Azernews.Az

The Armenians are falsifying ancient and modern history, an Azerbaijani presidential aide has said.

Ali Hasanov, the Presidential Administration official in charge of social and political affairs, said at an international conference in Baku Thursday that Armenian historians create myths and write their history on this basis. He said they deceive the whole world science by including false information in various political encyclopedias, thus trying to distort the history of the South Caucasus region.

"Attributing [to their nation] the ethnic structure, entire culture, all good things that the peoples of the South Caucasus possess, the Armenians are trying to appropriate all this. They consider other nations as nomads, who have no idea about culture," Hasanov told the conference, titled "The role of Caucasus Albania in the history of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus".

Hasanov said no nation will leave the South Caucasus, as "people will not go away, leaving everything to someone else".

"We must make our history by looking to the future," he said. "We must know who and how lived here and how they came here. But the future cannot be built on the past."

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict for two decades over the mountainous Nagorno Karabakh region, an historical Azerbaijani territory where Armenians were settled in the early 19th century. Azerbaijan and Armenia waged a brutal war in early 1990s which claimed some 30,000 lives and displaced about a million Azerbaijanis. The war, which flared up due to Armenia’s territorial claims, ended with the signing of a fragile cease-fire in 1994. About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory has been under the occupation of Armenian armed forces since then. OSCE-brokered peace talks have been largely fruitless so far.