Artsakh Foreign Minster Sergey Ghazaryan, in an interview with ArtsakhPress, said that while the Artsakh government is committed to a peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict any talks between Stepanakert and Baku must be held in an internationally recognized format based on the equality of rights of the parties and in the presence of strong international guarantees of the fulfillment of their obligations.

“The involvement of the international community in the dialogue between Artsakh and Azerbaijan is the only way to guarantee the comprehensive settlement of the conflict,” Ghazaryan said.

The foreign minister said Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s statement on April 18 that Karabakh Armenians must accept Azerbaijani citizenship or leave underscores Baku’s policy of intimidating Armenians to leave their homeland.

“It is not the first time that the president of Azerbaijan has made statements that reveal the true goals of Azerbaijan to subject Artsakh to ethnic cleansing and expel the indigenous people of Artsakh from their historical homeland,” Ghazaryan said, noting that Baku’s four-month blockade of the Lachin Corridor is part of this policy.

“By using coercion, force and the threat of force, Azerbaijan is essentially trying to force the people of Artsakh to accept the illegal demands of Azerbaijan, which, among others, contradict the binding norms of international law,” Ghazaryan said.

When asked to comment on Aliyev’s assertion that Karabakh is an internal matter for Azerbaijan and that Armenia, or any other third country, has no right to intervene, Ghazaryan said the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict was never considered an internal affair of Azerbaijan, neither during the existence of the USSR, nor during the subsequent period of the formation of independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

“This is evidenced by the fact that after the independence of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Armenia and Azerbaijan, the international community created a special mechanism for the settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict, the Minsk process. The decision to create an international format to determine the final political status of Artsakh proves that the international community has not recognized Artsakh as part of independent Azerbaijan. In turn, Azerbaijan's agreement to participate in the Minsk process is also a recognition of the fact that the Nagorno Karabakh problem is not an internal matter of Azerbaijan.”