Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia
“There will be no peace treaty”; this is a quote from the speech of the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, made on March 18, 2023.
President Aliyev made this statement in Talish village of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was depopulated as a result of the 44-day war.
In Talish as well as in other regions depopulated by the 44-day war Azerbaijan is openly implementing resettlement programs in an attempt to eliminate the Armenian trace from the territories of Nagorno-Karabakh that have passed under its control. At the beginning of the 1990s, Shahumyan region, Getashen sub-region and other settlements with a large Armenian population also suffered a similar fate.
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The above-mentioned actions of Azerbaijan are in direct contradiction to the point 7 of the trilateral statement of November 9, 2020, according to which internally displaced persons and refugees shall return to the Nagorno-Karabakh territory and adjacent regions under the control of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
With the policy of illegal resettlement and the practice of terrorizing the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, official Baku is doing everything to make the implementation of the above-mentioned provision of the trilateral statement impossible.
Azerbaijan is doing everything to make peace in the region impossible. On October 6, 2022, in Prague and on October 31, 2022, in Sochi, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan adopted statements according to which, based on the UN Charter and the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, Armenia and Azerbaijan recognize each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, and the demarcation process between the two countries should take place exclusively on this basis. Despite this, on March 18, the president of Azerbaijan again announced that the border demarcation should take place under the conditions set by Azerbaijan and has been continuously talking about some historical maps for a long time.
Azerbaijan not only keeps under occupation the sovereign territories of the Republic of Armenia which it illegally occupied on May 12 and November 17, 2021 and in September 2022, but also introduced the so-called “Western Azerbaijan” discourse and declares practically the entire territory of the Republic of Armenia as Azerbaijani land.
This means the expression of open claims towards practically the entire sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan also threatens Armenia if the latter does not accept those claims.
Azerbaijan continues the gross violations of the trilateral and quadrilateral statements adopted in various formats, and in practice there is not a single clause in those statements that Azerbaijan has not violated: illegal closure of the Lachin corridor, keeping Armenian prisoners of war and other captives in illegal detention until now, obstructing the opening of regional communications with groundless discourse about “corridor”.
Moreover, the President of Azerbaijan has violated the commitment he made on February 18, 2023 to discuss with Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh the issue of their rights and guarantees.
Just a few weeks after the mentioned commitment Azerbaijan announced that it was going to discuss the issue of “integration of the Armenians of Karabakh”, and the statements made in Talish, the illegal blockade of the Lachin corridor, the terrorist attack on March 5 prove that Azerbaijan intends to resolve the issue of at least assimilation of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, and Armenia’s alarms about official Baku’s preparations to subject the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians to genocide should not be ignored by the international community.
In the discourse of the last period Azerbaijan found a new accusation against the Republic of Armenia, accusing it of being a mono-ethnic country and trying to create the impression that, unlike Armenia, Azerbaijan is a multi-ethnic country. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia, four national minorities have a mandate in the highest legislative body of the country, and there is no such regulation in Azerbaijan which considers itself multi-ethnic.
The assessment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia is clear: with its aggressive discourse and actions Azerbaijan makes preparations for subjecting the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to genocide and for a new aggression against Armenia.
In the current situation, it is necessary to launch the international mechanisms for the prevention of genocides, send an international fact-finding mission to the Lachin corridor and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as to directly condemn Azerbaijan’s aggressive actions and policies. At the same time, the Republic of Armenia expresses its confidence in the peace agenda based on the trilateral statements of November 9, 2020, January 11, 2021, October 31, 2022 and the quadrilateral statement of October 6, 2022.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Government
