By ELIN SULEYMANOV

Next month, for the first time in our wider region, Azerbaijan will host COP29, the world’s annual forum to address the urgent need for meaningful climate action.

While some still prefer any COP to be a kitchen sink discussion club with little real-life impact, Azerbaijan is determined to deliver tangible progress on climate finance, carbon markets, and change for Small Island Developing States that replaces talk with agreed, practical mechanisms for action to ensure a better future for humanity.

One of the initiatives put forward by Azerbaijan is the COP Truce, akin to the call for Olympic truce issued every four years. This global appeal has a regional dimension since the decision to host COP29 in Baku came after a breakthrough agreement with Armenia on endorsing Azerbaijan’s candidacy. This was an outcome of direct, constructive talks between our two nations.

In fact, as acknowledged by both sides, Armenia and Azerbaijan are closer to a peace agreement than ever before, the border delimitation commissions are working and have already delivered a demarcation along a portion of the border and a de-facto peace has become a reality on the ground.

All of this is ultimately possible because Azerbaijan has restored its territorial integrity within internationally recognised borders in accordance with four UN Security Council resolutions. To remind those criticising Azerbaijan today, it was Armenia that occupied Azerbaijani territories and committed ethnic cleansing for thirty years, as testified by all international documents, not the other way around.

For all the media commotion around Foreign Secretary Lammy’s recent words, Azerbaijan indeed liberated its lands that were under foreign occupation. Stating a basic geographic truth is only politically controversial when those who criticise it have an agenda that is furthered by ignoring simple, verifiable facts. Still, it is refreshing to see our Armenian colleagues refer to Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and sovereignty when they spent the best part of the last three decades trying to remove any references to this veracity from those same international documents.

Even with wounds of the war, thirty years of illegal occupation and forced displacement, it has repeatedly been Azerbaijan that extended the olive branch, laid out basic principles for a lasting peace, and constantly demanded progress on an agreement.

We have even been willing to set aside and negotiate separately from the peace treaty even previous agreements – which Armenia has later reneged on – such as the proposed Zangezur corridor, a transportation link that would have benefited the entire region as previously agreed and signed between our countries in the Trilateral statement of 2020.

While there has been major progress, it is abundantly clear that stalling to lengthen the path to peace is a key negotiating strategy of the Armenian side. That is not the story that they tell in public, of course. There they say the very opposite, pronouncing that it is Azerbaijan that causes the delay. With no evidence save for rhetoric, this is an attempt at diplomatic gaslighting.

From clumsy attempts to deny the existence of minefield maps, which official Yerevan finally acknowledged after hundreds of Azerbaijanis fell victims to landmines, to the refusal to meet with the Azerbaijani side including at the recent European Political Community Summit in Oxfordshire earlier this year, to simply manipulating text of the draft agreement – Armenia’s foot-dragging is detrimental for peace.

Perhaps this should be expected. Despite declaring its formal independence, Armenia has never really assumed full sovereignty because of external economic and military debt to others for the political and financial cost of an illegal occupation of its neighbour’s land. This makes engaging in good faith as an independent nation with its neighbours a tall order. Armenia’s own Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has himself described these challenges in detail in numerous speeches.

But the fact that illegal occupation is over, along with many of the political and financial burdens it caused, means now is the moment to correct the mistakes of the past. There is the chance to end dependency on external protectors and finally start working directly with partners in the region.

Sadly, Armenian diplomats still call for “Western pressure” against Azerbaijan, clearly in the hope of replacing previous sponsor Russia with some new would-be western protectors. This is even though most of the progress has been made through direct talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, exactly as it should be between two neighbours.

When Armenia says that words matter, no words matter more than those in the Constitution, the highest law of the land. And there is a clear reference to declaring the territory of Azerbaijan, which Armenia’s Prime Minister now says is part of Azerbaijan, as part of Armenia.

As such, words of Armenian officials contradict their own Constitution and legal documents on an issue at the core of the peace talks with Azerbaijan. If both nations recognise each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, it should be final and irreversible for any peace to last. Unfortunately, the current Armenian Constitution simply doesn’t allow for that.

Some may say that a paragraph in the peace agreement would address this, but as the Armenian government says itself, no foreign treaty is above the Constitution. The country has form here: the Zurich Protocol, signed with much fanfare between Armenia and Türkiye and enthusiastically endorsed by Western leaders, was later rejected by Armenia’s Constitutional Court when it became politically expedient.

So, let us not play for publicity and trying to score points externally, but focus instead on removing real obstacles to a long-lasting, sustainable peace. Armenia and Azerbaijan have shown in recent years that this is possible when there is the political will – on both sides. The people of Armenia and Azerbaijan deserve no less.

*Elin Suleymanov is the Ambassador of Azerbaijan to the United Kingdom