FM: “Armenia responded to versions”
If Azerbaijan expects to continue to keep its society confused by distorting the facts, it can't do the same to the international community. This is what RA Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandyan announced in his extensive speech devoted to Armenia's foreign policy at the Foreign Institute of Strategic Studies, which is one of the reputable political science centers in London. Attending the event were political scientists, journalists, analysts and ambassadors accredited to London.
According to Nalbandyan, from November 2007 to June 2011 the sides have been presented with a number of working versions for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution. "Azerbaijan has not given its consent to any of them, and has simply announced that it can accept some version with certain reservations. Armenia has definitely responded to the versions presented in June, October, December of 2010 and June of 2011. Every time, Azerbaijan makes new proposals. It presented at least 10 proposals in March 2011 in Sochi and another ten changes during the last meeting in Kazan in June 2011."
The RA Foreign Minister also announced that Baku is confusing the public by saying that the Helsinki Final Act mentions the resolution of conflicts in the frames of territorial integrity. "There is simply no such thing in the Helsinki Final Act," said Edward Nalbandyan,
"Of course, what's also important is that the Deauville declaration states the inadmissibility of maintaining the status-quo. To achieve that, it is necessary to implement the three principles and the six elements that the leaders of the co-chairing countries state in their declarations. I would like to recall that in those declarations there is a very important element that Azerbaijan tries to make people forget or at least push back, and that element is the NK people's right to determine the NK's final status through the expression of free will that has legal force," said the RA Foreign Minister.
In response to Baku's latest statements regarding Karabakh's future status, the Armenian foreign minister underlined that before the final status is determined, the NK will have an interim status that is exactly what the co-chairs have proposed and what the leader of Azerbaijan agreed to in Prague in May 2009. "The interim status means "status quo plus", that is, all that Nagorno-Karabakh has, plus international recognition of that status," said Nalbandyan.
Commenting on the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister's statement that there is no sense in wasting time on agreeing on the Basic Principles and that it would be correct to move on to the elaboration of a peace deal, Edward Nalbandyan said that Azerbaijan has been saying that over and over again. The co-chairs have expressed their views on that idea, saying that if Azerbaijan can't come to terms on the Basic Principles, then there can't be any talk about the elaboration of a peace deal.
Edward Nalbandyan mentioned that Azerbaijan's approach is the country's overt desire to free itself from the Basic Principles presented by the co-chairs and lead the process of negotiations of the past years to failure.
