In a joint declaration adopted at a weekend meeting in Istanbul, the foreign ministers of OIC member states said Armenia should “desist from undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan” and “address the remaining legal and political obstacles” to an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal.
They thus effectively backed the Azerbaijani preconditions for the signing of such a treaty finalized by the two sides in March. Those include a change of Armenia’s constitution.
The OIC declaration also backed Baku’s demands for Yerevan to ensure the return of Azerbaijanis who lived in Armenia until the outbreak of the conflict in the late 1980s. Its signatories said they “deplore Armenia’s refusal to engage in dialogue with the Western Azerbaijani Community.”
The Armenian Foreign Ministry said it is “deeply disappointed” with this stance described by it as “extremely one-sided.”
“We draw the attention of the OIC member states to the fact that the talk of ‘Western Azerbaijan’ under the guise of human rights is a clear claim by Azerbaijan to the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia, which is documented even in the founding documents of the ‘organization’ artificially formed for this purpose,” it said in a statement. “There is no and there can be no so-called ‘Western Azerbaijan’ on the territory of the Republic of Armenia.”
The statement said that the Muslim states should have instead told Baku to drop the preconditions and sign the peace treaty “without undue delay.” It also called on them to abandon “biased initiatives targeting the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Armenia and jeopardizing the settlement process between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
The OIC has adopted pro-Azerbaijani resolutions throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Armenian opposition leaders portrayed its latest document as further proof of what they call the failure of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s appeasement policy towards Azerbaijan. They claimed that Yerevan’s reluctance to champion the Karabakh Armenians’ right to return to their homeland has only encouraged Baku to raise the “Western Azerbaijan” issue in the international arena.
“Amid the refusal by Armenia’s ruler to protect the rights of the people of Artsakh … and raise the issue of the occupied territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan is pushing the term ‘Western Azerbaijan’, which includes a significant part of present-day Armenia, onto the international agenda,” said Tigran Abrahamian, an opposition lawmaker.
The OIC statement came hours after Pashinian’s meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also held in Istanbul.