Baku – Reuters
Azerbaijan said on Tuesday that protests that have blocked the supply route to Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh for more than two weeks will be suspended if monitors are allowed access to what it says are illegal mining sites in the region.
And since December 12, a crowd of Azerbaijani citizens has been clashing with Russian peacekeepers in the Lachin Corridor, which is the road that crosses Azerbaijani territory and connects Armenia with the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The closure of the road, on which the region depends for supplies of food, fuel and medicine, has prompted the United States and the European Union to express their concern and to urge Baku to reopen it. Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought two wars in the past three decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but most of its 120,000 residents are Armenians.
Jeyhun Bayramov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, said in a press conference: For more than a year, Baku has been demanding the right of access to monitor mining sites in Karabakh, which it says are being exploited illegally.
In response to a question about the conditions needed to stop the protests, he added: “The requests of Azerbaijan and environmental activists are to allow state agencies to visit these mining sites, monitor them and follow the situation there.”
Armenian leaders in Karabakh accuse Azerbaijan of orchestrating fake protests to shut down the region. Paco denies it and says: The activists are not saying it and their protests are justified.
Efforts by Russia, the United States and the European Union to sign a permanent peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan have made only slow progress since the last war in 2020.
Azerbaijan carried out large-scale attacks across its border into Armenia in September, which Yerevan describes as an unprovoked attack. Azerbaijan said its soldiers responded after Armenian sabotage units attempted to mine their sites. More than 200 Armenian and about 80 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed.
