Turks to go to Azerbaijan for truce duty
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s parliament on Tuesday granted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government permission to deploy peacekeepers to Azerbaijan to monitor a cease-fire deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia that aims to end the conflict in the region.
In a show of hands, legislators voted in favor of a oneyear mandate allowing the government to send troops to Azerbaijan, where they would observe possible violations of the truce from a joint Turkish-Russian monitoring center. The cease-fire ended six weeks of intense fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Erdogan’s government would determine the number of troops to be sent and it wasn’t immediately clear how many the country planned to deploy. The motion states that civilian personnel could also be deployed as part of the peacekeeping mission.
Last week, the defense ministers of Russia and Turkey signed a memorandum to create a joint monitoring center in Azerbaijan, although technical details of the mission are still being worked out.
Azerbaijan has been pressing for its ally Turkey, which has supported Baku in the conflict, to take an active role in the peace talks and was the first to announce its involvement in the monitoring of the cease-fire agreement.
Russian officials have said that Ankara’s involvement will be limited to the work of the monitoring center on Azerbaijani soil, and Turkish peacekeepers wouldn’t go to Nagorno-Karabakh. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the center will operate remotely, using drones and other technical means to monitor possible violations.