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| - Azerbaijan's separatist region of Nagorny Karabakh elected a former prime minister to be president, rebel officials said Wednesday, in a vote that Baku and the international community have denounced as illegal. Arayik Harutyunyan garnered 88 percent of the vote in Tuesday's second round runoff, central election commission chief Srbui Arzumanyan told a news conference. The enclave's foreign minister Masis Mailyan received 12 percent of the votes, she said, adding that turnout was 45 percent. "This is a victory of our people as we have held, yet again, a democratic election," said Harutyunyan, 47, who served as prime minister of the region from 2007 to 2017. Azerbaijan, the EU and international mediators to the Karabakh conflict have rejected the elections as illegal. Ahead of the first round of voting on March 31, the European Union said it "does not recognise the constitutional and legal framework" for the ballot. Diplomats from Russia, the United States, and France which mediate Karabakh peace talks under the aegis of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, have said they "do not accept the results of these 'elections.'" The region "is not recognised as an independent and sovereign state" by any country, they stressed. Azerbaijan's foreign ministry has said the vote in its "occupied territory" was a "clear violation of the constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the norms and principles of international law." The election was held amid a state of emergency which Karabakh's de-facto authorities declared on Sunday over the coronavirus outbreak. The region has so far reported six cases of COVID-19. Ethnic-Armenian separatists seized Karabakh from Azerbaijan in a war that claimed some 30,000 lives in the early 1990s. A ceasefire was agreed in 1994 but arch-foes Baku and Yerevan remain locked in a bitter dispute with frequent exchanges of fire. mkh-im/jbr/bsp
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