Azernews.Az

By Sara Rajabova

Foreign nationals who visit the Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territories without permission of Azerbaijan do so for their own PR, a senior official said on August 30.

Elnur Aslanov, head of the Presidential Administration's Political Analysis and Information Provision Department, said that "looking at the list of these people, it is clear that these are low and uncivilized people who organize various scandals for the purpose of their own PR".

According to Aslanov, their visits do not contribute to the recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh, referring to an Azerbaijani region occupied by Armenia along with seven adjacent regions since a war in the early 1990s.

"These people visit the occupied lands of Azerbaijan to meet their subjective and mercantile interests. We are not concerned over this. Our concern is that countries do not impose sanctions on such citizens," he said.

At the invitation of Armenian-Russian Cooperation, a Moscow-based organization, a number of Russian journalists have paid a visit to Armenia and the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region. The group which illegally visited the occupied territories of Azerbaijan included TV host Anna Chapman, member of the Public Chamber of Russia Denis Dvornikov, public figure, human rights activist Sergei Karnaukhov, correspondent of the Rossiyskiy Reporter (Russian Reporter) magazine and correspondent of DairyNews news agency Alexandra Ryzhkova, and others.

Azerbaijan has repeatedly warned foreign officials and diplomats over visits to the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia, saying this contradicts international law. The Foreign Ministry has stated that such visits, paid without prior notification of the relevant authorities of Azerbaijan, are illegal and damaging to the settlement process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Elman Abdullayev recently said that persons who visited Nagorno-Karabakh will be considered persona non grata in Azerbaijan. Abdullayev said that since visits to the occupied territories are illegal, the visit of the said persons is a violation of the law "On State Border" of Azerbaijan.

Recently, the Foreign Ministry published a list of those declared persona non grata over illegal visits to the Armenian-occupied territories, which included 335 people.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since the 1990s war that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory. The UN Security Council's four resolutions on Armenian withdrawal have not been enforced to this day.

Peace talks aimed at resolving the long-standing conflict, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, are underway on the basis of a peace outline proposed by the Minsk Group co-chairs and dubbed the Madrid Principles. The negotiations have been largely fruitless so far.