“Naturally, Baku periodically tries to lead the situation to a new escalation, and we try to prevent that new escalation every time,” said Vahagn Aleksanian.
Aleksanian commented on cross-border Azerbaijani gunfire that has been reported by residents of Armenian border villages over the past month. Gunshots have struck houses located in two of those villages.
They began days after Azerbaijan started accusing Armenian troops of violating the ceasefire regime on a regular basis. The accusations denied by the Armenian military followed official announcements on March 13 that the two conflicting sides have bridged their differences on the text of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
The Azerbaijani leadership has made clear that it will not sign the treaty without securing more Armenian concessions. Armenian opposition figures insisted on Wednesday that the gunshots fired towards Armenian villages are aimed at forcing Yerevan to make those concessions.
“Azerbaijan’s goals remain the same,” said Hayk Mamijanian, the parliamentary leader of the opposition Pativ Unem bloc. “When it sees that the opposite side is ready to sell out everything for the sake of a piece of paper that’s worth nothing, it will press till the end and come up with new, even more illogical demands.”
Kristine Vartanian, a lawmaker representing the opposition Hayastan alliance, agreed, saying that Baku already bullied Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian into unilaterally ceding several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan a year ago.
“If that [Azerbaijani tactic] works, if Nikol Pashinian and his team scare, terrorize the people with Azerbaijan and say that that … if we don’t make concessions they will attack us, why should Azerbaijan not use it?” Vartanian told reporters.
The Armenian opposition has for years said that Pashinian’s appeasement policy only encourages Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to make more demands on Armenia and will not bring real peace. It has claimed that Pashinian is desperate to secure a meaningless peace accord in hopes of misleading Armenians and increasing his chances of holding on to power.
Pashinian declared on April 17 that “there is going to be no new Armenia-Azerbaijan escalation or war.” By contrast, his foreign minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, complained about the Azerbaijani preconditions and suggested that Baku is “not going to build peace.”
