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Azerbaijan to raise Nagorny Karabakh issue in UN Security Council

RIA Novosti

17:30 26/10/2011 BAKU, October 26 (RIA Novosti) - Azerbaijan plans to bring up the issue of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict settlement at the United Nations, following its election to the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member, Azerbaijan's Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mamedyarov said on Wednesday.

Azerbaijan was elected to the U.N. Security Council on Monday for the period 2012-2013. There are ten temporary member states and five veto-holding permanent members in the council – Russia, the United States, China, the UK and France.

“To introduce any initiative it is important to have the preliminary support of five permanent members of the council. Three of them are co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group. We have not discussed this issue with the permanent members yet, but we will,” Mamedyarov said.

Negotiations on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict settlement continue, he added, but “nobody thinks that it will be settled within a night.”

Baku has previously called for the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from occupied Azerbaijani territories as a first step towards the settlement of the dispute.

The conflict began in 1988 when the enclave of Nagorny Karabakh, which had a majority Armenian population but was surrounded by Azerbaijani territory, claimed independence from Azerbaijan. Local ethnic Armenian forces succeeded in expelling the Azerbaijani forces in 1994, driving out virtually all of the non-Armenian speaking population and also occupying large swathes of territory in Azerbaijan outside Karabakh.