Turkish factor contributed to Nakichevan incident – debate in Yerevan
13:39 * 07.06.14
The recent fatal incident on the Nakichevan border was evidently a
Turkish-Azerbaijani attempt to escalate tension in the run-up to the
Genocide centennial, says Vardan Devrikyan, an Armenian literary
critic and a veteran the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
“The closer we are to the Genocide centennial, the more Turkey will
use Azerbaijan as a second front to distract attention,” he told
reporters on Tuesday, calling for a higher degree of attention to the
Turkish factor.
Devrikyan said he doesn’t think that the choice of location was
accidental given that the situation on the Armenia-Nakichevan Contact
Line has always been relatively calm.
“Armenia thus experienced the breath of war, as the shootings were
closer to Yerevan,” he said, noting that the Nakichevan Line of
Contact is not limited to an Armenian-Azerbaijani border between
Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Larisa Alaverdyan, a former ombudsman also attending the news
conference, said the periodic shootings against the border villages of
Tavush have come to be perceived as something ordinary in Armenia,
with the repeated violations of ceasefire on the Nagorno-Karabakh
Azerbaijan Contact Line not catching any attention at all.
“The government bodies’ behavior forces the defense and security
agencies to shoulder the entire burden. But the question has to be
included into international organizations’ agenda,” she said.
Alaverdyan added that Armenia’s failure to respond to the statements
by James Warlick, the US co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, put the
country in a position of a guilty side that appears unable to resort
to any resistance.
“We too, have the right to speak about the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic
in the language of international law. We must never have our heads
down whenever an ignorant politician addresses a letter which is later
read out by another politician who is equally illterate,” said the
former ombudsman, referring to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s
letter which president Norsultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan read out at
the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council’s recent summit in Astana (in
the letter, the Azerbaijani leader said Armenia has to make reference
to internationally recognized borders when acceding to the Eurasian
Economic Union – Ed).
Alaverdyan added that Azerbaijan seems to be taking advantage of the
situation in Ukraine and Syria where, she said, violence against
civilians has gone unpunished. “Azerbaijan seems to be getting a
carte-blanche, seeing those countries’ example,” she said.