Speaker of the Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova informed President of the National Assembly of France Yaël Braun-Pivet at their meeting in Dublin of the local anti-terrorist measures taken by Azerbaijan, saying that, having recovered her lands from occupation, Azerbaijan had invited Armenia to normalise the relations and sign a peace treaty based on mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. Armenia, however, has spent three years resorting to every means thinkable of avoiding the signing: political and military provocations, a continued mining of our territories, violation of earlier agreements and the continued support to the illegal regime created on our lands.

Having stressed that Armenia had spent these past few months spreading the numerous false claims of ‘a blockade’ and ‘a humanitarian crisis’ in the Garabagh Region of Azerbaijan the world over, the Chair of the Milli Majlis recalled Armenia’s refusal to use either the Aghdam or the Lachin road, which was another political provocation premeditated to undermine the territorial integrity of our country.

Azerbaijan repeatedly called on the international community to pay attention to the fact that the presence of 10,000-strong Armenian troops and the existence of an illegal separatist regime, both in the Garabagh Region of our country, were the principal hurdles to achievement of peace and stability in the region, simply because those powers had been committing provocations against our territories. On 19 September, the mines that Armenian subversion squads had planted to terrorist ends exploded killing and wounding civilians as well as military personnel.

The Speaker of the Milli Majlis emphasised that Azerbaijan had responded to all those provocations with a less than 24-hour-long local anti-terrorist measure targeting solely the illegal military groups and military infrastructure. The peaceful population and civilian facilities were never once targeted, and our troops never marched in civilian populated localities. According to Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister of Armenia, too, admitted that there was no direct threat to the Armenian population of Garabagh and that reports about violence against it were untrue.

The Press and Public Relations Department
The Milli Majlis