NEW YORK — The international community must intervene to prevent Azerbaijani from committing genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh after its latest military offensive there, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan told the UN General Assembly late on Saturday.
He also said that Baku may be planning to attack Armenia as well in an attempt to open an “extraterritorial corridor” to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave.
Speaking during a session of the General Assembly, Mirzoyan again accused Azerbaijani forces of committing atrocities as part of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh planned by Baku.
“As I speak today, 30 percent of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh is displaced,” he said. “The entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh remains without any means of subsistence, as just limited humanitarian assistance has been able to enter into Nagorno-Karabakh. There is no food, no medicine, no shelter, no place to go. People are separated from their families, terrorized and fear for their lives.”
“A number of international human rights organizations, lawyers, genocide scholars, reputable independent experts … have already characterized the situation on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh as a risk of genocide … Let me draw your attention to the fact that after its failure of preventing Genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations managed to create mechanisms for prevention, thus making ‘never again’ a meaningful pledge. But today we are at the brink of another failure,” added Mirzoyan.
“Claims that the United Nations is not present on the ground, so has no capacity to verify the situation cannot be an excuse for inaction,” he said.
Mirzoyan declared in his speech that “forcefully imposing on Armenia an extraterritorial corridor, a corridor that will pass through the territory of Armenia but will be out of our control, can be the next target” of Azerbaijan.
“Azerbaijan has a hidden agenda when it comes to unblocking regional transport and economic communications. As a landlocked country, Armenia is vitally interested in implementation of the agreement on the unblocking of all the regional communications on the basis of sovereignty, national jurisdiction, equality and reciprocity. Armenia is a long-standing advocate of the inclusive and equitable transport connectivity with the view to promote trade, cooperation and people-to-people contacts, whereas our neighbors continue to impose the three decades-long blockade of Armenia, as part of its well-established policy of economic coercion of my country. The so-called “corridor” logic promoted by Baku and their hidden and open sponsors is aimed at undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Armenia and justifying its territorial claims” Concluded Mirzoyan.
