Azernews.Az

BAKU – The Washington Post on Saturday published a letter of protest sent to its editor-in-chief by Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States after the newspaper carried a biased article on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, the Azerbaijani embassy told AssA-Irada.

Amb. Yashar Aliyev wrote that Will Englund’s July 7 news article, "In Karabakh, the first post-Soviet war," misrepresented the facts regarding the Karabakh conflict and failed to present Baku’s position.

"The article emphasized the Armenian interpretation of Stalin’s 1921 decision to ‘assign’ Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan, which in fact was the decision to retain Nagorno Karabakh within Azerbaijan. Left out, however, was any mention of the million Azerbaijanis who became refugees and internally displaced persons [during a war with Armenia in the early 1990s], the four UN Security Council resolutions demanding withdrawal of occupying forces from the territories of Azerbaijan, and the crimes committed against Azerbaijanis, such as the Khojaly massacre of 1992. Instead, the article amounted to an advertisement of the illegal separatist regime installed in Nagorno Karabakh by Armenia," the letter says.

Aliyev noted that further, in his July 8 article, titled "Nagorno Karabakh wants a seat at the table", Englund disregarded the fact that Nagorno Karabakh has always had two communities — Azerbaijani and Armenian.

"We hope that in the future The Post will pay equal attention to the Azerbaijani position," the ambassador added.

Will Englund, the newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, recently visited the Armenia-occupied Nagorno Karabakh region and wrote a series of articles about the Karabakh conflict. He used the words "Artsakh" and "Stepanakert", which the Armenians use for Karabakh and Khankandi, the center of the self-proclaimed republic run by ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijani region. Baku accused the reporter of pro-Armenian bias and distorting historical facts.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Elkhan Polukhov said earlier the Azerbaijani government was informed about Englund’s visit to Nagorno Karabakh and did not ban it.

Englund has told the Baku-based ANS TV channel that he tried to be fair while writing the articles and mainly reflected his observations.

Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry has "blacklisted" several journalists over their illegal visits to the country’s Armenia-occupied territories, including Russian Izvestiya (News) newspaper’s reporter Yuri Snegirov and Sergei Buntman, Echo of Moscow radio station’s first assistant editor-in-chief.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war in the early 1990s. About 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including the Nagorno Karabakh region, has been under the occupation of Armenian armed forces since a ceasefire was signed in 1994. Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno Karabakh, backed by Armenia, declared so-called independence in 1991, which has not been recognized by the international community. Peace talks, brokered by the United States, Russia and France through the OSCE Minsk Group, have been largely fruitless so far.