Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan has replied to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's comments that the process of defining Armenia's borders would be based on all maps dating back to 1918, as well as those that existed before the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.
"We are not against researching maps. But why limit ourselves to the 20th century? We can start from the maps created in Babylon in the 6th century BC, or by Herodotus in the 5th century BC, or by Strabo in the 1st century BC, or created by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, or from the maps created by Pliny the Elder in the same period, and then to continue with numerous Latin, Byzantine, Arabic and other geographical descriptions and maps of later periods. Armenia has no fear of not finding itself on those maps," he said.
Yerevan has requested Baku to define which lands it means when it talks about Azerbaijan's territorial integrity.
Armen Grigoryan, the Secretary of Armenia's Security Council, stated that the proposal by Armenia and Azerbaijan to recognise each other's territorial integrity is not undesirable.
"We also stated that in the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan acknowledged each other's territorial integrity. For us, the Nagorno-Karabakh problem is a matter of security and rights for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, not a territorial issue," Grigoryan stated. "But some statements by a number of high-ranking Azerbaijani officials need to be clarified. In the context of these statements, we believe that the Azerbaijani officials should specify which territories they see in the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan so that Armenia could clarify its position."
