He made the remarks during the joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin June 7.

The president noted that these resolutions, which were passed twenty years ago, call for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from Azerbaijani territory.

“Regrettably, these resolutions have not been fulfilled yet. There is no mechanism for it,” Ilham Aliyev said stressing that no sanctions have been imposed on Armenia for occupying Azerbaijani territory, carrying out ethnic cleansing against Azerbaijanis and violating international law.

According to him, the latest developments on the contact line of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops have shown that the ceasefire is fragile and unsustainable.

“The Armenian committed armed provocations on the contact line, so we had to defend ourselves, our civilian population. At the time, 8 people were killed by Armenians,” added the head of state.

He underlined that the status quo has to be changed.

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs and the co-chair countries’ presidents have said the status quo is unacceptable, said Azerbaijan’s president.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includes Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCE Minsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996.

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.

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