“Azerbaijan and Armenia have made some historic and unprecedented moves to reach a lasting peace and put the history of conflict behind us,” Azerbaijani Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Elin Suleymanov said in his letter addressed to the Economist magazine.

The letter by the Azerbaijani ambassador was published in response to Wendell Steavenson’s article, which was posted on the online publication “1843” of the Economist on January 1.

“Wendell Steavenson is correct to point out that former separatist authorities in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region refused supplies from Azerbaijan and flatly rejected its sovereignty (“Nagorno-Karabakh, the republic that disappeared overnight”, 1843 January 1st). This was a requirement of international law, as this was a recognized part of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Perhaps, the author who acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were violently displaced in the 1990s, should be a bit more clear that this was a sovereign Azerbaijani territory illegally occupied by Armenia in a late-Soviet era engineered separatism project, later replicated throughout Eurasia.

For more importantly, as Azerbaijan and Armenia have made some historic and unprecedented moves to reach a lasting peace and put the history of conflict behind us, the article’s focus on the legacy of conflict and division was both disappointing and misplaced,” the Azerbaijani diplomat emphasized.