Azerbaijanis in France call on international community to settle Karabakh conflict

Azerbaijani community in France made a statement highlighting a problems of unresolved Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

"There is not a single Azerbaijani left in the Nagorno-Karabakh region because of the ethnic cleansing conducted by Armenia," reads the statement made in connection with the visit of President Ilham Aliyev to France.

“As a result of the conflict, confrontation occurred in 1988-1994 and 20 percent of Azerbaijani territories was occupied. To date, Azerbaijan has about one million refugees, which is 10 percent of the country's population,” the Azerbaijani community notes, adding that the country leads in the world in the number of refugees and IDPs per capita.

The statement reads that the culmination of ethnic cleansing by Armenia was the Khojaly genocide, which occurred in the night of February 25-26, 1992. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, who personally directed the massacre in Khojaly repeatedly recognized this in his statements to the international media.

“On behalf of the Azerbaijani community, we demand from France, acting as a mediator of the OSCE Minsk Group, and from the international community a peaceful settlement of the conflict within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, the statement underlines.

The statement also calls on Armenia, which perpetrated a massacre of the peaceful Azerbaijani population, while posing as the victim, to understand that it is impossible to endlessly continue the occupation of Karabakh.

“In connection with the visit of President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev to France, we express support for his policy aimed at resolving the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and we hope that this will lead to a final resolution of the problem,” the community concludes.