Azerbaijani community leader condemns Armenians' arranging visits to Nagorno-Karabakh
By Sara Rajabova
The Armenians of Karabakh should not forget that they are citizens of Azerbaijan, head of the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh Bayram Safarov told journalists on August 30.
Nagorno-Karabakh is an Azerbaijani region occupied by Armenia along with seven adjacent regions since a war between the two countries in the early 1990s.
Referring to the issue of the plundering of the natural resources of Nagorno-Karabakh, Safarov said the Armenians living there as well as in Armenia itself have no financial resources to tap these resources.
"This is another disinformation of the Armenians. By spreading this kind of disinformation about its economic achievements, Armenia is deceiving its own population. The current economic situation in Armenia is deplorable and a solution to this situation could be found only by ending the policy of aggression against Azerbaijan," Safarov said.
Safarov also said that Armenia fraudulently lures official and unofficial representatives of foreign governments to Nagorno-Karabakh. According to him, the officials of foreign governments presume that all the territories where they were taken are part of Armenia.
"That is, they travel to Armenia and then it turns out that they were also taken to Nagorno-Karabakh. There is no such official who visited Nagorno-Karabakh for a second time. This, in itself, indicates the hypocrisy with which the Armenians prepare for such visits," the community leader said.
Recently, a number of Russian journalists paid a visit to Armenia and the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region at the invitation of Armenian-Russian Cooperation, a Moscow-based organization. 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 said such visits, paid without prior notification of the relevant authorities of Azerbaijan, are illegal and damaging to the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The Azerbaijani government states that persons who visited Nagorno-Karabakh will be considered persona non grata in Azerbaijan and such visits run counter to 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.