Right of Reply Statements Delivered by Mr. Nairi Petrossian, Deputy Permanent Representative of Armenia, during the High-level Segment of the 46th Session of the UN Human Rights Council in response to the Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Turkey

24 February, 2021

First Right of Reply

President,

We requested the floor to exercise our right of reply to Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The current situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is the result of a flagrant violation by Azerbaijan of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and objectives of international law, namely the obligation to refrain from the threat to use and the use of force itself, peaceful settlement of disputes, and equal rights and self-determination of peoples. Those had been the agreed basic principles for the Nagorno Karabakh conflict resolution put forth by the OSCE mandated international mediators, supported by the UN Security Council. Make no mistakes: A solution imposed with uninhibited and sheer force, heinous war crimes and grave violations of the international human rights law and international humanitarian law will never become a basis for a lasting and sustainable peace.

The Azerbaijani Minister spoke of his Government’s resolve to “re-integrate” Armenians into its space. We are unfortunate to know well the Azerbaijani strategies and means that result in rather an enforced physical disintegration of individual Armenians that fall into the Azeri hands, which has been their preferred way of dealing with Armenians.

Many examples are just one click away, none of them fabricated or faked. A video showing Azerbaijani troops summarily executing two captured Armenians that our distinguished High Commissioner diligently assessed as “appearing to show war crimes being committed” was thoroughly investigated and verified by Bellingcat.

Ibad Huseynov, who most recently got decorated as a national hero of Azerbaijan by the President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, is best known for a picture, where he is posing with a severed head of an Armenian. There are several pictures of Ibad Huseynov with the Azerbaijani and Turkish leadership, including President Erdogan.

The sanctimonious talks of peace that high-level representatives of those two nations pursue in the high-end salons around the globe, as we witnessed yesterday, are not matched with the corresponding appropriate actions on the ground. Most recently, Azerbaijan and Turkey conducted large-scale joint military drills just 50 kilometers from the Armenian border without taking the burden of notifying Armenia about it in violation of their international commitments. It is a peculiar way to display a peace-loving policy amid the calls upon Armenia to demonstrate positive steps.

In our book, those who pursue peace don’t embrace butchers that decapitate human beings and don’t lionize them into national heroes.

I thank you.

Second Right of Reply

President,

The kin delegations of Azerbaijan and Turkey deliberately distort the root causes of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

In 1988 the parliament of the Armenian autonomous region of Nagorno Karabakh formally requested Baku, Moscow and Yerevan to support their right to self-determination. In response to this peaceful call Azerbaijan unleashed murderous violence, deportations, premediated massacres, and abolishment of the autonomous constitutional status. The impunity granted to the perpetrators paved the way for the ethnic cleansing of Armenians throughout Azerbaijan, and further led to a full-scale military aggression against Nagorno Karabakh.

Azerbaijan thinks it can choose à-la carte from the international law and UN Security Council resolutions by cherry-picking the provisions it finds suitable to its own interests.

As per Turkey, instead of lecturing Armenia, Turkey should take certain steps to substantiate its supposed good will. It was Ankara that closed the border with Armenia imposing illegal unilateral coercive measures. It was Turkey that refused to establish normal diplomatic relations without any preconditions, and not the other way around. Armenia will find the ways to reciprocate should Turkey substantiate its nice declarations.

What Turkey calls “unfounded allegations” was a genocide. Historians and genocide scholars have established it beyond reasonable doubt that Armenians were deliberately killed or sent on death marches by the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. It was not a collateral damage, as Turkey presents it.

I thank you.

MFA RA
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