raffi K. Hovannisian, Armenia’s first minister of foreign affairs and founding chairman of the Heritage Party, was hacked and emptied of all of its content from inception to the current day. The page, which for years had been administered for civic-political purposes only, and not for personal communications, was wiped clean on March 18, a day after Hovannisian published a statement entitled “It’s All Been Said, But Not Done.” Like many of Raffi Hovannisian’s freely-expressed oral and written addresses of late, it called on his fellow citizens hereafter to save their breath in reacting to the endless sequence of nationally damaging statements made by a self-taken commander in chief, and instead to focus an achieving a new nationwide consolidation—to include a self-cleansing reckoning with the ills of the preceding periods—to save the Homeland from the unprecedented decline and destruction, imposed both externally and internally, currently underway. It is to be assumed that Hovannisian’s facebook page was destroyed as part of that same plan by the party who was most affected by his March 17 posting.
https://heritage.am/en/news/180323-en