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APA (18 October 2017)

The Armenian president’s irresponsible evasion from the statement made after the Geneva meeting is not right, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said at a joint press conference with his Polish counterpart Witold Waszczykowski in Baku on Wednesday, APA reported.

 “The statement is a joint one whose entire text was dictated by the presidents. The Armenian president’s irresponsible evasion from this statement is not right,” Mammadyarov said.

The minister noted that the talks should be substantive.

 “There are concrete proposals as to how the co-chairs should broker the talks by the end of the year. They proposed holding a meeting of the foreign ministers in the near future. The principle goal is to hold the discussions concretely. The location and date of the meeting is not fixed yet,” he added.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includes Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCE Minsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the CSCE (OSCE after the Budapest summit held in December 1994) Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, the US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996. 

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.