Azernews.Az

BAKU – Azerbaijan’s ruling party has issued a protest to the OSCE mediators brokering settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict over the resettlement of ethnic Armenian families from other countries to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the New Azerbaijan Party’s (NAP) website said.

In its letter issued on Thursday, NAP drew the attention of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs - Bernard Fassier of France, Igor Popov of Russia and Robert Bradtke of the United States - to the media reports about the resettlement of more than 200 Armenian families from the Central Asian state Kyrgyzstan to the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The letter says that the issue of Yerevan-backed illegal settlements in the occupied territories has been discussed at the UN and other international organizations many times. The OSCE fact-finding mission said in its report last year that about 15,000 Armenians were illegally resettled in the Azerbaijani territories, it said.

NAP said that arranging "new Armenian settlements" in the Nagorno-Karabakh region could seriously damage the Minsk Group-brokered "intensive and successive negotiations" on the settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

"An attempt to artificially change the demographic situation in this occupied territory, which has been cleansed from Azerbaijanis, is aimed at strengthening Armenia’s policy of aggression," the letter says.

NAP expressed deep concern over the settlement of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, calling on the Minsk Group co-chairs to condemn unambiguously the "policy of settlement". It said this policy "negates the results of peace talks and impedes the constructive efforts towards a peaceful solution of the conflict", urging to take action to prevent its adverse impact in time.

A copy of NAP’s letter will be submitted to OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Petros Efthymiou, who is visiting Baku.

The two South Caucasus republics waged a war in the early 1990s, which claimed some 30,000 lives and displaced about a million Azerbaijanis. Armenia has been occupying over 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory since then. A ceasefire accord was signed in 1994, but peace talks have been largely fruitless so far.