Azerbaijani President: We used all existing international instruments to restore territorial integrity

“Within our capacity and our potential, we try to contribute to the cause of peace and security. With the United Nations, our active interaction with institutions started as a result of Armenian aggression, and 1993 was a year when those famous resolutions of the Security Council were adopted, which were a very positive step, a very promising gesture of support, and addressing the Armenian aggression. The demand for immediate, full, unconditional withdrawal of Armenian troops from our internationally recognized territories was a very important political gesture of the Security Councilm,” President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during a meeting with the newly appointed United Nations Resident Coordinator in Azerbaijan Vladanka Andreeva on August 24.

“But unfortunately, these resolutions were not implemented, and as you probably know, many times I personally raised this issue that there is no mechanism of implementation of the Security Council resolutions. In one case, they were implemented for a short period of time, but in our case, they were not implemented at all by international players. Especially what was of concern and was difficult to understand by Azerbaijani society that those who adopted those resolutions, three out of five permanent member-states were the countries which were and still are the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group. So, they themselves adopted those resolutions, and they had a mandate to facilitate the implementation of these resolutions. But unfortunately, 28 years of the Minsk Group were the years of lost opportunities. On many occasions, I raised the issue of imposing sanctions on Armenia. Because I thought that could be a way how to avoid confrontation, avoid war. We wanted to resolve this issue peacefully. Speaking last year at the General Assembly just several days before the war, I was warning the international community that Armenia is preparing for war, that these were not just words for the sake of propaganda. That was a realistic analysis of Armenia’s behavior in the months prior to the war. And unfortunately, I was right. If sanctions were imposed on Armenia on time, if Minsk Group co-chairs – three leading countries of the world used five percent of their potential to persuade or to force Armenia to withdraw its occupational forces, then the war would not have happened. Therefore, the responsibility for the war does not only lie on Armenia but on those who could not or did not want to force them to comply with international law. Therefore, Azerbaijan implemented these resolutions itself within international law norms. We restored justice, we restored international law norms. We implemented the United Nations Security Council resolutions ourselves, and we acted in accordance with UN Charter. Chapter 51 recognizes the right for every country for self-defense. So, we used all the existing international instruments to restore our territorial integrity,” the head of state said.