Two Azeri MPs appeal to Belgian FM
Two Azerbaijani lawmakers have appealed to Belgium’s Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere over a plan of the country’s Betravel company to arrange trips to the Armenia-occupied Nagorno Karabakh region next year.
The offer to organize trips to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh on September 15-27, 2012 was posted on Betravel’s website.
Moreover, historical facts were blatantly distorted on the web-page. Nagorno Karabakh, a region where ethnic Armenians are running a self-proclaimed republic, is cited as an independent state, while 13th century Albanian shrines are indicated as Armenian churches.
This information was also published in the Belgian French language newspaper La Tribune de Bruxelles.
The two MPs – co-chairman of Belgium-Azerbaijan inter-parliamentary relations taskforce Elkhan Suleymanov, and its member Azer Karimli – in their letter to the Belgian minister demanded that Betravel remove the provocative information from its website, provide an explanation for spreading information potentially questioning Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and apologize to Azerbaijan.
The letter was also sent to Belgian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Luc Truyens, Belgian-Azerbaijani working group co-chair Philippe Blanchard and the head of Betravel.
Nagorno Karabakh is an Azerbaijani region occupied by Armenian forces since a 1994 cease-fire ended a war that killed an estimated 30,000 people and ousted up to one million Azerbaijanis from their homes. Years of OSCE-brokered peace talks have brought few tangible results.
Though the separatist regime in Nagorno Karabakh declared so-called independence at the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991, it has not been recognized by the world community.