Saturday,
Karabakh Man Arrested By Azerbaijan During Medical Evacuation
• Artak Khulian
Vagif Khachatrian and other patients from Nagorno-Karabakh pass through an
Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor, .
Azerbaijani security forces arrested a seriously ill resident of
Nagorno-Karabakh as he was being evacuated by the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenia on Saturday.
Vagif Khachatrian, a 68-year-old resident of the Karabakh village of Patara, was
among patients escorted by the ICRC to Armenian hospitals for urgent treatment.
He was detained at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor in what
Karabakh’s leadership and the Armenian government condemned as a gross violation
of international law.
Azerbaijani authorities said later in the day that Khachatrian was taken to Baku
to stand trial on charges of killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani
residents in December 1991, at the start of the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
They claimed that he was indicted on these charges in 2013.
A senior Karabakh official, Artak Beglarian, rejected the “false” accusations.
He insisted that like many other Karabakh Armenian men, Khachatrian “defended
his homeland” during the 1991-1994 and did not commit war crimes.
“He was neither a commander nor a deputy commander. He was a driver,”
Khachatrian’s daughter Tsovinar, who accompanied him during his aborted trip to
Armenia, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. She said her father was due to undergo
a heart surgery in Yerevan.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry condemned Khachatrian’s arrest as a “blatant
violation of international humanitarian law” and “war crime.” “It is aimed at
completely disrupting the ICRC’s activities in Nagorno-Karabakh at a time when
Azerbaijan is keeping the Lachin corridor closed and impeding the entry of other
international organizations to Nagorno-Karabakh,” it said in a statement.
Nagorno Karabakh - A Red Cross vehicle leaves a hospital in Stepanakert in
December 2022.
Khachatrian is the first Karabakh patient arrested by the Azerbaijani
authorities during the medical evacuations organized by the ICRC after Baku
halted last December commercial traffic through the only road connecting
Karabakh to Armenia. The Red Cross did not immediately react to his detention.
There was also no immediate reaction from Russian peacekeeping forces stationed
in Karabakh. It is not clear whether they tried to prevent the man’s arrest.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly suspended the medical evacuations. On June 15, it also
banned the ICRC and the Russian peacekeepers from sending limited amounts of
humanitarian aid to Karabakh, aggravating the shortages of food, medicine, fuel
and other essential items in the Armenian-populated region.
The worsening humanitarian crisis there led the United States, the European
Union and Russia to renew their calls for the lifting of the Azerbaijani
blockade. Baku continued to reject such appeals this week.
Gurgen Nersisian, the Karabakh premier, on Saturday also blamed Armenia for the
crisis and Khachatrian’s “kidnapping” in particular, saying that this was made
possible by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s May 2023 pledge to recognize
Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh.
Armenian opposition leaders have likewise claimed that the far-reaching
concession made by Pashinian only emboldened Baku to tighten the screws on the
Karabakh Armenians.
Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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