Baku (TDI): Armenian and Azerbaijani officials said on Thursday that they had agreed the text of a peace deal to end nearly four decades of conflict between the South Caucasus nations, a sudden breakthrough in a fitful and often bitter peace process.
The two post-Soviet countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that a draft peace deal with Azerbaijan had been finalized from its side.
“The peace deal is ready for signing. Armenia is ready to begin consultations with Azerbaijan on the date and place of signing the accord,” Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
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In its statement, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said: “We note with satisfaction that the talks on the text of the draft Agreement on Peace and the Establishment of Interstate Relations between the two countries have been concluded.”
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However, the timeline for signing the agreement is uncertain as Azerbaijan has said a prerequisite for its signature is a change to Armenia’s constitution, which it says makes implicit claims to its territory.
Armenia denies such claims, but Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said repeatedly in recent months that Armenia’s founding document needs to be replaced and has urged for a referendum to do so. No date has been set.
The outbreak of hostilities in the late 1980s led to mass expulsions of hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim Azeris from Armenia and Armenians, who are majority Christian, from Azerbaijan.
