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UN concerned over unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

23 June 2015 17:56 (UTC+04:00)
UN concerned over unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

By Sara Rajabova

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed concern that the sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have not yet reached a peaceful settlement and the tensions are still rising.

He made the remark in an address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe summer session on June 23.

Ban Ki-moon said the military solution to the conflict will be devastating, not only for the sides of the conflict, but also for the entire region.

"I hope that the OSCE Minsk Group will help the sides reach a constructive and peaceful solution to the conflict," he said.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988, when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. A lengthy war in the early 1990s displaced over one million Azerbaijanis. Armenian armed forces occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

Peace talks, mediated by Russia, France and the U.S. through the OSCE Minsk Group, have been largely fruitless so far despite the efforts of the co-chair countries over the past 20 years.

Armenia has yet to implement the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.

Furthermore, during the PACE session, Samad Seyidov, an Azerbaijani MP and head of Azerbaijani delegation to PACE urged the Council of Europe to treat issue of refugees and internally displaced persons with particular interest.

“I raised the issue of the refugees, since Azerbaijan suffers from this problem. Azerbaijan has more than one million refugees and internally displaced persons and the country on its own copes with this problem. These people are still waiting for the liberation of occupied Azerbaijani lands by Armenia. I believe that the Council of Europe should be interested in objective information on the subject,” Seyidov said.

He went on to say that Armenia recently banned two appointed PACE rapporteurs’ entry into the country.

Seyidov said these are Milis Markovic, the rapporteur on the deliberate deprivation of residents of Azerbaijan’s border territories’ access to water, and Robert Walter, the rapporteur on the preparation of the report ‘Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and other occupied territories of Azerbaijan.’

“Currently, two PACE rapporteurs cannot enter the occupied Azerbaijani lands. If we want to alleviate the suffering of refugees and internally displaced persons, then regardless of their location, we must be attentive to the issues of direct relevance to us. We need to help the rapporteurs to enter the Azerbaijani occupied lands in order to obtain objective information about the situation,” Seyidov said.

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Sara Rajabova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @SaraRajabova

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