Those who were silent on Karabakh occupation responsible for tragedies there: Turkish president

By Dilan Pamuk

ANKARA (AA) - Those who remained silent on the three-decade occupation of Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region are responsible for the tragedies and the bloodshed that took place there, said Turkey’s president on Monday.

Speaking at the Presidential Complex in the capital Ankara after a Cabinet meeting, Recep Tayyip Erdogan marked Azerbaijan’s first Victory Day, marking a key day in the end of that illegal Armenian occupation.

Erdogan said Turkey has been successfully coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been continuing to threaten humanity with new waves and variants in its second full year.

Noting that a long-running fight is necessary to beat the pandemic, he said it challenges the healthcare services of all countries, including developed ones.

Erdogan stressed that Turkey is in a position to control the numbers of hospitalization, cases in intensive care units, and fatalities.

With normalization steps, Turkey has left behind the problems the pandemic measures caused in the fields of tourism and trade, he added.

Shusha, Azerbaijan's cultural and historical capital, was liberated last fall after 28 years of Armenian occupation.

During the 44-day conflict, which ended with a Russian-brokered truce in November 2020, Azerbaijan liberated several strategic cities and nearly 300 of its settlements and villages from Armenian occupation.

Relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan – two former Soviet republics – have been tense since 1991, when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Upper Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

A joint Turkish-Russian center was established to monitor the postwar truce.