The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina does not recommend traveling to Azerbaijan due to the escalation of the conflict between that country and Armenia, in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh, said the head of the Public Relations Office of this ministry, Nebojsa Regoje stated on Tuesday.
The recommendation for BiH citizens, who are currently in war-torn regions, is to leave immediately. The Consulate General of BiH in Istanbul is responsible for the consular protection of BiH citizens, and the telephone number is + / 90 212 / 236-69-34. For all additional clarifications and instructions, BiH citizens can contact the BiH Embassy in Ankara.
The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, signed a decree declaring a state of emergency in the entire country, starting on September 28th. Military mobilization was announced and a state of war was declared in several regions, after Armenia declared total military mobilization.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, which are de facto controlled by the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, but are internationally recognized as de jure part of Azerbaijan. The conflict has its origins in the early 20th century. Under the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin decided to make the Nagorno-Karabakh region an autonomous oblast of Soviet Azerbaijan.
The present conflict began in 1988, when the Karabakh Armenians demanded that Karabakh be transferred from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The conflict escalated into a full-scale war in the early 1990s.
A ceasefire signed in 1994 provided for two decades of relative stability, which significantly deteriorated along with Azerbaijan’s increasing frustration with the status quo, at odds with Armenia’s efforts to cement it. A four-day escalation in April 2016 became the deadliest ceasefire violation to date.
(Photo: E-Intrnational, Marco Fieber)
