Azernews.Az

Azerbaijani First Vice-Speaker Ziyafat Asgarov has said settling the Upper (Nagorno) Garabagh conflict with Armenia within Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity does not meet any country’s interests, blaming world powers for failing to do enough to resolve the long-standing dispute.
Speaking to an international conference on South Caucasus security in Baku on Friday, he noted that Azerbaijan is cooperating with the West under several large-scale energy projects but has not yet seen any benefits from this partnership in terms of resolving the Garabagh conflict, its most pressing problem.
Asgarov said the world’s leading policymakers are treating the issue with double standards. He emphasized that during unrest in the Balkans, NATO promptly moved to solve the problem, while the Garabagh conflict was vested in the mediating OSCE Minsk Group, whose efforts have been unsuccessful for nearly two decades.
"The Minsk Group has accomplished nothing over 18 years. Is the world community waiting for Upper Garabagh to fall into Palestine’s state? International law has been left helpless at Armenia’s hands," the vice-speaker said.
Commenting on the reasoning that the Armenian community is strong in the world’s leading countries, Asgarov said that "if US policy depends on the Armenian diaspora, this is ridiculous and I don’t want to believe that."
According to him, international forces calling on Azerbaijan to seek a peaceful solution to the Garabagh conflict, actually, have no intention to assist the country.
"A NATO Parliamentary Assembly official has told me that no one wants to abandon Christian Armenia and help Muslim Azerbaijan," Asgarov said.
Addressing international experts attending the conference, the vice-speaker said that, "if international law does not work, the leading countries should declare this from the UN rostrum."
"That way Azerbaijan will know what to do. The international community has been insistently discouraging us from tackling a military solution of the conflict. But you should know that if Azerbaijan seeks to launch war, it won’t ask for permission from the United States, Russia, France or other leading powers. This will be a decision of the Azerbaijani people and their president," Asgarov said.
Azerbaijan has been facing a conflict with Armenia that began in 1988 on Armenian territorial claims. Since the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan including the Upper Garabagh region and its seven surrounding districts, despite four standing UN resolutions on unconditional pullout of Armenian troops and condemnation by a number of other international organizations.*