By Astghik Bedevian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — The signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty is conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution, a senior aide to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said in a newspaper interview published on August 27.
“We are very close with Armenia to finalize a peace agreement, but we need to ensure this peace is sustainable,” Elchin Amirbayov told the Korea Times daily. “The remaining obstacle is Armenia’s constitutional territorial claim on a part of Azerbaijan. Once that is resolved, we can move forward.”
Aliyev has repeatedly set this precondition in recent months and especially after forcing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to cede four disputed border areas to Azerbaijan in April. Baku specifically wants Yerevan to remove from the Armenian constitution a reference to a 1990 declaration of independence which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast.
The only legal way to remove that reference is to enact a new constitution through a referendum. Pashinyan announced plans to do that earlier this year, leading his domestic detractors to claim that he is bowing to yet another Azerbaijani demand.
Pashinyan appeared to alter his rhetoric last Friday in a statement congratulating Armenians on the 34th anniversary of the 1990 declaration’s adoption. He said that “contrary to various interpretations” the constitutional reference in question “does not mean that the entire content of the Declaration of Independence is included in the Armenian constitution and that the content of these two documents is identical.”
