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“Dear Colleagues,

As today we are talking about the Economic Affairs and Economic cooperation it is very hard to imagine cooperation in a situation when a neighboring country, having unleashed a devastating, inhumane war against people of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) last fall, now keeping Armenians captured during and even after the war as hostages, staging various court trials against them, and has even invaded the sovereign terrirory of the Rebpulic of Armenia in May, this year.

It is astonisihing to see a video of the conversation between the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev and the First Lady of Turkey discuss the issue of captured Armenian nationals where the First lady of Turkey is asking Aliyev if there are still captives and then call to send them portion by portion or in stages.

The video is a clear proof that all Armenian captives are being held hostage in Azerbaijan for political bargaining and trade. Therefore, all the trials of the captives are simply staged , and the arrests are a forbidden punishment . This is in fact how the Azeri authorities are trying to mislead the international community.

As we need to indeed talk today about unblocking of the regional communication infrastructure in South Caucasus – including railways, instead Ali y ev is claiming a part of Armenia’s sovereign territory as a corridor that will connect Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan and Turkey. A corridor has nothing to do with unblocking of roads and railways, it is an issue that was never discussed and will never be discussed, instead it is being so much manipulated, also for internal use, by an authoritarian president. In fact, the intrusion to the Republic of Armenia in the part of Armenia which is the narro we st in width leaves no room to doubt about the motivation behind that invasion.

The war was put to end on November 9, 2020 with a signature of a trilateral agreement. And the agreement says more than clearly that all the POW s and other detained persons should be exchanged immediately and without any precondition. Azerbaijan has not fulfilled its obligation for this part. And this should be directly addressed by all of us here.

It is with no doubt that this is a necessary step to be undertaken by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that we deny use of force or threat of using force as a means for resolving conflicts and by this bring our words and actions to the same line.

I want to thank the OSCE Minsk group and the leaders of the member states for their efforts as well as Georgia for the recent support in returning home Armenian captives,” Hripsime Grigoryan said.