ROME, Italy—Italian Senator Aldo Di Biagio criticized fellow senator Maria Rizzotti’s February 21 speech about the Khojaly incident, assessing it as one-sided and based only on pro-Azerbaijani rhetoric.
Rizzotti—a member of friendship group with Azerbaijan—urged in her speech to declare February 26 “Remembrance Day of Khojaly Genocide” at the Italian Senate.
Senator Biagio said that the Senate does not support Rizzotti’s speech. During his speech on Tuesday, he stated that speaking about the Khojaly events and assessing it as “genocide” means to accept the biased opinion of the Baku authorities but is denied by facts. “There is no reference to the fact that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh reaffirmed their right to self-determination through referendum,” Biagio said. He also noted that his colleague bypassed in her speech the provocations and the spread of Armenophobia by Baku authorities, which hamper the OSCE Minsk Group Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) peace process.
“Ignoring all this means to ignore facts and spread partial information which is pregnant with the risk of being mistaken for the truth, since the issue has been raised in this reputable establishment of the Senate of the Republic, and this is a very serious country,” he concluded.
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The minutes of the Tuesday session at the Senate reportedly did not include Rizzotti’s proposition to declare February 26 as a “Khojaly Genocide” remembrance day.