By Berge Jololian
Negotiating peace between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey has officially entered the realm of farce. Add Russia’s Putin and Belarus’s Lukashenko to the mix, and you have the world’s most dysfunctional quartet of dictators — Aliyev, Erdogan, Putin and Lukashenko — who could easily moonlight as the villains in a satirical geopolitical sitcom. Their demands on Armenia range from ludicrous to outright laughable, revealing that their vision of “peace” is more like a game of “Let’s Humiliate Armenia for Fun.”
Name Games and Mountain Claims
It seems that Armenia’s negotiations with Azerbaijan and Turkey for a peace treaty are less about diplomacy and more about surreal theater. The ever-growing list of demands from the Aliyev-Erdogan duo ranges from the audacious to the outright absurd. Their latest? A request for Armenia’s Foreign Minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, to change his name because “Ararat” is simply too triggering for Turkey. After all, how dare an Armenian official carry the name of a mountain that has symbolized Armenia for millennia, even though it now sits awkwardly within Turkey’s borders?
Erdogan reportedly said, “every time I hear the word Ararat, I’m reminded of things I’d rather not admit happened.” Suggestions for Mirzoyan’s new name include “Flatland Mirzoyan” or simply “Nothing-to-See-Here Mirzoyan.”
Meanwhile, Putin chimed in to support Erdogan’s claim, declaring that Mount Ararat was “never really Armenian anyway” and suggesting it be renamed Mount Neutral. “Let’s make it fair for everyone,” Putin said, ignoring his troops’ failure to lift a finger when Azerbaijani forces ethnically cleansed Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh under the watchful eye of Russian “peacekeepers.” Apparently, in Putin’s world, peacekeeping means keeping peace between Azerbaijan and Turkey – by throwing Armenia under the bus.