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No incident during OSCE monitoring on Azerbaijani, Armenian troopsâ€™ contact line

20 October 2016 12:20 (UTC +04:00)

Baku – APA. The OSCE monitoring held on the line of contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops passed without incidents, Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said.

The monitoring was held on Oct. 20 under the mandate of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Personal Representative on the line of contact near the Ashaghi Abdurrahmanli of Azerbaijan’s Fuzuli district.

On the Azerbaijani side, the monitoring was held by the Personal Representative’s field assistants Hristo Hristov, Simon Tiller and the representative of the High-Level Planning Group (HLPG) LTC Alexander Nepokrytykh.

The Personal Representative’s field assistants Jiri Aberle, Peter Svedberg and the representative of the HLPG Major Christian Hirsch carried out the monitoring in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan occupied and controlled by the armed forces of Armenia.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includes Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCE Minsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the CSCE (OSCE after the Budapest summit held in Dec.1994) Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, the US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996.

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.