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Azerbaijani deputy PM: Some Muslim countries still provide assistance to Armenia

20 June 2017 10:08 (UTC +04:00)

Azerbaijan’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the State Committee for Affairs of Refugees and IDPs Ali Hasanov has accused some Muslim countries of providing assistance to Armenia.

“Armenia uses the Shusha mosque as a pigsty. However, some Muslim countries still provide assistance to Armenia. Is this a Muslim brotherhood?” said Hasanov addressing an event co-organized by the Azerbaijan Office of UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the State Committee for Affairs of Refugees and IDPs on June 20 – World Refugee Day, APA reported.

Hasanov noted that if June 15 marks the National Salvation Day of Azerbaijan, then June 14 is the beginning of the Day of Liberation of Azerbaijan’s occupied territories.

The deputy premier said that the tendency among internally displaced persons to get military education has grown stronger in Azerbaijan: “If 20 IDPs studied in military schools 10 years ago, this figure has reached to 276 nowadays,” he added.

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 December 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.