Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian, who is in Finland on an official visit, said the abovementioned during his address Monday at Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki.

“For decades that right has been obstructed by annexation, ethnic-cleansing, massacres and military aggression. Nevertheless, as history has proven on several occasions, it is impossible to ignore the choice of a people for self-determination,” Nalbandian said. “Being unable to solve the issue by military means Azerbaijan had to sign, with Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, in May 1994 ceasefire agreement, in July 1994 agreement on the reinforcement of ceasefire, and in February 1995 agreement on the consolidation of ceasefire, which have no time limitations. During the following years negotiations were held by the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. By the way, one of the first Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group was Finland (in this process were involved such prominent Finnish diplomats as Heikki Talvitie and Rene Nyberg). In this framework numerous rounds of negotiations were held on the levels of Presidents, Foreign Ministers which however, have not yielded results due to the continuous rejection of the Co-Chairs’ proposals by Azerbaijan. The essence of the negotiations has been, on the one hand, the necessity of finding a political settlement of the issue, on the other hand, consolidation of the ceasefire regime on the Line of Contact between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan and on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Since the beginning of April Azerbaijan has unleashed large scale aggressive military operation along the entire Line of Contact with Nagorno-Karabakh, which targeted also civilian infrastructures and settlements and which left several hundreds of killed and wounded.

“In more than 20 years of fragile ceasefire regime this became an unprecedented destabilization with the use of heavy weaponry, tanks, rockets, artillery, aviation. The continuous acquisition of offensive armaments, the feeding of its society with bellicose warmongering and the spread of hate-speech against Armenians by Baku sooner or later could not but result in such a situation. This is something that we had warned all our international partners during the past several years.”