Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – The Armenian government is concerned over the Upper (Nagorno) Karabakh conflict being tabled at the United Nations again.

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry has responded harshly to Azerbaijan’s efforts to achieve adoption of a new resolution at the UN General Assembly condemning the country’s occupation of neighboring Azerbaijan’s territories.

Yerevan claimed that Baku was thus impeding a peaceful settlement of the long-standing Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

The UN is expected to table the draft resolution in mid-September. The document says that displaced Azerbaijanis driven out of Nagorno Karabakh and other occupied regions around it during the war in the early 1990s reserve the right to return to their native lands. The OSCE, which is brokering the ongoing peace talks through its Minsk Group, is requested to delegate a fact-finding mission to the conflict zone to scrutinize the extent of the parties’ compliance with international humanitarian law.

Tigran Balayan, the spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, has told Radio Liberty that if the resolution passes, this would allegedly be a dire blow upon international efforts to settle the Karabakh dispute. He said Armenian diplomats are already working to counter passage of the document.

Yerevan also said that no international organization other than the Minsk Group should be drawn to the conflict settlement process.

Alexander Arzumanyan, an opposition leader who served as Armenia’s envoy to the UN in the 1990s, says it will be impossible to prevent the resolution on Karabakh from passing.

"According to the General Assembly by-laws, only if five countries vote for a resolution while other UN members stay neutral, the resolution passes. In such situations, usually most countries abstain."

The UN GA passed a similar resolution on the situation in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, drafted by Baku, in March 2008. The document recognized Karabakh as an internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan and urged a full, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian forces, which occupy 20 percent of Azerbaijani lands, despite four standing UN resolutions on their unconditional pullout passed earlier.

39 countries, mostly members of the Organization for Islamic Conference (OIC), voted for the document, while seven opposed the initiative, and 100 member states abstained.