UPDATE - Armenia-Azerbaijan peace meeting called off over Yerevan's insistence of involving France

UPDATE WITH MORE REMARKS FROM AZERBAIJAN’S PRESIDENT

By Ceyhun Alizade

ANKARA (AA) - A planned peace meeting next month between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been called off over Armenia’s insistence on involving France, Azerbaijan’s president said on Friday.

The planned Dec. 7 meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Brussels will not be held, said Ilham Aliyev, addressing a conference in the capital Baku.

According to Aliyev, Pashinyan had said that Armenia would only take part at the meeting if French President Emmanuel Macron also takes part in the talks, an insistence Aliyev called "an attempt to disrupt the peace talks.”

Aliyev said that Hikmet Hajiyev, his assistant and foreign policy chief, told him on Thursday that they had a call from the office of European Council President Charles Michel conveying Pashinyan’s request for Macron to be involved in the meeting.

Aliyev said that just a week before the meeting in Prague, Macron criticized Azerbaijan in an interview, accusing it “of things we didn't commit.”

“Later, the completely unacceptable and insulting bill of the French Senate was passed,” he said, adding that the French National Assembly is expected to “adopt another anti-Azerbaijani bill.”

Last week, Azerbaijan rebuffed a French Senate resolution calling for sanctions against Baku and its withdrawal from territory liberated from Armenian occupation in 2020.

“Then there was the French attempt to attack us through the Francophonie Summit (in Tunisia). This is unacceptable because Francophonie is a humanitarian organization,” he added.

Last week, Azerbaijani officials walked out of the francophone country summit over "distorted, provocative statements" against Baku in a draft of the summit’s declaration.

Saying that a preliminary version of the French bill, “prepared jointly by France and Armenia,” is “full of accusations and fabrications,” Aliyev said this clear bias makes Paris’ involvement in the talks impossible.

“This is their fault, not ours. Because neither the US nor Russia have ever been an official party (to the conflict),” he said.

Aliyev said that Yerevan’s request for French participation at the talks “means that the Dec. 7 meeting will not take place” and that Baku will consider “other alternatives.”

“Let's see who will take the role of mediator and on what platform it will take place,” he added.

Relations between the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

In fall 2020, in 44 days of clashes, Baku liberated several cities, villages, and settlements from Armenian occupation, ending in a Moscow-brokered truce. The peace agreement is celebrated as a triumph in Azerbaijan.

- Azerbaijan: Normalization processes should move in parallel

The Azerbaijani president said that Armenian society has been “poisoned by the propaganda of the Armenian diaspora and Armenian nationalists for decades.” He added that this is one of the reasons “for what the Armenians did against the Azerbaijanis.”

Aliyev said that Armenians “educate their children in a spirit of hatred of Türkiye and Azerbaijan.”

“Turcophobia and Azerbaijanophobia have become the ideology of Armenia,” he added. “They make up so many legends about their own history and historical figures that they are starting to believe it themselves. All the history and historical heritage of Armenia is fake.”

According to Aliyev, the normalization processes of Armenia-Türkiye and Armenia-Azerbaijan relations should proceed in parallel.

“Now they (Armenia) say they want to normalize relations with Türkiye. We support this,” he said.

“I don't know how sincere Armenia is when talking about peace. We want peace,” he added. “We want them to understand that they have nothing to do with the Armenians living in Karabakh. We want the Zangezur corridor to be implemented,” he said, referring to a route connecting Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan.

“We’re trying to determine the borders according to historical maps, not as they (Armenia) want. We don't want land and we don't want war. If we wanted this, we would have done it,” he added.