Stay out of Karabakh, Nalbandian tells Turkey

TBILISI

If Turkey wants to contribute Nagorno-Karabakh issue, it should stay away from the process, Nalbandian says.

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian called on Turkey to not involve itself in the Nagorno-Karabakh issue if it wants to make any contribution. 

“If Turkey really wants to contribute to the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, it should stay as far as possible from the process,” Nalbandian said, according to the armradio website yesterday. 

Responding to a question on the recent statement of Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu that France should withdraw from the OSCE Minsk Group as it could no longer remain neutral, Nalbandian said, “These are senseless statements. The bill adopted by the French Senate is not directed against any concrete country. 

“When Turkey says that only Armenians speak of genocide, it is the same as to say that only Jews speak about Holocaust,” Nalbandian said, adding that Turkey cannot keep the Armenian border closed forever. A subcommittee on Nagorno-Karabakh under the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is likely to suspend, said the Armenian delegation to PACE, according to the ArmeniaNow website.

“The newly appointed president of PACE, French Jean-Claude Mignon, is believed to have a more pro-Armenian stance than the former president, Turkish Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu,” said the website, adding that Mignon had offered to “reconsider the expediency of the subcommittee’s work.” 

The PACE bureau proposed to discuss resumption of the subcommittee’s work after discussing the issue with the delegations of Armenia and Azerbaijan, according to the website. The subcommittee’s work on the issue prevents the Minsk Group from having the “exclusive rights” to the Karabakh issue settlement, according to the website.