The fact that murderer Ramil Safarov has been extradited to Azerbaijan and pardoned by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev continues to be one of the most discussed issues. A set of international organizations have made assessments of the incident, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO, has also made an assessment. www.aravot.am asked Stepan Safaryan, the secretary general of the Heritage Party, to assess the position of Rasmussen and generally, international organizations. He stated, “I am not satisfied, since I myself expected an absolutely different response from both NATO and the EU, since a country, which is a member of both of those organizations, has contributed to that criminal act. Therefore, their position should have been tougher. I also heard Rasmussen’s assessments, but the message that must be sent to Azerbaijan, the step that must be taken must be taken toward administering justice to Ramil Safarov.”
Then S. Safaryan added, “Even if we accept that they made an assessment of the incident, let us assert that they didn’t request from Azerbaijan such a move that would make the verdict brought in against Safarov in Hungary be in force. Everyone criticizes, condemns, but no one sets deadlines, has made a concrete demand to return Safarov to Hungary. What is the point in criticizing, if in practice, we will have Azerbaijan’s impudent attitude toward justice and human life.” We inquired what the reason for the above-mentioned was. S. Safaryan replied, “They cannot criticize Hungary, since it is a member of their family, they don’t want to pressure Azerbaijan too much, since they have oil interests.”
Whereas political scientist Stepan Grigoryan thinks the opposite. During a conversation with us, he stated, “I welcome Rasmussen’s visit. He clearly said that what Baku is doing is unacceptable. One couldn’t have expected more than that. NATO is a serious organization, every word said by it is important.”
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Coming back to international organizations, the political scientist stated, “International organizations expressed a rather tough position, one could hardly expect more than that. The response of the international community was serious, condemning Azerbaijan. This serious mistake of Azerbaijan must be considered in the Karabakh issue. Azerbaijan stated officially that they had done the right thing; they had the right to do it. It means that Karabakh cannot be administratively subordinate to Azerbaijan anymore and we should reassert that on the negotiation table.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
