An Armenian refugee has said he will contest Azerbaijani elections if Armenian refugees are able to return to their homes in Azerbaijan.
If the Azerbaijani leadership refuses to uphold the right of Armenian refugees to return to their homes, this will show the international community that this country’s demands on Nagorno-Karabakh are simply absurd and that it has no place amongst civilized states, the chairman of the Assembly of Azerbaijani Armenians, Grigoriy Ayvazyan, told a press conference in Yerevan yesterday.
Ayvazyan said that if Azerbaijan met its obligations and allowed refugees to return to their previous places of residence, he was ready to submit his candidacy in parliamentary and presidential elections.
“I have as much right to this as the usurper Aliyev,” Ayvazyan said.
Asked how many people in Armenia shared his desire to return to Azerbaijan, Ayvazyan said: “There are as many Azerbaijani Armenians who want to return to their homes in Azerbaijan as Azerbaijanis who want to return to Armenian land.”
“The second Armenian republic is not Karabakh, but Azerbaijan, which can be considered Eastern Armenia,“ Ayvazyan said provocatively.
Ethnic Armenians left their homes in Baku and other parts of Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 90s, when Azerbaijanis were forced out of their homes in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and other parts of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces.
A representative of Azerbaijan's Central Election Commission said that Azerbaijani citizens who contested elections could not have any obligations to foreign countries.
'If we consider this issue from the legal viewpoint, any Azerbaijani citizen regardless of ethnicity, religious and political affiliation can take part in presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections in our country," CEC Secretary Natig Mammadov said.
"However, in order to stand in elections, an Azerbaijani citizen cannot have any obligations before a foreign state or dual citizenship and must follow the laws of the country and not have been sentenced for grave crimes. In addition, a candidate has to collect 450 signatures from voters in the constituency they are going to contest in parliamentary elections," Mammadov said.
Regnum, 1news.az
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