Bourg-les-Valence Mayor Marlene Mourier reveals in a Facebook post she received threats from Azerbaijanis in August this year.
“Enough is enough! In Bourg-lès-Valence, we have no lessons to learn from Azerbaijan, a “petro-dictatorship” ranked 168 out of 180 by Reporters Without Borders,” she says.
In a lengthy post the Mayor says “when it comes to threats and intimidation against me, Azerbaijan is at its best.”
“After putting me on a blacklist in 2014, then sending me a bailiff in my town hall in 2016 to demand that I put an end to all friendly relations with the residents of the city of Shushi in Artsakh. It was in 2018 that I had to face a lawsuit brought by the state of Azerbaijan before the administrative court with the aim of invalidating the friendship charter that I signed on October 5, 2014 with Shushi, a historical capital of Artsakh, “she says.
The Mayor makes it clear, however, the friendship charter challenged by Baku remains valid and that no one can prejudge the final decision of the Council of State.
“Today I am once again the subject of threats and intimidation to which I will not give in, let alone the dictator in Baku or even his allies in Turkey. Indeed, three Azeri henchmen came to town hall on August 25 to order me to withdraw within an hour the Artsakh flag which flies alongside the flags of our twin cities with which we maintain friendship links,” Marlene Mourier says.
She notes that fifteen minutes later an official of the Azerbaijani Embassy called her deputy, trying to intimidate him undemanding that the Artskh flag be withdrawn.
“Azerbaijan, Aliyev and his associates must come to terms with the idea that friendship cannot be decreed or annulled and that Bourcans have esteem and consideration for the residents of Shushi and for the people of Artsakh, in general,” teh Mayor stresses.
According to her, “Bourg-lès-Valence is not a land of conquest but a land of resistance.”
“Here in France, in Bourg-lès-Valence, displaying the Artsakh flag is an act of solidarity with a people that Azerbaijan threatens daily with annihilation, demonstrating to the world that its only stated ambition is to complete the genocide of the Armenians of 1915 whose executors of yesterday are their allies today,” she notes.
“Neither Bourg-lès-Valence, nor its mayor, Marlène Mourier, will be under the orders of the Baku dictatorship!” she concludes.