Armenia says that Azerbaijan laying claims to half of Armenian village

Representatives of Azerbaijan have demanded 12 houses located in the village of Shurnukh, in the Syunik region of Armenia be transferred to them.

The Azerbaijani side believes that these houses belong to them, as they are located on the east side of the Goris-Kapan road.

According to the trilateral agreement signed after 44 days of the war in Karabakh, the Zangelan region was transferred to Azerbaijan. It borders on the Syunik region of Armenia and is now undergoing a process of demarcation along the administrative borders of the Soviet era.

As a result, the road between the cities of Goris and Kapan of the Syunik region crosses the Azerbaijani territory in several places. Recently, incidents have often occurred here due to the fact that the border passes through the middle of some state objects of Armenia and private houses.

The situation in the region is extremely tense. The residents of Syunik believe that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ‘voluntarily transferred the territory of Karabakh to Azerbaijan’, and now he is ‘giving away the lands of Armenia.’ On December 21, people even blocked the roads and did not allow the prime minister to enter the region.

• Strikes and blocked roads in Armenia: how the opposition is trying to overthrow the PM
• Armenian opposition proposes creation o new Russian military base in country
• Why residents of south Armenia block PM’s entrance into region

What’s going on in Shurnukh

At noon on December 24, the head of the village said that the Azerbaijanis were in Shurnukh, they were negotiating with a representative of the Armenian National Security Service and Russian border guards.

Hakob Arshakyan himself did not participate in the negotiations and does not know what the parties agreed to. But he assumes that negotiations are now going on at a different level – diplomatic.

According to the headman, if the demarcation process is carried out using GPS, the village will be divided into two parts.

What the prime minister says

In the morning, at a government meeting, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoke about the process of defining borders in Syunik. He warned that painful situations could arise in the villages of Shurnukh and Vorotan:

“But I want to assure that in all those cases when questions arise with the protection of the interests of the residents of Armenia, the government will provide full compensation – the interests of our citizens will be protected.”

Expert opinion

Nikol Pashinyan is ‘quietly’ fulfilling hidden promises that he made to the Azerbaijani side, analyst Karen Bekaryan said. In his opinion, there is no other explanation for the fact that the same is happening with the borders of Armenia as with the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, that is, they are voluntarily given to Azerbaijan:

“The only logic is that he [Pashinyan] has assumed additional obligations to Aliyev, which are now being silently fulfilled without presenting any document to the people.”

According to Karen Bekaryan, the logic of the demarcation now taking place does not even correspond to the trilateral agreement of November 10, which was signed by the leaders of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan. The expert considers it a ‘shameful document’, but emphasizes that it does not contain ‘grounds for what is happening now in Syunik.’