President Ilham Aliyev: Armenian radicalism has doomed the Azerbaijani people to unprecedented suffering

Allied and fraternal relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey, the commitment of both countries to the principles of international law create a solid foundation for ensuring stability in the region.

As reported by AZERTAG, this was stated in the address of President Ilham Aliyev to the participants of the international conference on "Return to Western Azerbaijan as an important condition for the rule of human rights".

"Unfortunately, as a result of armed conflicts and racial discrimination, millions of people have been forced to leave their native lands and become refugees. In particular, during and after the First World War, Armenian radicalism and extremism condemned the Azerbaijani people to unprecedented suffering, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of our compatriots were forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands, subjected to mass killings and massacres," the address notes.

The head of state emphasized that in Western Azerbaijan - on the territory of Armenia in 1918-1921, 1948-1953 and 1987-1991, systematic and total ethnic cleansing was carried out. As a result, not a single Azerbaijani remained in Armenia. This ethnic cleansing became a great humanitarian tragedy. At the same time, it served such a treacherous geopolitical purpose as breaking the land connection between the main part of Azerbaijan and its integral part - Nakhchivan, by taking Western Zangezur from Azerbaijan and transferring it to Armenia in 1920.