Foreign media
US media "The National Interest” has published an article written by the Chairman of the Baku-based Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center).
The article stated that on September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a counter-offensive campaign against Armenian armed forces to liberate the occupied territories that it lost in 1992-94.
“There are claims made by the Armenian side stating that Baku premeditated the operation. As much as fighting has developed on the battlefield, it has also advanced into a propaganda war,” the author of the article noted.
“A cohort of Western scholars, experts, and journalists writing about the conflict solely focused on geopolitics and history but remained largely silent on the most important element—namely international law—because it did not fit the pro-Armenian narrative,” the article reads.
“In 1993, the UN Security Council, through four binding resolutions, reaffirmed Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven adjacent regions under Armenian occupation and demanded the unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian occupying forces. In 2015, the European Court of Human Rights also highlighted that Armenia controls through occupation of the sovereign territories of Azerbaijan.
Since 1992, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been working towards a diplomatic solution under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, co-chaired by France, Russia, and the United States. In 2007, this effort produced the so-called Madrid Principles, which were updated in 2009 and accepted by both Armenia and Azerbaijan as the basis for implementing the return of the occupied territories. Since then, Armenia under various pretexts postponed this implementation and opted for maintaining the status-quo of occupation. In March 2020 the new leadership of Armenia under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explicitly denounced the Madrid Principles. This had been preceded by Pashinyan’s August 2019 open declaration that “Nagorno-Karabakh is Armenia,” thus reconfirming the strategic goal of unification, i.e. territorial expansion. This in turn had been preceded by the March 2019 announcement of a new military doctrine by Armenia’s defense minister, David Tonoyan, which had called for a “new war for new territory,” the author of the article also writes.
‘With a dead-end in the negotiation process and the increased military posture, Azerbaijan had no choice but to resort to the use of force, which it is entitled to under chapter 51 of the UN Charter. This is rarely mentioned in biased reports about the status of the conflict.
Some Western observers also focus on the role of Turkey in the current stand-off between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Leaving aside a complicated analysis about why Turkey and the West ended up in the current state, considering Azerbaijan’s political, economic, and energy links with the United States and the EU, cliché-driven stories of sultans and tsars should be left to Emmanuel Macron in his dealing with the Armenian lobby in France,’ the author also argues.