Azerbaijan calls for real steps from OSCE middlemen

By AzerNews

Azerbaijan does not support meeting for the sake of meetings and urges real activity from the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, member of Azerbaijani Parliament Aydin Mirzazade told Azernews.

He was commenting on the proposal of OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs - Igor Popov of Russia, Jacques Faure of France and Ian Kelly of the United States - to organize a meeting of the foreign ministers in the coming weeks.

In their statement after the visit to the region the co-chairs said they plan to organize a meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers, in the coming weeks to advance the peace process.

Meanwhile, Baku has agreed with the OSCE Minsk Group's proposal to organize a meeting of foreign ministers, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov told journalists on Thursday.

The OSCE Minsk Group mediators will arrive in the region next month.

There were no new proposals during the recent visit to the region, except for the proposal of holding a meeting of foreign ministers, Mammadyarov added.

"Baku gave a positive response to this proposal," he said.

According to MP Mirzazade, organization of the next ministerial makes an impression that visits of the co-chairs are of political character and they are involved in organizing meetings rather than carrying out serious activity.

He said the Minsk Group co-chairing countries are not ordinary countries, but three of the five permanent countries of the UN Security Council, which enjoys quite great authority and influence in the world.

"The co-chairs' efforts to organize meetings and to bring together the conflict sides can be evaluated as nothing but diplomatic activity. However, the key task is not to normalize the relations between conflict sides, but to put an end to the occupation of the part of the Azerbaijani lands by Armenia," Mirzazade said.

He said the policy not to call the invader country by its name and accept it as one of the sides to the conflict, unfortunately is one of the leading directions in the foreign policy of the co-chairing countries.

Mirzazade noted that the last visit of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs to the region raised some interest.

The co-chairs as well as the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Andrzej Kasprzyk, toured the region on March 18-22 and April 1-6 to continue working to help the sides find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Azerbaijan and Armenia for over two decades have been locked in conflict, which emerged over Armenian territorial claims. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions. The UN Security Council has adopted four resolutions on Armenia's withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territory, but they have not been enforced to this day.

A precarious cease-fire was signed in 1994. However, units of the Armenian armed forces commit armistice breaches on the frontline almost every day.