Foreign

Washington. Isabel Levine – APA. Ambassador Agshin Mehdiyev, Permanent Representative of Azerbaijan to the UN, has submitted a 10-pagse letter to the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council concerning the behavior of Armenian leaders, as well as latest updates on the ceasefire violations, as well as the killing of the Azerbaijani citizens by the Armenian armed forces, APA’s Washington DC correspondent was informed by UN News Center.

The Ambassador raised his concern over the facts that Armenian forces intensified attacks on Azerbaijani civilians and civilian objects over the last months. Two month after shooting a nine-year-old Azerbaijani child by a sniper on 8 March, Armenian armed forces continued firing the civilian population of the Chiragli village of the Agdam District of Azerbaijan. Later, on 3 June, Elmar Piriyev, a resident of the Aghjabadi District, was killed by Armenian militaries in the Chemenli village of Agdam, repots the letter.

“Besides such inhuman and unjustifiable actions, the high-ranking officials of Armenia continued their irresponsible statements and provocative visits to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, thus openly and deliberately challenging the international mediation efforts aimed at the soonest settlement of the conflict”, says Ambassador Mehdiyev.

“Thus, in an interview on 16 May to the Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News) newspaper, full of the usual historical falsifications and factual distortions, President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan confirmed once again that the Armenian side considers the conflict settlement process only as a means of achieving the annexation of Azerbaijani territories. The views of Armenian President about the relevant international legal principles and their application and scope in the context of the settlement of the conflict unambiguously testify to the fundamental and persistent denial by this State Member of the United Nations of the generally accepted norms and principles of international law. The ideas conveyed to the public in the aforementioned interview of Serzh Sargsyan are none other than a product of stereotypical thinking and sheer nonsense in terms of not only the letter and spirit of law but also elementary logic. In addition to Armenia’s confused history and the annexationist and racially motivated nature of its policy and practice towards neighbouring nations, yet another flow of revelations from the head of the Armenian State also demonstrated how intellectual and educational gaps are detrimental to the decision-making ability of this country’s high-ranking officials”, says the letter.

While the President of Armenia acknowledged his active involvement in the “Garabagh movement” since 1988, the Vice-Chairman of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia, Razmik Zohrabyan, informed the public several days before the interview of Serzh Sargsyan that the so-called “Garabagh movement” had been a product of the State Security Committee (KGB) of the USSR.

“In his interview, Armenian President made it clear that his country’s territorial claims are not limited to the Daghlyq Garabagh (Nagorno Karabakh) region of Azerbaijan but also include other parts of the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan, in particular its Autonomous Republic of Nakhchyvan. The Republic of Azerbaijan rejects any suggestion that Daghlyq Garabagh and Nakhchyvan had ever belonged to Armenia in the past and that these territories had been allegedly “detached and handed over to Azerbaijan” by the Soviet authorities only in the 1920s”, Ambassador Mehidyev mentiones, adding, Azerbaijan considers Armenia’s historical accounts false and as having the sole purpose of misleading the international community and justifying groundless territorial claims and annexationist aspirations.

“From ancient times up to now, both Daghlyq Garabagh and Nakhchyvan were inalienable parts of Azerbaijan. The mass resettlement of Armenians in the Azerbaijani lands after the signing on 12 October 1813 and 10 February 1828 of the Gulustan and Turkmanchay treaties, respectively, accompanied by the imposition of artificial territorial division and purposeful attempts by the Armenians to expand their territorial scope at the expense of other peoples living in the region, laid the basis for long-term instability, tensions and conflicts there. Suffice it to say that, during the Soviet period, the territory of Armenia increased from 8,000-10,000 to 29,800 square kilometres. As a result, the Nakhchyvan region of Azerbaijan was cut off from the main body of the country. There is not a single Azerbaijani remaining in present-day Armenia of the more than half million Azerbaijani people who lived there when Soviet rule was established in the region. These facts are supported by numerous documents and acknowledged in Armenian official and academic sources”, he notes. “Moreover, in the 1920s, the ancestral land of Azerbaijan — Daghlyq Garabakh — was given the status of autonomy within the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, and its administrative borders were defined in such a way as to ensure that a small Armenian population constituted a majority in this autonomy. At the same time, a significantly larger Azerbaijani population residing in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia at that time was refused the same privilege, and attempts to so much as mention this were promptly, roughly and savagely suppressed”

After that, Ambassador Mehdiyev drew the UN officials’ attention to the last letter of Permanent Representative of Armenia, in which the author is trying to blame Azerbaijan for alleged “anti-Armenian propaganda” and “circulation of disinformation”.

However, he says, “such resentment is obviously irrelevant against the background of the continuing illegal occupation by Armenia of the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan, its unconcealed annexationist intentions and apparent disrespect for the position of the international community. In its unconvincing attempts to draw the international community’s attention away from the main problems by claiming that Azerbaijan has allegedly ignored and even mocked the proposals and statements on the withdrawing of snipers from the line of contact, the Armenian propaganda falls into its usual forgetfulness”.

“In his letter, the Permanent Representative of Armenia confirmed once again that his country rejects the recommendations of the OSCE MG Co-Chairs presented on the basis of their field assessment mission to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. It should be noted in this regard that the field assessment mission visited the occupied territories on the initiative of Azerbaijan, while Armenia, the occupying Power, is the only addressee of the call of the OSCE MG Co-Chairs to refrain from additional actions that would change the demographic, social or cultural character of the occupied territories of Azerbaijan”, says the Ambassador.

At the end, he mentioned that Azerbaijan has no doubts that the international law-based settlement of the conflict provides for the complete withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from all the occupied territories, the restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, the return of the forcibly displaced population to their places of origin and the peaceful coexistence of Armenian and Azerbaijani communities in the Daghlyq Garabagh region within the Republic of Azerbaijan.

“Unfortunately, attempts by the Armenian side to misinterpret the norms and principles of international law and its insistence on unrealistic annexationist claims, which Azerbaijan will never accept, speak to the real intentions of official Yerevan and represent an open challenge to the conflict settlement process and a serious threat to international and regional peace and security”, he adds.

According to the Ambassador Mehdiyev’s letter, during the month of May, 68 cases of violations of the ceasefire by the military forces of Armenia have occurred.

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