Maps Related to Disputed Territories and Sotk Scanned and Sent to Ministries

The former director of the National Archive, Amatuni Virabyan, discussed on Sputnik Armenia whether there exists a documentary database in the archive relating to the delimitation work between Armenia and Azerbaijan that could shed light on post-war realities.

Virabyan noted that the sections that were disputed and discussed by the commission led by Vladimir Movsisyan in the 1980s have been preserved in the archive, but he is not familiar with other sections. "I am familiar with the maps from 1944-46 and I assume they have received them recently from Moscow. You know, there has never really been a delimitation with Azerbaijan. Delimitation is generally a process where a bilateral commission passes through specific locations and decides which stone belongs to your territory and which belongs to ours, and they plant pillars. Such a thing has never been done. The issue is that it was an administrative boundary from the peak of one mountain to the peak of another. Delimitation is a very complex and time-consuming task," the former director of the National Archive stated.

Virabyan emphasized that although Georgia and Armenia have been independent states since 1991, the delimitation process has not been completed to this day, and delimitation has never been conducted with Azerbaijan; there have only been disputed territories, and issues have been resolved maintaining the principle of parity.

"For Armenia and Azerbaijan, a collection of about 1000 pages of different maps should be created, with a separate map for every 5 kilometers. Just imagine how many maps need to be prepared; thus, taking a map as a basis is not correct, especially since no map contains detailed delimitation," noted the director of the National Archive.

Virabyan is unaware of what happened to the documentary base of the State Committee on Geodesy and Cartography after its dissolution, but emphasized that no maps or projects have been transferred from there to the archive. According to him, thousands of pages of factual materials available in the national archive, including maps related to disputed territories and Sotk, were scanned and transferred on disk to interested departments, including the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Territorial Administration, and the Ministry of Justice. Several scanning machines worked for several days to carry out this task.