Naira Zohrabyan to PACE delegates: You gave Azerbaijan carte blanche to start large-scale military operations in Karabakh conflict zone
Naira Zohrabyan, a member of the Armenian delegation to the parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) addressed harsh criticism to PACE President Pedro Agramunt during the PACE spring session, condemning Agramunt for his support of the Azerbaijani aggressive policy. She declared that by voting for the resolution of the Sarsang Reservoir in the January session PACE gave Azerbaijan 'a carte blanche' to start large-scale military operations. “On the night of April 2, Azerbaijan attack along the entire perimeter of the Line of Contact between Karabakh-Azerbaijani armed forces, applying heavy weapons, clearly targeting civilians and bombarding civilian settlements. They bombarded schools, killed peaceful civilians and soldiers, cut off their ears, mutilated the corpses of Armenian soldiers, and killed a schoolboy in front of his brother. Azerbaijan tortured and beheaded prisoners of war and combatants, and all this before the eyes of the civilized world. Moreover, Azerbaijan's troops managed to take the village of Talish [in Karabakh] under their control for one day, where Aliyev’s mercenaries brutally tortured and killed elderly people who stayed in the village. While Aliyev’s mercenaries were committing war crimes, PACE President Pedro Agramunt expressed his support to Azerbaijan’s authoritarian and aggressive policy. While Azerbaijani armed forces were shelling civilian settlements, the President of our Assembly who is obliged to maintain neutrality and impartiality was encouraging the war criminals by his messages,” Zohrabyan said. “The Council of Europe is an organization of 47 states, obliged to represent and protect the rights of 800 million Europeans. The president of such a serious organization must be an unbiased and objective person, not someone who publicly defends dictatorship by encouraging criminal Azerbaijan. It’s an unprecedented situation here, when the President of the Assembly is also Azerbaijani President’s spokesman. “All those who voted for the so-called humanitarian issue of the Sarsang water reservoir should have already acknowledged that Azerbaijan didn’t want to solve any humanitarian problem, but to recapture the reservoir. That’s why Azerbaijan needed your support in international institutions and in PACE to commit a war crime under the guise of a humanitarian act. Look at the movement of the Azerbaijani armed forces during the four-day war and you will understand that through your vote you gave Azerbaijan that ‘carte blanche’,” Zohrabyan said.
