Nagorno Garabagh

Nagorno Garabagh

Yerevanâ€™s statements distort essence of Karabakh conflict, says Azerbaijan

18 May 2016 15:04 (UTC +04:00)

He was commenting on the statement made by Armenia's Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian during the session of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in Sofia.

A meeting was held in Vienna May 16 involving President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, US Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, French Minister of State for European Affairs Harlem Desir, OSCE Minsk group co-chairs, and special representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk.

Hajiyev noted that today, the entire international community, including the OSCE Minsk Group emphasizes the inadmissibility of the dangerous status quo and urge for changing it.

“Unfortunately, instead of showing constructiveness, Armenia’s foreign minister is by all means trying to create conditions for preserving the status quo. If he is doing this under the instructions of his country’s president, this is a very dangerous way and may dramatize the situation,” the spokesman said, urging the Minsk Group co-chairs to take serious measures in this regard.

Hajiyev added that when Nalbandian, representing the corrupt military dictatorship regime, is speaking about “democratic security” and “democratic peace,” it sounds ridiculous.

“Carrying out the massacre of its own people with firearms, the Armenian regime has no moral, political and legal right to talk about human rights and democracy,” he stressed.

The military provocation committed by Armenian troops on the contact line in early April has proved once again that the Armenian regime is a major threat to the entire region, Hajiyev concluded.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includes Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCE Minsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996.

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.