YEREVAN —
US House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi on Sunday condemned what she described as an
“illegal” attack by Azerbaijan on Armenia that sparked the worst fighting since
their 2020 war.
اضافة اعلان
Baku and Yerevan
have accused each other of initiating the border clashes on Tuesday, which
claimed the lives of more than 200 people.
“We strongly
condemn those attacks — on behalf of Congress — which threaten (the) prospects
of the much-needed peace agreement,” Pelosi told a news conference in Yerevan.
“Armenia has
particular importance to us because of the focus on security following an
illegal and deadly attack by Azerbaijan on the Armenian territory.”
Pelosi said the
attack was an “assault on (the) sovereignty of Armenia”.
Hostilities between
the Caucasus arch foes ended overnight on Thursday thanks to mediation by the
US, Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan said.
Earlier attempts by
Russia to broker a truce failed.
“We are grateful to the US for the agreement of the
fragile ceasefire reached by their mediation,” he told a news conference
alongside Pelosi.
Pelosi’s visit
marks a growing closeness between Washington and Yerevan where frustration is
brewing over the lack of support from Armenia’s traditional ally Moscow which
is distracted by its nearly seven-month war in Ukraine.
Russia — which has a treaty obligation to defend
Armenia in the event of foreign invasion, but which also has close ties with
Baku — did not rush to help Yerevan despite a formal demand for military help.
“We asked for
military help and our demand was not accepted. Obviously, we are not happy,”
Armenia’s security council chairman, Artyom Grigoryan, said Friday.
Pelosi, who arrived
in Yerevan on Saturday for a three-day visit, is the highest-ranking US
official to travel to Armenia since the tiny nation gained independence from
the
Soviet Union in 1991.
On Sunday morning,
a tearful Pelosi laid flowers at Yerevan’s hilltop memorial of the 1.5 million
Armenians killed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Armenia has long
sought international recognition of the bloodletting as genocide — a claim
fiercely rejected by Turkey but supported by many other countries.
Pelosi said she was
“proud” to travel to Yerevan after US President Joe Biden formally acknowledged
the Armenian genocide last year.
“It is the moral
duty of all to never forget: an obligation that has taken on heightened urgency
as atrocities are perpetrated around the globe, including by Russia against
Ukraine,” Pelosi said on Saturday.
Armenia and
Azerbaijan have fought two wars — in the 1990s and in 2020 — over the contested
region of Nagorno-Karabakh an Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan.
Pelosi said: “In
the Congress, in the bipartisan way, we hold (Baku’s ally) Turkey responsible —
as well as Azerbaijan — for the conflict that exists in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Together with
France and Russia, the US co-chairs the Minsk Group of mediators, which had led
decades-long peace talks between Baku and Yerevan under the aegis of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The Minsk Group has
been largely defunct as Moscow faces growing isolation on the world stage
following its February invasion of Ukraine.
The EU had taken a
lead role in mediating the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization process.
Analysts have said
the hostilities have largely undone Western efforts to bring Baku and Yerevan
closer to a peace deal.
The six-weeks war
in 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended
with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Under the deal,
Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades, and Moscow
deployed about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
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