Azerbaijan rejects Washington-mediated meeting with Armenia

YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 16, ARMENPRESS. Azerbaijan has turned down a proposed foreign ministerial meeting with Armenia scheduled to take place on November 20 in Washington, D.C. after a State Department official said that ‘nothing will be normal with Azerbaijan after the events of September 19 until we see progress on the peace track.’

“We’ve made clear that nothing will be normal with Azerbaijan after the events of September 19 until we see progress on the peace track. So we’ve canceled a number of high-level visits, condemned the actions… We don’t anticipate submitting a waiver on Section 907 until such time that we see a real improvement,”James O’Brien, assistant secretary at the department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, said at a hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh in the House of Representative Foreign Affairs Committee on November 15.

The Azerbaijani foreign ministry falsely accused the State Department official’s statement of being ‘biased, unproductive, groundless and unacceptable.”

The Azeri foreign ministry, in a statement, in response to O’Brien, said that Azerbaijan “considers the possibility of high-level visits from the United States to Azerbaijan inappropriate as well.”

The Azerbaijani foreign ministry also said that the “unilateral” approach of the U.S. could lead to it losing its role of a mediator. “In these conditions, we don’t find it possible to hold the meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia on November 20 in Washington,” the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said.