Azernews.Az

Members of the Euronest parliamentary assembly raised the Nagorno Karabakh conflict at a meeting with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Azerbaijani MP Faraj Guliyev told Trend news agency Friday in an interview following his visit to Armenia.

Faraj Guliyev and two other Azerbaijani parliament members, Azay Guliyev and Rovshan Rzayev, visited Armenia February 21-23 to attend a meeting of the social affairs committee of Euronest, a legislative body of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership program.

Regarding the issues discussed with the Armenian president, Guliyev said the Azerbaijani MPs had told Sargsyan they could not visit the graves of Azerbaijanis buried in the occupied territories.

"The importance of organizing a meeting between the Azerbaijani and Armenian communities of Nagorno Karabakh [an Azerbaijani region occupied since a war in the early 1990s] was stressed as well."

According to him, when Sargsyan said Nagorno Karabakh is not part of Azerbaijan, the MPs reminded him of the four standing UN resolutions on an unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian occupying forces from the Azerbaijani territories.

Guliyev said that though it was proposed to discuss ways of resolving the Nagorno Karabakh conflict with the assistance of the European Union, Sargsyan opposed this, saying that the OSCE Minsk Group plays the leading role in the conflict settlement.

Nonetheless, lawmakers from other countries expressed their support for EU mediation in peace talks.

Guliyev said that after the Azerbaijani MPs arrived in Yerevan, Armenian border guards at the airport held them in a detention facility for a few hours.

Meanwhile, the Armenian delegation to the Euronest parliamentary assembly said it would join the organization’s session due in Baku April 3-4 if the safety of its members is guaranteed, Artak Zakaryan, a co-chair of the Euronest committee for education, culture and social affairs, was quoted by the Panarmenian news website as saying.

Besides Azerbaijan and Armenia, Euronest includes Georgia, another South Caucasus republic, as well as Moldova and Ukraine.

About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including Nagorno Karabakh and seven surrounding regions, has been occupied by Armenian armed forces since a fragile ceasefire was signed in 1994 following the war. Efforts by the US, Russian and French co-chairs of the Minsk Group have been largely fruitless so far.

This story is published by AzerNEWS Weekly under a project funded by the Foundation for State Assistance to the Development of the Media under the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.