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Azerbaijani community entitled to take part in determining legal status of Karabakh region

8 January 2019 16:00 (UTC+04:00)
Azerbaijani community entitled to take part in determining legal status of Karabakh region

By Trend

There are significant changes in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Trend reports referring to an article published in one of the leading Italian newspapers L'Opinione.

"A congress of the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh was held in Baku approximately in mid-December,” the article said. “Young employee of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Tural Ganjaliyev was elected head of the community instead of 68-year-old Bayram Safarov. This news is of great importance for communities in the region because new diplomatic mechanisms may be used to resolve the conflict."

“Ganjaliyev is from the Nagorno-Karabakh region,” the article said. “He was born in Azerbaijan’s Shusha city. He spent his childhood near the house-museum of famous Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov.”

"After the occupation of Shusha in 1992, he moved to Baku, where he got his musical education, but did not become a professional musician,” the article said. “He got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in law at the Baku State University. In 2004, he began his diplomatic career in the security department of the Foreign Ministry and then worked in the embassy of Azerbaijan in Canada and in embassy of Azerbaijan in the Czech Republic. In 2017, he represented the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh at the conference on "Human Rights and IDPs" held in Vienna under the OSCE auspices."

"I have been a refugee since 1992,” he said. “I would like to use my right to return to Shusha, where I was born, and to the house where I spent my childhood.”

"The criminal junta created in the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia is essentially a continuation of former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan’s regime,” he said. “The Armenian population living there, that is, the Armenian community of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, has been occupied by the separatist regime. They are fully controlled and have been deprived of all rights. The Armenian population ousted Sargsyan during the mass protests in April 2018. The recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh region show that the population is tired of this separatist criminal regime.”

“The initial goal of the young diplomat is to strengthen the role and requirements of the Azerbaijani community to ensure equal access to the negotiations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of the region,” the article said.

"During the negotiations, Armenia and Azerbaijan were determined as parties to the conflict, and the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of Nagorno-Karabakh as interested parties,” he said. “Settlement of the conflict is impossible without restoring the legitimacy of the Azerbaijani community and its rights, as well as without returning Azerbaijanis to their lands. Sargsyan’s regime prevented the establishment of a dialogue between the two communities.”

“The fact that the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh is headed by a young professional diplomat means that Azerbaijan wants to strengthen the role of the community in ensuring equal access to the negotiations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of the region,” he said.

"While determining the status of Nagorno-Karabakh region, the only position of the Armenian side cannot be taken as a basis," the article said.

The Azerbaijani community, which due to ethnic cleansing was forced to leave the region, has the legal right to participate in the process of determining the future legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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