By Mark Dovich
Baku has formally called on Yerevan to cede control of four border villages formerly inhabited by Azerbaijanis, as efforts to reach a normalization deal continue to stall.
“Four villages that are under the occupation of Armenia and are not exclaves…unquestionably belong to Azerbaijan and should be returned immediately,” Azerbaijan’s deputy prime minister’s office was quoted as saying Saturday by Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.
“The issue of the return of four exclave villages…will be resolved within the framework of the border determination process,” Shahin Mustafayev’s office added.
The demand came just two days after Mustafayev and his Armenian counterpart, Mher Grigoryan, held their latest meeting on the thorny issue of determining their two countries’ border.
Those talks centered on procedural issues, with no indications of progress on substantive matters, according to a readout from Armenia’s negotiating team.
What villages are we talking about?
The four villages Baku is demanding are all located along the border between Armenia’s northeastern Tavush region and Azerbaijan’s northwestern Gazakh district.
They are called Asagi Eskipara, Baganis Ayr, Heyrimli, and Kizilhacili in Azerbaijani. The first is also known as Nerkin Voskepar in Armenian.
Three of the four other villages referred to by Mustafayev’s office as “exclave villages” are located nearby in two small pieces of territory that are formally part of Azerbaijan but are surrounded entirely by Armenia.
They are called Berhudarli, Sofulu, and Yukhari Eskipara in Azerbaijani. The first two are located together in one exclave, while the last, which is also known as Verin Voskepar in Armenian, has its own exclave.
Azerbaijanis often refer to these villages together as the “seven Gazakh villages,” in reference to the nearby district.
The fourth and final “exclave village” is located near the border between Armenia’s western Ararat region and Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan region. It is called Kerki in Azerbaijani and Tigranashen in Armenian.
Armenian forces took control of all eight villages during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, forcing their ethnic Azerbaijani residents to flee.
The fact that a number of the villages are located in small pockets of Azerbaijani territory within Armenia is a legacy of the Soviet Union, where borders were largely drawn along ethnic lines.
That often meant forming exclaves in areas of mixed populations, though in Soviet times, those boundaries were internal, and so in practice, it mattered little if a village belonged to one union republic or another.
To that point, Soviet map makers drew one Armenian exclave within Azerbaijan. For their part during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijani forces seized that village, called Artsvashen in Armenian and Bashkend in Azerbaijani, forcing its ethnic Armenian residents to flee.
Why are these villages so important?
These eight villages are particularly important to Armenia since strategically vital highways connecting the country with Georgia to the north and Iran to the south run through them. If those highways were to be interrupted, there would be no easy way to reroute traffic, given Armenia’s difficult, mountainous geography.
Since the area of Azerbaijan’s three exclaves within Armenia combined is roughly equal to that of Armenia’s single exclave within Azerbaijan, a number of observers have suggested a swap deal. That would allow Armenia to formalize its control of those areas — including the highways running through them. In return, Azerbaijan would formalize its control of Artsvashen.
However, there is no indication as of now Yerevan and Baku are even considering such an arrangement.
In fact, now with Nagorno-Karabakh firmly under Azerbaijani control, the fate of those villages remains one of the key sticking points in ongoing efforts to agree on a common border, a crucial part of any future normalization deal.
Armenia and Azerbaijan formally formed a joint border commission nearly two years ago, but publicly, nothing has come of it so far.
Without progress, the two countries’ border remains undelimited and undemarcated, as it was previously an internal Soviet administrative boundary, and so formally defining it was not of concern at that time.
Delimitation refers to the process by which a border is legally defined, while demarcation involves physically marking a border, such as by building a fence or wall.
In parallel, broader efforts to reach a normalization deal also continue to stall, according to Armenia’s top diplomat, who indicated last week there was no substantial progress made at the most recent round of talks last month in Germany.
