Azernews.Az

By Sara Rajabova

Senior Azerbaijani official has said that Armenia is a structure rather than a country.

"Personally, I do not consider Armenia as a country and stress this with full responsibility," he said. "Armenia is just a structure, an outpost in someone's hands," First deputy speaker of the Azerbaijani Parliament and Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on security and defense Ziyafat Asgarov said on September 16.

Armenia is an outpost in strange hands, Asgarov added.

According to him, Armenia does not have an independent foreign policy. "There is no normal person with whom one could negotiate on international law and decisions taken by the UN Security Council," he said.

Asgarov added that Armenia's economic situation is getting worse and worse every year. "Around 100,000 people leave the country annually. The pension policy is very poor," he said.

Asgarov stressed that if Armenia as a particular country would conduct a specific policy, then one could negotiate with it.

"Armenia, having no common border with any country which is a member of the Customs Union, joined this organization. All this is just a game," he concluded.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by US, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far. Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.