Details added: first version posted on 12:53
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Jan.26
Trend:
Azerbaijan handed over the bodies of nearly 1,200 Armenian military servicemen who were killed during the 44-day war (from late Sept. through early Nov.2020) to the Armenian side, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan, Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Presidential Administration Hikmat Hajiyev said, Trend reports.
Hajiyev made the remark answering questions during an online seminar on the results of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war and the prospects for regional cooperation in the post-conflict period.
The seminar was hosted by the Eurasian Center under the ‘Atlantic Council’, one of the authoritative brain centers in the US Washington.
Moderator of the online event was the director of the Eurasian Center under the Atlantic Council, former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst.
According to Hajiyev, as a result of the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the illegal ‘status quo’, which Armenian side had been abusing for the past 26 years, was eliminated, and after that the confrontation in the South Caucasus should be transformed into cooperation and regional integration. Answering the question about which side started military operations in September 2020, the president’s assistant stressed that in order to clarify the reasons for the latest armed conflict, it’s necessary to consider the conditions that led to the war.
“After the meeting of the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Dushanbe, President Ilham Aliyev, demonstrating good will, allowed the Prime Minister of Armenia to return to the issue of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict after achieving stability in Armenia. However the prime minister, abusing this good will, began to issue nationalist appeals. One of them had been made during his illegal trip to the former occupied territories of Azerbaijan, when he said: ‘Artsakh’ (Armenian name of Karabakh) is Armenia and that's it," he reminded.