Azerbaijan’s president says double standards policy behind unresolved Karabakh conflict

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has said in 2014 there was no progress in settlement of the Karabakh conflict.
He spoke on Saturday at an expanded cabinet meeting focusing on results of the country’s social and economic growth in the past year.
“Last year there was no progress in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict,” Aliyev said.

He blamed Armenia for not “wanting peace” and reproached international mediators that their words about inadmissibility of the current status quo in the conflict remain “just words, lacking serious politics behind them.”

Aliyev recalled four resolutions on the Karabakh conflict adopted by the UN Security Council that had remained unimplemented over the past 20 years.

Also, the Azeri president said documents like these tackling other international problems often come into force without delay.

“It is injustice and a policy of double standards,” he said. “There seem to be such forces which are interested in the conflict to be frozen or half-frozen so that it could be used as a tool to pressure Azerbaijan.”

• In 2015 Azerbaijan will beef up its military potential, Aliyev said.

The mountainous area of Nagorno-Karabakh remains a so-called 'frozen conflict' on the post-Soviet space as it is the subject of a dispute between Azerbaijan where the region is located and its ethnic Armenian population.

In 1988 a war broke out there between Azerbaijani troops and Armenian residents, which resulted in the region's de facto independence. In 1994 a ceasefire was reached but the relations between the two states are still strained.

Russia, France and the U.S. co-chair the Minsk Group of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which attempts to broker an end to hostilities and the conflict.
 http://itar-tass.com/en/world/770628
10/1/15
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