BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 21. The alliance and brotherly relations between Azerbaijan and Türkiye, and the commitment of both countries to the principles of international law, provide a solid foundation for ensuring stability in the region, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said in his address to the participants of the international conference on “Return to Western Azerbaijan as an Important Condition for the Supremacy of Human Rights”, Trend reports.
"Unfortunately, due to armed conflicts and racial discrimination, millions of people are displaced from their homelands and live as refugees. In particular, during and after the First World War, Armenian radicalism and extremism subjected the Azerbaijani people to unprecedented hardships; hundreds of thousands of our compatriots were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and faced mass murder and massacres.
In Western Azerbaijan - the territory of Armenia - systematic and total ethnic cleansing occurred in 1918–1921, 1948–1953, and 1987–1991, resulting in not a single Azerbaijani remaining in Armenia. In addition to being a great humanitarian tragedy, this ethnic cleansing also served the heinous geopolitical goal of cutting off the overland connection of the main part of Azerbaijan with its integral part, Nakhchivan, by severing Western Zangezur from the rest of Azerbaijan and transferring it to Armenia in 1920," the head of state noted.