President Aliyev: Armenia did everything to disrupt negotiations

By Aisha Jabbarova

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said that the Armenian authorities did everything to disrupt the process of negotiations and that the negotiations around the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict stopped in 2019.

Aliyev made the remarks addressing a session of the Council of Heads of State of the Commonwealth of Independent States held in the format of a video conference on December 18.

“Armenian leadership did everything to disrupt the process of negotiations and essentially leave everything as it is, the status quo, especially since they were actively involved in the illegal settlement of the occupied territories, which is a war crime under Geneva Conventions.

“Starting in 2019, the Armenian leadership began to resort to new tactics – in essence, it was a refusal to imitate talks and a disruption of the process of negotiations,” the president said.

Aliyev reminded Armenian Defence Minister’s statement during the latter’s visit to the U.S. that Armenia was preparing for a new war for new territories, which Aliyev said fully reveals the essence of Yerevan’s aggressive policy.

Aliyev also reminded Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that Karabakh is Armenia, which run counter to the Madrid principles developed by co-chairs of the Minsk Group and which the previous Armenian leadership had accepted as a basis for negotiations.

Among other provocations by Yerevan, Aliyev sited illegal settlement of Armenian in Karabakh, inauguration of the leader of the criminal regime in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Azerbaijanis’ historic Shusha city.

“The actions and steps of the Armenian leadership were aimed at exacerbating the situation, provoking the Azerbaijani side to retaliate and disrupt the process of negotiations in order to say afterwards that, as you can see, there are clashes again and this issue must be put on the back burner.”

Speaking about the 44-day war, Aliyev said that during this period, the Azerbaijani Army liberated more than 300 settlements, strategic heights, the cities of Jabrayil, Fuzuli, Zangilan, Gubadli, urban-type settlements Sugovushan, Hadrut, a part of Khojavand district, the Murovdag ridge, and a part of Lachin and Kalbajar districts and Shusha city.

Aliyev said that the army that was defeated is not Pashinyan's army, it is the army that previous Armenian leaders Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan had been creating for 20 years.

“Our cities of Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Zangilan, Gubadli and others were not destroyed by Pashinyan's army, he did not give such instructions. First, there was nothing more to destroy. This was all done by the regime of Kocharyan and Sargsyan, our so-called former colleagues in the CIS, people who participated in our meetings for 20 years, people who had negotiated with me for many years. We knew that there was blood of the Azerbaijani people on their hands, but when we got to these territories, when we got there, we saw all the horror, all the tragedy of what they had done.”