Azerbaijan has done good work to aid over a million refugees & IDPs

By Sara Rajabova - AzerNews 

The European Union has always supported Azerbaijan's territorial integrity and considered ‘elections’ in the so-called ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Republic’ illegal.

Ali Hasanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy premier and chairman of the State Committee for Refugee and IDP Affairs, made the remark at a meeting with Herbert Salber, the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus.

Hasanov said Azerbaijan and the European Union always had good relations, noting that the unjust acts of any body of the EU against Azerbaijan would not impact these relations.

He also spoke of the preconceived statement adopted by the European Parliament about Azerbaijan and noted that the MPs who voted for this resolution had no such authority to do so.

"The MPs who voted for the resolution were the people who bought thanks from Armenian diaspora's material support. These people are the aggressive ones from their countries, that's why they were sent to the European Parliament by those countries," he added.

Hasanov recalled that the most imperative problem for Azerbaijan is the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict emerged in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Since a lengthy war in the early 1990s that displaced over one million Azerbaijanis, Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

Hasanov noted that the activities of the OSCE Minsk group's co-chairs have yielded no results so far.

The official also added the resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council and other international organizations in this regard had not been implemented.

He said that while Europe has not been able to settle about 100,000-200,000 refugees, Azerbaijan carried out a great job to solve the problems of more than one million refugees and IDPs.

The bloody war, which flared up in the late 1980s due to Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor, left 700,000 civilians from Nagorno-Karabakh and the regions adjoining it, as well as the regions bordering Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, without homes.

They are temporarily settled in more than 1,600 settlements across 62 cities and regions of Azerbaijan.

Moreover, 250,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia and became refugees due to Armenia's ethnic cleansing policy after the emergence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan.

Salber, for his part, thanked Hasanov for the detailed information and noted that his position over the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remained unchanged.

He said the current status quo concerning to the dispute is unacceptable and the conflict should be resolved as soon as possible.

Salber also noted that Azerbaijan was an important partner for the EU and highlighted the importance of discussions in terms of further expanding bilateral ties in a variety of fields.

The EU and Azerbaijan are maintaining relations under the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, which was signed in 1996 and came into force in 1999.

Since then the PCA has provided the legal framework for EU-Azerbaijan bilateral relations in the areas of political dialogue, trade, investment, economic, legislative and cultural cooperation.

Azerbaijan is also included in the EU program on "Eastern Partnership" adopted on the initiative of Poland and Sweden and approved at the EU summit in Brussels in 2008.