Azernews.Az

By Sara Rajabova

Armenia is taking advantage of tourism for certain political purposes. This is unacceptable and shows once again that Armenia is pursuing the policy of annexation of Azerbaijan's occupied territories, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmet Hajiyev said.

He made the statements on November 4 in reaction to recent reports in Armenian media claiming that a stand of the Nagorno-Karabakh separatist regime is operating as part of Armenian pavilion at the World Travel Market exhibition in London.

However, the event's organizer Reed Exhibitions Company said on November 3 that the separatist regime in Nagorno-Karabakh won't be represented at World Travel Market exhibition. The message came in reply to a letter from Azerbaijani embassy in UK.

Hajiyev told Trend Agency that Armenia, under various pretexts, tries to justify its failure by trying to present the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh regime and the so-called Karabakh Tourism Development Agency with a separate stand at international tourism exhibitions.

He also added that the participation of the Nagorno-Karabakh regime created in Azerbaijan's occupied territories at the international tourism exhibition in Italy's Rimini was prevented.

Hajiyev said by resorting to another provocative action and creating a stand in the pavilion of Tourism Department of Armenia's Economy Ministry, Armenian side tries to present this as presentation of tourism sphere of the Nagorno-Karabakh regime.

Armenia captured Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions in a war that followed the Soviet breakup in 1991. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and nearly 1 million were displaced as a result of the war.

The large-scale hostilities ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994 but Armenia continued its occupation in defiance of four UN Security Council resolutions calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal from the occupied lands.

Peace talks mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. have produced no results so far.