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Artsakh’s State Minister Artak Beglaryan on Friday refuted Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s claims on the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region. The minister's full statement is provided below.

"Ilham Aliyev made new falsifications of historical facts, for this time – on the demography of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region.

At an event in occupied Shushi, the president of Azerbaijan, in addition to other false statements, said that during the soviet era the Azerbaijani population was majority in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, while the reality is the contrary.

1. In 1921, at the moment of Karabakh annexation, the Azerbaijani population was 4%, and in the following decades the USSR censuses show the following:

• 1926 - 10.06%,
• 1939 - 9.32%,
• 1959 - 13.80%,
• 1970 - 18.08%,
• 1979 - 22.98%,
• 1989 - 21.52%.

2. Definitely, the rest of the population was Armenian and a tiny percentage – minorities.

3. And those are numbers which had been collected by the Soviet Azerbaijani authorities, including the father of Ilham Aliyev. Therefore, they are inflated.

4. The stable growth of the Azerbaijani population in Nagorno-Karabakh during the soviet era is explained by the white genocide committed against the Armenian indigenous people.

5. The Azerbaijani authorities must keep in mind forever that Artsakh has had an exclusively Armenian overwhelming majority for 3,000 years."