New York [US], August 9: Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a U.S.-brokered peace agreement on Friday during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump that would boost bilateral economic ties after decades of conflict.
The deal between the South Caucasus rivals - assuming it holds - would be a significant accomplishment for the Trump administration that is sure to rattle Moscow, which sees the region as within its sphere of influence.
"It's a long time - 35 years - they fought and now they're friends, and they're going to be friends for a long time," Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House, where he was flanked by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at odds since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Azerbaijani region mostly populated by ethnic Armenians, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. Azerbaijan took back full control of the region in 2023, prompting almost all of the territory's 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.
Trump said the two countries had committed to stop fighting, open up diplomatic relations and respect each other's territorial integrity.
The agreement includes exclusive U.S. development rights to a strategic transit corridor through the South Caucasus that the White House said would facilitate greater exports of energy and other resources.
Trump said the United States signed separate deals with each country to expand cooperation on energy, trade and technology, including artificial intelligence.
He said restrictions had also been lifted on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Both leaders praised Trump for helping to end the conflict and said they would nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. "So who if not President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?" Aliyev said.
Trump has tried to present himself as a global peacemaker in the first months of his second term. The White House credits him with brokering a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand and sealing peace deals between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Pakistan and India.
However, he has not managed to end Russia's war in Ukraine or Israel's conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
U.S. officials said the agreement was hammered out during repeated visits to the region and would provide a basis for working toward a full normalization between the countries.
Senior administration officials told reporters the agreement marked the first end to several frozen conflicts on Russia's periphery since the end of the Cold War and said it would send a powerful signal to the entire region.
The peace deal could transform the South Caucasus, an energy-producing region neighboring Russia, Europe, Turkey and Iran that is criss-crossed by oil and gas pipelines but riven by closed borders and longstanding ethnic conflicts.
Armenia plans to award the U.S. exclusive special development rights for an extended period on the transit corridor, administration officials told Reuters this week. The so-called Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity has already drawn interest from nine companies, including three U.S. firms, one official said on condition of anonymity.
Daphne Panayotatos, with the Washington-based rights group Freedom Now, said it has urged the Trump administration to use the meeting with Aliyev to demand the release of some 375 political prisoners held in the country.
Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country that hosted the United Nations climate summit last November, has rejected Western criticism of its human rights record, describing it as unacceptable interference.
Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Additional reporting by Christian Martinez and Costas Pitas; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Alex Richardson, Mark Porter, Paul Simao, Diane Craft and Richard Chang
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation
