(Munich) The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on Saturday called on Armenia and Azerbaijan to seize “a historic opportunity” to make peace after thirty years of conflict around the Nagorny Karabakh region.
“We believe that Armenia and Azerbaijan really have a historic opportunity to reach a lasting peace after more than 30 years of conflict,” Blinken said ahead of a meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham. Aliev on the sidelines of the security conference in Munich, Germany.
He welcomed the fact that the “parties themselves have taken up the peace process again, including by talking directly or through the European Union and the United States”.
The United States “remains committed to doing everything we can” to support this process, he added.
The meeting comes a few days after the Armenian prime minister announced that he had submitted his draft peace treaty to Azerbaijan.
These two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus clashed in the early 1990s during the breakup of the USSR for control of Nagorny Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region mainly populated by Armenians.
The first conflict, which claimed 30,000 lives, ended in an Armenian victory. But Azerbaijan got its revenge in a second war that claimed some 6,500 lives in the fall of 2020 and allowed Baku to retake many territories.
Armenia recently accused Azerbaijan of wanting to carry out “ethnic cleansing” in Nagorny Karabakh by forcing the Armenians who live there to leave this territory which has been confronted for weeks with the blocking of a vital axis for its supply.