YEREVAN/BAKU

Armenia and Azerbaijan made another decisive step towards a full settlement as Yerevan handed over major landmine maps of lands it occupied for almost three decades.

The maps show another 92,000 hidden anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the former front-line Fizuli and Zangelan districts. Armenia occupied those districts and all or parts of seven others of Azerbaijan for 25-30 years.

“On July 3, Armenia, at the initiative of the Russian Federation, provided Azerbaijan with maps of mines installed during the occupation in Fizuli and Zangilan regions in Karabakh,” the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said.

Last month, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan gave maps of 97,000 mines in another district, Agdam. Those maps were relayed via an American envoy, evidently in a display of displeasure with Moscow.

Taken together, the maps of the three districts detail the locations of 300,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, a number far greater than de-mining experts had anticipated.

The maps, of course, do not include records of unexploded shells, booby-trap type explosives, or mines likely planted in haste as Armenian forces retreated.

Removing the hazards will be extremely costly and time-consuming, with estimates ranging from five to 13 years for the clean-up.

Armenian forces also occupied four other Azerbaijani districts. It has yet to relinquish maps for those four, although they were further from the immediate former front lines and believed to be less heavily mined.

Azerbaijan retook most of the occupied districts late last year in a six-week blitz. Russia mediated an armistice between the sides which forced Armenia to give up more of the occupied territories. PM Pashinyan said it was the only way out of a bad situation and saved the country from even worse losses.

It is not clear if the landmine maps were handed over via a third party or directly, though the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry statement thanked the head of the Russian peacekeeping force “for his intermediary role in the implementation of the humanitarian initiative to obtain mine maps.”

The immense scale of the landmine issue -along with the fact the districts were systematically looted over the years of the occupation – has made it impossible for practically any of the more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis ethnically cleansed in the early 1990s by Armenians to return.

At least 25 have Azerbaijanis have been killed and over 100 injured since in the last few months in landmine incidents.

“The Foreign Ministry emphasises that receiving mine maps from Armenia will save the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens, including de-miners, and will accelerate the implementation of construction and reconstruction projects initiated by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the liberated territories, as well as the process of returning internally displaced persons,” the statement went on.

Illustrating the subject’s sensitive nature, the landmine map handover was not mentioned on official Armenian websites and given only scant coverage on independent ones.

MINEFIELD MAPS FOLLOW THE TURKISH-RUSSIAN AGREEMENT TO SPEED FULL SETTLEMENT

The map handover came just after a widely advertised meeting and agreement between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in Antalya, Turkey.

The two vowed to accelerate joint efforts to bring Baku and Yerevan to a full peace agreement and normal relations, and open long-shut trade routes.

This would also likely speed normalisation of ties between Turkey and Armenia, bitter foes for a century.

Though outwardly Moscow and Ankara have cordial ties, under the surface they have often been complicated.

The Kremlin’s idea of accepting NATO member Turkey as basically an equal partner in an area it has long regarded as its strategic backyard could not have been easy, but Moscow appeared to have no real choice militarily or strategically.

Turkey actively helped build the Azerbaijani army for over a quarter-century. Azerbaijan is Turkey’s key backer, a country with which it has deep cultural ties.

So sensitive was the idea that in the original November 10 Kremlin-negotiated armistice that Turkey was not explicitly mentioned initially.

Yet Moscow and Ankara operate a joint armistice monitoring centre in the gutted, looted Azerbaijani city of Agdam, so systematically destroyed during the Armenian occupation that it is often called “Azerbaijan’s Hiroshima”.

The issue of landmines, a lack of a fully demarcated border and the opening of trade routes have provoked new tensions along the undefined frontier since the armistice.

Baku last month threatened to use force to resolve the issue with what is now a decimated Armenian military.

With heavy Turkish backing, Russia would likely have its hands full in such a scenario. Officially, Armenia is a member of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), though many see it as a reluctant one.

Since last year’s armistice, Yerevan and Baku have seemed at times to express discontent with the Kremlin’s role.

AZERBAIJAN RETURNS 15 MORE ARMENIANS

Evidently, as a reciprocal step, Azerbaijan released 15 Armenians it was holding. Baku has insisted they were rounded up after the November 10 armistice and therefore not POWs but “border-violators”, or other alleged wrongdoers.

“As a humane step, the Azerbaijani side handed over to Armenia 15 people of Armenian origin, who were sentenced to imprisonment by a court decision, and whose term of punishment has expired,” the Foreign Ministry said.

Unlike the lack of coverage in Armenia of the landmine issue, the return of the group of detained Armenians was trumpeted in the country’s press outlets.

Baku released 15 other Armenians in June when Armenian PM Pashinyan handed over the first set of maps.

The contentious landmine question and that of delimiting the border (Russian President Vladimir Putin noted last week that the situation was complicated by the fact there had never been a real one between the two now independent countries) are challenging enough.

And yet, there remains the issue of what is left of the former Azerbaijani Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh district, where an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Armenians remain.

After last year’s all-out military effort, Armenians remain in control of a much-reduced section of it. Azerbaijan says the issue is thus resolved, that there is no such entity as “Nagorno-Karabakh” and that the Armenians remaining in the area can have “cultural autonomy” only.

Yet, the question may still complicate efforts to define the border in a full bilateral agreement and is potentially dangerous for Pashinyan. The 46-year-old writer and journalist already came under fire last month for handing over the first set of landmine maps to Azerbaijan.

As well as for a comment that Armenia, despite the historical enmity between the countries, were after all neighbours and would eventually have to find a way to co-exist.

Despite this, he overwhelmingly won a snap parliamentary poll last month called in response to protests by nationalists that he was responsible for the war loss to Azerbaijan and for signing the armistice. He said that both were inevitable.