I want to invite Azerbaijan’s Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva to Karabakh. The wife of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, Anna Hakobyan, said this today, 4 December, at a conference on the theme “The Role of Women in Establishing Peace: Opportunities and Challenges.”
She also made a post about this on her Facebook page, in which she wrote:
A few days ago, Azerbaijan’s First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva wrote on her Telegram page that it is the dream of all of them to listen to mugham in Artsakh. I invite Mehriban Aliyeva to Artsakh, and she will be our guest. Our people, the people of Artsakh, know how to receive a guest, how to honour a guest, and among the accepted rules of our hospitality is also to honour the guest with the music of their choice. We can provide mugham, we can fulfil her dream, and in Karabakh she will listen to her beloved mugham.
This is an invitation, and if she accepts that invitation, I too am ready to be hosted in Baku. And I think that this could be a very realistic and very high realisation of the goal of UN Resolution 1325 throughout the world. But if Mehriban Aliyeva means that their dream is to come to Artsakh to listen to mugham and to do that through war, I assure you that in that case the dream will remain unfulfilled. Not only will it remain unfulfilled, but if they start a new war, new settlements will probably appear where listening to mugham will become an unfulfilled dream for them. If Mehriban Aliyeva says in the name of herself and her people that she dreams of listening to mugham in Artsakh, then there is only one way to reach that dream: that is peace, good-neighbourly relations with Artsakh, and mutual visits as a guest.
The different peoples of the world have been able to overcome wars that lasted longer years, have been able to overcome enmity, and today they have no borders, they live in the same economic union, they are the best of friends; if that has succeeded with other European peoples, why should it not succeed with us? The Azerbaijani side simply needs to show political will and finally shake off the obsession with war, understanding that it can achieve nothing with it. I want to repeat again that the invitation is completely serious.
