This year marks the 28th anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of the maximally Armenian-populated Shahumian region of Nagorno-Karabakh perpetrated by Azerbaijan. This is what deputy of the ruling My Step Alliance Tatevik Hayrapetyan said in parliament today.

She particularly stated that the seizure of Shahumian and the emptying of the Armenians of this region attest to the fact that Azerbaijan intended to lead a similar policy against Nagorno-Karabakh as a whole.

“It is only thanks to our victories in the 1990s that we managed to avoid repetition of this in Karabakh. I would like to state that recently the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh issued relevant statements, and it is also very important that the residents of Shahumian region also made a statement on what happened 28 years ago,” Hayrapetyan stressed, adding that the issue related to Shahumian needs to be included in the agenda of talks over the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the future.