Commentary by the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Quite chaotic and lacking in logic reaction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia to the statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan on August 6, this year attracted our attention. In our statement, a principled position was expressed towards the provocative rhetoric of the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, which he had delivered a day earlier during an unauthorized by legal authorities visit to the city of Khankendi in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Republic of Azerbaijan, occupied by the armed forces of Armenia.

We believe that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, which carried out military aggression against Azerbaijan, occupied the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country and the adjacent areas with the illegal use of force, committed total ethnic cleansing of the Azerbaijani population in these territories and the act of genocide in Khojaly, is the last among the ones that might even pretend to try to accuse Azerbaijan of failure to adhere to rules of civility and decency, as well as intolerance.

In addition, the Armenian Foreign Ministry is trying to assure that the Azerbaijani authorities were unable to understand the context and content of N. Pashinyan’s speech in Khankendi, dedicated to “unity, solidarity, development and prosperity” for Armenia, Karabakh and the Diaspora. Now, by a similar clumsy explanation of its “noble intentions” the Armenian Foreign Ministry already, following the Prime Minister of this country, has actually directly confessed the conduct by the official Yerevan of annexationist policy towards the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

The demonstration by the Armenian side of such an inadequate approach that undermines the very logic of the negotiation process for a peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, causes regional tension, the responsibility for which lies entirely on Armenia. This is what was said in the extremely clear statement of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry of August 6, which, apparently, the Armenian Foreign Ministry failed to understand.