Azerbaijani MP in PACE: Time to give clear assessment to actions of Armenian authorities
By Rashid Shirinov
Azerbaijan is a neighboring country with Armenia, so it is not indifferent to the situation in Armenia, Sevinj Fataliyeva, member of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, said during the PACE spring session.
She regretted that due to the short-sighted policy of the Armenian authorities, the country not only found itself in regional isolation and in difficult socio-economic conditions, but also on the verge of a civil war.
“Today eyes of many people are bent on Yerevan. But who knows what is happening in the Armenian provinces? Armenian human rights activists are actively sharing information on social networks, reporting numerous detentions and arrests,” Fataliyeva noted.
She added that while in Yerevan, those who block the buildings of the government agencies are detained, in other cities, ordinary demonstrators are detained and subjected to severe means of influence.
“Of course, this is not disclosed by the authorities, but Armenian human rights organizations are sounding the alarm. Yerevan is the capital city, so everything that happens there is in the spotlight, but what is happening in other cities remains out of sight of international organizations,” the MP mentioned.
She stressed that these are not the first large-scale protests in Armenia, but every time the protest of hundreds of thousands of people is brutally suppressed, and international organizations and the developed democracies of the world react quite softly to what is happening.
“With such indifference of the rest of the world, the Armenian government has been acting for decades, formatting and reformatting its power to please the ruling clan that usurped political power, and even mass protests, which are designed to draw the attention of the international community to the lawlessness that is taking place there, get a very streamlined assessment,” Fataliyeva noted.
She added that it is time to give a clear assessment to the actions of the Armenian authorities, who are occupying Azerbaijani territories with the same impunity as they are fighting with their own people.
Armenia broke out a lengthy war against Azerbaijan by laying territorial claims on the country. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.
To this day, Armenia has not implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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