In the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the US Department of State confirmed Turkey’s participation in the 44-day war unleashed by Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in fall 2020.

In the section devoted to Armenia, the Department of State said Azerbaijan, “with Turkish support”, seized control over four territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, while a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement resulted in the peaceful transfer of control over three additional territories to Azerbaijan. The Department of State also recalls that the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh has been the topic of the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (US, France, Russia) since 1995.

Hakob Arshakyan on Wednesday submitted his resignation from the post of Minister of High-Tech Industry of the Republic of Armenia (RA); he posted a respective statement on Facebook.

“Today is my last working day as the RA Minister of High-Tech Industry.

As a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, I consider unacceptable the use of violence by an official against any citizen (…).

As a high-ranking official, a person representing the Republic of Armenia in the international arena, moreover, I am obligated to serve the public as an example through my own experience.

Thus, I express my intolerance toward violence, both psychological and physical.

I hope that what happened will serve as a lesson for our society, and we will love each other and respect everyone’s right to the inviolability of the personal, family life a little more.

With my future activities, I will continue to work for the development of our beloved homeland: the Republic of Armenia,” Arshakyan wrote in part.

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of State released the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices on Tuesday, March 30, during a press briefing led by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, reported the Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly). The human rights violations against Armenians were outlined in the reports, particularly in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) war launched by Azerbaijan, with the full support of Turkey, against the Armenian people on September 27, 2020. “Significant human rights issues” by Azerbaijan highlighted in the report included “unlawful or arbitrary killing; torture; arbitrary detention; harsh and sometimes life-threatening prison conditions…significant human rights issues connected with the Nagorno-Karabakh armed conflict included unlawful killings, civilian casualties, and inhuman treatment.” The report noted that “the government did not prosecute or punish the majority of officials who committed human rights abuses and that “impunity remained a problem.” Honing in on the human rights abuses, the report contained examples of two videos featured on social media last October of Azerbaijani soldiers “humiliating and executing two Armenian detainees in the town of Hadrut.” The report goes on to state that the videos were assessed as “genuine” and “authentic” by independent experts from Bellingcat, the BBC, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Another example listed was tied to an Amnesty International report that documented the “execution by decapitation of two ethnic Armenian civilians by Azerbaijani forces.” Azerbaijan’s “use of heavy artillery missiles, combat unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and aerial bombs, as well as cluster munitions, hitting civilians and civilian facilities in Nagorno-Karabakh” was also underscored in the report, noting that the Azerbaijani government “denied the accusations” that its military targeted civilian structures, despite the fact that the Human Rights Watch on October 3, 2020 and December 11, 2020 “criticized Azerbaijan’s armed forces for repeatedly using weapons on residential areas in Nagorno-Karabakh.” The nonmilitary sites targeted included medical emergency service centers and ambulances, food stocks, crops, livestock, electricity and gas plants, and drinking-water installations and supplies, as well as schools and preschools. International observers reported that “Azerbaijani armed forces on multiple occasions struck near humanitarian organizations, such as The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and HALO Trust, located in Stepanakert” and on October 14, 2020 “three aircraft reportedly dropped bombs on the military hospital in Martakert, damaging the hospital and destroying nearby medical vehicles, all clearly marked as medical.” The report also cited that on November 2, 2020, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized Azerbaijan’s continuing attacks in populated areas in and around the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, and quoted High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, who stated “homes have been destroyed, streets reduced to rubble, and people forced to flee or seek safety in basements.” A section on “abused soldiers and civilians by Azerbaijani forces” was rooted in “credible reports” and detailed the abuse based on the Human Rights Watch report published on December 2, 2020, that “Azerbaijani forces inhumanly treated numerous ethnic Armenian soldiers captured in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict” and “Azerbaijani forces subjected the detainees to physical abuse and humiliation in actions that were captured on videos and widely circulated on social media.” The number of missing persons and prisoners of war was documented in the report, citing the ICRC that “processed cases of persons missing in connection with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and worked with the government to develop a consolidated list of missing persons.” Lastly, the report commented on the rise of “inflammatory rhetoric and hate speech against Armenians.” In his statement during the press briefing, Secretary Blinken emphasized that President Biden is “committed to putting human rights back at the center of American foreign policy” and that perpetrators of abuse will be held accountable.  He noted that “human rights are universal” and that “all people are entitled to these rights.” The COVID-19 pandemic caused “alarming trend lines,” according to Secretary Blinken, which gave autocratic governments the opportunity to “further repress human rights.” “Standing up for human rights everywhere is in America’s interest,” he said. “Standing for people’s freedom and dignity honors America’s most sacred values.” Secretary Blinken pledged to work with the U.S. Congress to sanction human rights violators and to “demonstrate a bipartisan commitment to promoting human rights.” He remarked that consequences would be imposed, including economic sanctions and visa restrictions if “autocratic institutions undercut human rights.”

