Azerbaijan should be returned to constructive activity - Yerevan
YEREVAN. April 22 (Interfax) - The Azerbaijani authorities have been torpedoing the Karabakh settlement process, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.
"Obviously, appeals are not sufficient to sober Baku - there is a need for definite steps, which would bring Azerbaijan to order and return it to constructive activity," the ministry said on Thursday.
In the opinion of Yerevan, Azerbaijan has been trying to present the negotiations as a debate on issues of interest only to Baku.
"Despite the international community's appeals for continuing negotiations under the aegis of the OSCE Minsk Group cochairmen, the real aspiration of Baku is to torpedo the settlement process. This is proven by the fact that the extensive statement of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry not only fails to give a single reference to the statements of the OSCE Minsk Group cochairmen but also does not mention the Minsk Group cochairs as the only format with an international mediation mandate," the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.
It called "cynical" the Thursday statement of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry and said that "the Foreign Ministry turned the obvious facts upside down and tried to put the blame for the intense hostilities against Nagorno-Karabakh unleashed on April 2 on the Armenian side for the purposes of avoiding responsibility for war crimes."
"This is not the first unsuccessful attempt of Baku to distort reality. Our international partners also said at meetings that it was definitely Azerbaijan that launched a large-scale attack throughout the line of contact with Nagorno-Karabakh, causing the death and injury of hundreds of people and committing war crimes," the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.
"Armenia strongly condemns the unsuccessful attempts of Azerbaijan to cast doubt on the open-ended trilateral ceasefire agreement reached between Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia in May 1994. This is a dangerous step fraught with further destabilization of the region. The aggressive military operations launched by Azerbaijan in early April not only fail to terminate the truce agreement but also entail liability of the violator," the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.