YEREVAN: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned Friday of the risk of a new war with Azerbaijan, accusing Baku of “genocide” in the breakaway Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Baku and Yerevan have fought two wars over the mountainous enclave and the signature of a peace treaty remains a distant prospect.
Talks under the mediation of the European Union, United States, and Russia have brought about little progress.
“So long as a peace treaty has not been signed and such a treaty has not been ratified by the parliaments of the two countries, of course, a (new) war (with Azerbaijan) is very likely,” Pashinyan said.
Tensions escalated earlier in July when Azerbaijan temporarily shut the Lachin corridor, the sole road linking Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
The closure sparked concerns over a humanitarian crisis in the region, which experiences shortages of food, medicines, and energy.
“We’re talking not about a preparation of genocide, but an ongoing process of genocide,” Pashinyan said in an interview, referring to the Karabakh crisis.
The growing diplomatic engagement of the European Union and United States in the Caucasus has irked traditional regional power broker Russia.
As the latest round of peace talks on July 15 in Brussels failed to bring about a breakthrough, Pashinyan said that both the West and Russia needed to increase pressure on Baku to lift its blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“If, according to the logic of some circles in the West, Russia is not meeting all of our expectations because it is not fulfilling its obligations, similarly Russia also tells us (the same) about the West,” he said.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been at the center of a decades-long dispute between the two countries, which have fought two wars over the mountainous territory — in the 1990s and in 2020.
In autumn 2020, a Russian-brokered cease-fire deal saw Armenia cede swathes of territories it had controlled for decades, while Moscow deployed peacekeepers to the Lachin Corridor to ensure free passage between Armenia and Karabakh.
New war with Azerbaijan ‘very likely’: Armenian prime minister
https://arab.news/zvbbe
New war with Azerbaijan ‘very likely’: Armenian prime minister
- Talks under the mediation of the European Union, United States, and Russia have brought about little progress
- Tensions escalated earlier in July when Azerbaijan temporarily shut the Lachin corridor
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
