By Ruzanna Stepanian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Former Foreign Minister Ara Ayvazyan has claimed that he was kept in the dark about the handover to Azerbaijan of contested border areas along Armenia’s Syunik province which Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan controversially ordered in December 2020.
Armenian troops withdrew from those areas more than a month after a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The withdrawal sparked angry protests by Syunik residents concerned about the security of their communities.
Nearly one year later, Azerbaijan seized full control of a 21-kilometer section of the main highway that connected the provincial towns of Goris and Kapan. It was part of Armenia’s only overland transport link with neighboring Iran. The Azerbaijani move made the highway section off limits to Armenian, Iranian and other vehicles, forcing the Armenian government to hastily build a 70-kilometer bypass road in Syunik.
Around the same time, the government allowed several opposition parliamentarians to see a copy of a document that mandated the Armenian troop withdrawal. According to one of those lawmakers, Gegham Manukyan, the memorandum signed only by the then defense ministers of Armenia and Russia listed no legal grounds for the handover.
Manukyan insisted on Monday, July 29, that he believes the handover was illegal because it was carried out “without any delimitation and demarcation” of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This is why, he said, Pashinyan’s administration withheld any information about the memorandum for almost a year.
