On March 16, at the summit of heads of Turkic states, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s speech was an overt manifestation of territorial claims against the Republic of Armenia and preparation for another attack.
This was stated in a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia.
“By presenting the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia under the fictitious name of ‘Western Azerbaijan,’ the President of Azerbaijan grossly violates not only the UN Charter, the UN General Assembly Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States, the Alma-Ata Declaration, but also his own commitments undertaken under the Prague and Sochi declarations, to which he himself referred in this very speech. Azerbaijan continuously obstructs the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions, while at the same time declaring that it intends to resettle the territories that came under its control as a result of the forced displacement of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. Having violated virtually all articles of the November 9, 2020 trilateral statement, the President of Azerbaijan, by his own admission, is obstructing the process of opening regional communications through fictitious discourse. The belligerent rhetoric of Azerbaijan’s leader is aimed at completely undermining efforts to establish stability in the South Caucasus and resorting to large-scale use of force both against the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia and against Nagorno-Karabakh. Moreover, the insulting rhetoric directed against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, accompanied by actions aimed at creating a humanitarian catastrophe on the ground, reveals Azerbaijan’s undisguised policy of carrying out ethnic cleansing at the highest level. Furthermore, voicing such provocative theses in Ankara aims not only to undermine the ongoing peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also to impede the positive dynamics in the process of normalizing Armenia-Turkey relations. All partners interested in the stability and peace of the region must unequivocally assess such a policy of the President of Azerbaijan and take active steps to eliminate Azerbaijan’s violations of international law and exclude manifestations of the use of force,” the aforementioned statement said.
