Azerbaijan urges CE Commissioner to be impartial
By Aisha Jabbarova
Azerbaijan has called on the Council of Europe Commissioner for human rights Dunja Mijatović to withhold from double-standards and remain impartial over the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
In a statement published on April 27, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry criticized Mijatović for misinterpreting the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by describing it as an “inter-ethnic hostility” or “bitter relations between the ethnic communities residing in and around Nagorno-Karabakh”.
The ministry said that there is no “ethnic community” in and around Nagorno Karabakh other than ethnic Armenians, due to Armenia’s ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis in these areas.
It further reminded that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in its resolution 1416 (2005) expressed its concern over “mass expulsion of population and creation of mono-ethnic areas, which resemble the terrible concept of ethnic cleansing”.
The Foreign Ministry stressed that for 30 years, the Commissioner and her predecessors turned a blind eye to rights violations of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis expelled from their homes, as well as to mass destruction of Azerbaijan’s formerly occupied territories and the killing of around 100 civilians in Armenian attacks on residential areas in Ganja and Barda in 2020.
The ministry’s comments are in response to Mijatović’s critical statement on the opening of Military Trophy Park in Baku.
The ministry said that the recently-opened park serves to immortalize Azerbaijan’s victory in the war for its sovereignty and territorial integrity and is a practice widely applied by many nations, including across the Council of Europe region.
Furthermore, the ministry spoke about revanchism and Azerbaijanophobia in Armenia where anyone who speaks about reconciliation and peaceful coexistence with Azerbaijan is treated as “traitor”.
“All these reprehensible developments have since remained however unnoticed by the Commissioner,” the ministry stressed.