Azerbaijan urges drive to resolve Karabakh dispute
ISTANBUL, June 26 (Reuters) – Azerbaijan called on the international
community to help resolve its chronic dispute with Armenia over
Nagorno-Karabakh on Saturday, arguing that the region was a potential
hotbed for drug-running and terror.
Azeri President Ilham Aliyev clashed at a conference in Istanbul with
an Armenian official who described the territory as an “established
entity” with governing institutions and a ceasefire that has held for
a decade since a six-year conflict.
“Nagorno-Karabakh is an entity which is not recognised by anyone in
the world,” the president responded to a comment from Armenian foreign
ministry official Garen Nazarian.
“It is an unrecognised, self-proclaimed, illegal so-called entity.
Azerbaijan will never agree with the loss of its territory, we will
get these territories back.”
Nagorno-Karabakh is a territory wholly inside Azerbaijan, populated by
Christian ethnic Armenians, which broke away from Baku’s rule as the
Soviet Union collapsed. The Azeris, their country controlling large
oil resources, want it back.
The Minsk Group of 11 countries, led by France, the United States and
Russia under the mandate of the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, has so far failed to settle the problem.
Aliyev said that “Armenian occupation” had left one million of
Azerbaijan’s population of eight million as either refugees or
internally displaced persons, and Nagorno-Karabakh had become one of
the southern Caucasus’s “uncontrolled lawless zones.”
“Nagorno-Karabakh poses a very serious threat for the region –there
is no international control, no international monitoring and no rule
of law,” he told the security conference which set the stage for a
NATO summit in the Turkish city next week.
“This is a very comfortable place for criminal elements. There
is…some very significant evidence of illegal drug trafficking in
Nagorno-Karabakh, of terrorism camps.”
Aliyev appealed for more active efforts to resolve the dispute from
the “broad international community,” including the European Union, the
Council of Europe and other international institutions.
Asked by Nazarian why he was not satisfied with the mediation efforts
of the Minsk Group, Aliyev replied: “Because there is no result.”
06/26/04 13:53 ET