President Sargsyan: Nagorno Karabakh Republic must be freed from the challenge of being colonized again

Panorama.am - 04/04/2016 

“Nagorno Karabakh Republic [must be] freed from the challenge of being colonized again. Noone can force people to live within a country, which does not reflect its aspirations and values”, - said President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan in an emergency meeting with the ambassadors of the OSCE Member-States in Armenia, held today, April 4 around 1:00PM Yerevan time.

According to the press statement from the Office of the President, Serzh Sargsyan stressed that Armenia’s continuous calls upon the international community over the past years and decades to take note of bellicose rhetoric and anti-Armenian xenophobic statements by the leadership of Azerbaijan have not been properly considered, but Armenia, nevertheless, “has never refused logical compromises aimed at the resolution of the conflict”.

“[The] ethnic conflicts shall be resolved by first addressing their causes and only then turning to the possible scenarios for the resolution”, - Sargsyan said in the meeting.

Earlier in the evening of April 2, speaking at the National Security Council meeting President Serzh Sargsyan instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia to cooperate with the Foreign Ministry of Nagorno Karabakh aimed at concluding a bilateral treaty on mutual military assistance. “We should draft the text of the treaty, hold relevant discussions and send it to the National Assembly. The Republic of Armenia will fully fulfill its responsibility to protect the security of the people of Nagorno Karabakh, and we have also the legal rights for that, since we are a party to the 1994 ceasefire agreement,” the President concluded then.

Ceasefire agreement between Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan, facilitated by Russia's representative to the CSCE/OSCE Minsk Group Vladimir Kazimirov, was signed on May 5, 1994, which had been maintained with only sporadic violations along the Line of Contact and international border till the latest Azerbaijani large scale offensive in the night of April 2, 2016. Over the last two years Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh, the OSCE Minsk Group co-Chairs and over 80 U.S. Congressmen proposed (Royce-Engel bill) concrete measures to de-escalate situation and establish ceasefire monitoring equipments along the borders. Azerbaijan has been repeatedly rejecting these calls.