Spokesperson of the Prime Minister of Armenia Mane Gevorgyan posted the following on her Facebook page:
“I read the statements that President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev made yesterday in Khatay region, and I must say that the Azerbaijani President’s ongoing attempts to dig deep into history are truly ridiculous. He claims that there is nothing mentioned about Armenians in the Kyurakchay Treaty concluded in the early 1800s.
We were naïve to think that Mr. Aliyev is familiar with the most popular works in ancient history in which there are tremendous materials devoted to Hayastan-Armenian and its indigenous Armenian people.
If Mr. Aliyev doesn’t trust the authors of those works, he should have at least read Ottoman authors of the 16th-19th centuries, some of which have not only provided a lot of information about Armenia, but have also traveled through Armenia-Ermenistan and interacted with Christian Armenian residents.
We thought Mr. Aliyev’s knowledge would allow him to know well about Amaras, Dadivank Monastery and the 13th century Gandzasar built by Armenians in Artsakh in the early Middle Age and with Armenian inscriptions.
It isn’t Prime Minister Pashinyan who says that Artsakh is Armenia, but the Armenian inscriptions on Amaras, Dadivank Monastery and Gandzasar Monastery.
Mr. Aliyev is trying to claim that at the Munich Security Conference Prime Minister Pashinyan presented a king as an Armenian who had nothing in common with the Armenian people. He should at least be ashamed of the authors mentioned above. True, they didn’t write anything about Azerbaijan, but it’s not their fault that they haven’t come across such a country in the territory of modern-day Azerbaijan until 1918.
As far as the negotiations over the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are concerned, Mr. Aliyev’s last statement clearly mentions the reason why the conflict remains unresolved — the rights of the people of Artsakh have been fully ignored. The citizens of Artsakh will obviously protect their rights, and the negotiations can’t be effective as long as Azerbaijan hasn’t recognized those rights.
After all, Prime Minister Pashinyan has proposed a clear formula for making the negotiations effective, and that is that any solution to the Karabakh issue must be acceptable for the peoples of Armenia, Artsakh and Azerbaijan. The international community accepts this formula, but not Mr. Aliyev, who says the settlement of the conflict must be acceptable only for the people of Azerbaijan.
Armenia’s response remains the same — if there is a military solution to the issue, the citizens of Artsakh solved the issue a long time ago.
Mr. Aliyev is blaming the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, Armenia and historical justice for the fact that there is no solution to the issue, but he must only blame himself for not discussing the issue constructively for a long time now.”