Armenia should be forced to peace: Azerbaijani MP
By Sara Rajabova
The international community will have to impose sanctions against Armenia and force it to the peace, in case of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict cannot be resolved peacefully.
Chairman of the Council of State Support to NGOs under the President of Azerbaijan, MP Azay Guliyev made the remarks at an international conference in Vilnius, organized within the framework of the "Perspectives and political attempts to resolve the frozen conflicts" project of the Democratic Political Institution, the Council told Trend Agency.
Guliyev said the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not frozen. "This is unresolved conflict. People are dying on contact line of troops," Guliyev said.
He noted that meetings between Azerbaijani and Armenian communities can be a factor that promotes conflict resolution and restoration of mutual trust between the two countries.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.
As a result of the military aggression of Armenia, over 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed, 4,866 are reported missing and almost 100,000 were injured, and 50,000 were disabled.
The UN Security Council's four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal have not been enforced to this day.
Peace talks, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, are underway on the basis of a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs and dubbed the Madrid Principles. The negotiations have been largely fruitless so far.