Azerbaijan has reacted angrily to comments made by a European Union diplomat who drew a distinct line between the issue of ethnic Armenians returning to Nagorno-Karabakh and the question of Azerbaijanis who left Armenia at the start of the conflict decades ago.
In an August 4 interview with JAMnews, a news website focused on the South Caucasus, the EU’s outgoing Special Representative for the South Caucasus and crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar implied that the question of Azerbaijanis returning to Armenia should be considered separately from the issue of Armenians returning to Nagorno-Karabakh, but along with that of Armenians returning to other parts of Azerbaijan.
“Sometimes other issues are brought up in this context, such as the question of so-called “Western Azerbaijan.” For me, these are completely distinct questions that cannot be mixed,” Klaar said in reference to claims in Baku that much of the territory of modern-day Armenia historically used to be part of Azerbaijan.
“The first is the facilitation of the return of the Karabakh Armenians to their ancestral homes, which is an obligation that Azerbaijan has. The second is the question of Armenians who used to live in other parts of Azerbaijan, including in Baku, or of Azerbaijanis who used to live in Armenia,” added Klaar, who completes his mission in the South Caucasus in September to take up the position of EU ambassador to Uzbekistan.
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The EU diplomat said that Armenians and Azerbaijanis should also be able to visit the places where they or their families once lived or even to return there, if they so wish, and that this should likewise be a consequence of normalization.
“But that is a wholly different issue from the specific question of the Karabakh Armenians,” Klaar stressed.
Reacting to Klaar’s remarks, Vasif Aliyev, a deputy spokesman for Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry, described them as biased, calling it a “blow to the reputation of the organization, which the EU diplomat primarily represents.”
“It is Armenia’s obligation to create appropriate conditions for the safe and dignified return of Azerbaijanis expelled from Armenia to their native lands, and the international community should demand the fulfillment of this obligation,” he said in a statement published by Azerbaijani media.
Aliyev also said that “the Azerbaijani side respects the intention of returning to Azerbaijan only for those Armenians who respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of our country.”
“The fact that he [Toivo Klaar] makes such biased statements, which are not within his authority, on the eve of his departure from office, is another blow to the reputation of the organization, which he primarily represents,” the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry representative concluded.
More than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh last fall amid a military offensive by Azerbaijan that regained full control of the region, which had remained de facto independent for nearly three decades after breaking away from Baku’s rule during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Only a handful of Armenians decided to stay and live under Azerbaijani administration.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has publicly acknowledged the right of ethnic Armenians to return to Nagorno-Karabakh, stating, however, that to do so, Armenians will need to apply for Azerbaijani citizenship and be prepared to live under Baku’s rule as loyal citizens.
Representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians who currently stay in Armenia have called for international security guarantees before they can return home, something that Baku appears to reject, insisting that Azerbaijan’s legislation adequately protects the rights of ethnic minorities within its territory.
At the same time, Azerbaijan has linked the issue of Karabakh Armenians to the return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris to parts of Armenia from where, as Baku claims, they were “forcibly displaced” during the 20th century, notably in the late 1980s when another wave of ethnic tensions arose between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians fled from other parts of Azerbaijan at that time as the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh was in its early stages. Armenia insists that the rights of these Armenians should also be considered in the current normalization process.
RFE/RL’s Armenian Service
