Azernews.Az

BAKU – The Azerbaijani community in Germany will protest at a planned concert devoted to the self-proclaimed republic run by ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno Karabakh region, the state committee for the diaspora told AssA-Irada.

The Azerbaijani Coordinating Center has sent letters to the Germany-based diaspora groups calling on them to protest at the illegal "20 years of the Nagorno Karabakh republic" concert, scheduled for September 19 in Stuttgart as part of the Days of Armenian Culture, which began Wednesday and will last until September 22.

The center has also sent letters of protest to the Prime Minister of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg Winfried Kretschmann and Stuttgart Mayor Wolfgang Schuster, demanding to cancel the concert. It informed the German officials about the policy of aggression pursued by Armenia against Azerbaijan since 1988, referring to the outbreak of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, which emerged due to Armenian territorial claims and boiled into a war in the early 1990s.

The center noted that Nagorno Karabakh is Azerbaijan’s indigenous land. It said that the Nagorno Karabakh republic has not been recognized by any country, including Germany, and by supporting the upcoming concert, Baden-Wuerttemberg authorities are de facto recognizing the separatist regime in Nagorno Karabakh, in defiance of Germany’s foreign policy.

The separatist regime held an illegal referendum in 1991 with the participation of only Armenian residents of Nagorno Karabakh. The voters allegedly supported so-called independence of the region.

About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including Nagorno Karabakh and seven surrounding regions, has been occupied by Armenian armed forces since the Karabakh war that ended with the signing of a fragile cease-fire in 1994. OSCE-brokered peace talks have been fruitless so far.