Tbilisi, Sep 24 (EFE).- Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Alíev will meet on Oct.5 in the Spanish city of Granada to discuss and potentially finalize a peace treaty, the Security Council of Armenia press office said on Sunday.
The leaders of France and Germany and European Commission President Charles Michel will also take part in the meeting to discuss the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries.
Armenian Security Council head Armén Grigorián will travel to Brussels on Tuesday to prepare for the meeting, the council said in a press statement.
Grigorian will hold consultations in the Belgian capital with Azerbaijani presidential aid Hikmet Gadzhiev.
Earlier, Pashinyan had said the peace treaty was unlikely to be signed in the Spanish city, but he expected that the two nations would get closer to inking the pact.
However, on Sunday, in a speech to the nation, he expressed his willingness to finalize the pact with Baku to delimit the border between the neighbors and avoid future conflicts.
Aliev said the attitude shown by Yerevan during the Azerbaijani military operation in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region paved the way for the signing of the peace treaty.
He was referring to Armenia’s failure to militarily intercede on behalf of the Karabakhs, which has sparked anti-government protests against Pashinyan.
The Grenada meeting will take place after Azerbaijan regained control of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which agreed to disband its military forces.
The European Union has called on Baku to uphold the rights of Armenian inhabitants in Karabakh.
On Sunday, the Karabakh authorities reported that ethnic Armenians had begun evacuating the region due to concerns of ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijanis.
The Karabakh conflict, a long-standing dispute over a region that is destined to become a part of Azerbaijan, has pitted Armenians and Azerbaijanis since 1988, when the Soviet Union still existed. EFE
mv-mos-ssk
