BAKU (Reuters) – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused France on Tuesday of creating an environment favorable to a new war in the South Caucasus by supplying arms to Armenia.
France last month approved future defense contracts with Armenia.
“France is destabilizing not only its past and present colonies, but also our region, the South Caucasus by supporting separatist tendencies and separatists,” said Ilham Aliyev, during a conference on decolonization in Baku, the capital of country.
“By arming Armenia, it is establishing a militarist policy, encouraging revanchist forces in Armenia and preparing the ground for new wars in our region,” the Azerbaijani president continued.
Paris did not immediately make an official comment but a diplomatic source recalled that “France is resolutely committed to supporting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Armenia”.
“France is mobilized, with its European and American partners, in favor of a just and lasting peace in the South Caucasus, based on the principles of the recognition of sovereignty, the inviolability of borders and the integrity territorial power of all countries in the region,” the source told Reuters.
Last week, France officially protested against Azerbaijan, after uncovering a digital disinformation campaign aimed at questioning France’s ability to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris.
In a sign of these tensions, President Ilham Aliev declared that France was responsible for “most of the bloody crimes in the colonial history of humanity”.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Baku and Yerevan have fought several wars over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani territory in the hands of Armenian secessionists until its recapture by Baku’s forces in September last, causing a mass exodus of almost all of the 120,000 Armenians in the territory.
Years of mediation by the European Union, the United States and Russia had failed to get Armenia and Azerbaijan to sign a peace agreement. The two states have yet to agree on the demarcation of their common border, which remains closed and highly militarized. Border skirmishes, often fatal, occur regularly.
Azerbaijan wants bilateral peace talks with Armenia and believes it can quickly reach an agreement without Western mediation, Azerbaijani presidential adviser Hikmet Hajiyev told Reuters on Tuesday.
“A peace agreement is not about nuclear physics. If there is goodwill, the basic principles of a peace agreement can be worked out in a short time,” he said.
But on the question of Western involvement, he added: “We need peace in our region, not in Washington, Paris or Brussels.”
Azerbaijan, which maintains close ties with Turkey, has repeatedly withdrawn in recent months from peace talks sponsored by the United States and the European Union, both of which it accuses of bias in favor of Armenia.
This week, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian acknowledged that the EU had contributed to progress in talks on a peace treaty, but he said the two sides continued “not to speak the same diplomatic language.”
Hikmet Hajiyev said the United States had shown “double standards and an unconstructive attitude.” Azerbaijan has also been very critical of France, which said last month it had concluded new contracts to supply military equipment to Armenia.
(Reporting Nailia Bagirova, with contributions from John Irish, writing by Felix Light and Mark Trevelyan; French version Gaëlle Sheehan and Zhifan Liu, editing by Kate Entringer)
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