A private video reportedly featuring the daughter of Azerbaijani opposition leader Jamil Hasanli has been leaked on social media, the latest in a spate of sex-tapes targeting opposition figures.

Hasanli is the chair of the National Council of Democratic Forces and stood as the main opposition candidate in the 2013 presidential elections, with the official results placing him in second with 5.5% of the vote.

This is the fourth such incident over the past month, with the sister of a critical blogger, and feminist activists and writers also being targetted. 

In a post on Facebook on Sunday, Hasanli blamed the security services and president Ilham Aliyev personally for the leak, indicating that the release was a means to apply political pressure on him. 

‘My daughter, Gunel Hasanli, is 38 years old and has been divorced for more than 10 years. She can have her own personal life and remarry. No one, including me, can forbid it. There is nothing unusual here,’ Hasanli wrote.

‘It is immoral to intrude on the privacy of others, to mobilise the security services of the state to use it as a means of political blackmail.’

Hasanli claimed this was a practice going back decades, citing a criminal case being filed against Aliyev’s father, former president Heydar Aliyev, for the same form of attacks while he was still working for the KGB. It was not possible to verify this claim. 

‘Ilham Aliyev has unreasonable hopes that he will deter us from politics in such immoral ways. How my daughter builds and lives her personal life is her own business, it has nothing to do with the state’, stated Hasanli. 

OC Media was unable to contact Gunel Hasanli for comment. Her family told the media that she was shocked by the circumstances.

‘The state must investigate’

Human rights lawyer and feminist activist Zhala Bayramova condemend the government’s reaction to the leak.

She accused them of violating Article 32 of the Constitution of Azerbaijan, as well as Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protect the right to privacy.

Bayramova told OC Media that the state accusing victims filming and distributing the videos themselves as opposed to investigating the leaks was a violation in itself.

‘There is a procedural obligation, if an incident occurs, the state must investigate it effectively. Experience shows that when the victim is a member of civil society, the state investigates such cases late’, said Bayramova.

She said that any information, photo, or video spread on the internet already provided a legal obligation for law enforcement agencies to immediately initiate a criminal case and investigate the matter. 

‘Article 156 of the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan criminalises all acts of intrusion into private life. In fact, the government’s deliberate delay in doing so has allowed the videos to remain on the internet and circulate for a longer period of time’, Bayramova said.

She said it should be considered an aggravating circumstance when such crimes are committed by officials. 

‘Experience has shown that prior to this incident, law enforcement agencies did not take any action not only in cases involving political opponents, but also when personal information of other citizens was disseminated, especially on Instagram and Telegram’, said Bayramova.

Bayramova observed that instead of investigating cases, law enforcement agencies often blame and insult the victims. When a victim is queer, they have even encouraged the leaking of personal materials. 

‘In fact, this shows that when it comes to punishing opponents, law enforcement agencies maintain platforms to disseminate videos of private lives in a way that allows past crimes to continue’, concluded Bayramova.

Source: https://oc-media.org/new-sex-tape-emerges-targetting-daughter-of-azerbaijani-critic/

Armenia could have avoided the war. This is what President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian said in an interview with the Russian RBK TV.

“I think Armenia could have avoided the war. I have been a diplomat for thirty years and have met with the leaders of various countries, and it seems to me that it is always possible to find paths to solve such problems without hostilities. After all, in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, after the first war in Nagorno-Karabakh, there was an organization that was dealing with the solution to the issue, that is, the OSCE Minsk Group. There was a mechanism for dialogue and communication. However, if we look at it from Armenia’s perspective and the country’s mistakes, we Armenians believed in what we wanted to believe once again instead of strengthening Nagorno-Karabakh’s defensibility, creating more modern military infrastructures and making Nagorno-Karabakh economically more effective. We Armenians thought the war was over and the issue was solved, but it was far from being solved, especially since Azerbaijan was constantly talking about the future war.”

Sarkissian also talked about Armenia of the 21^st century, stating that there is the real Armenia which we talk about and the virtual Armenia that is hinged on new technologies.

Four steps Washington can take to facilitate a lasting end to the conflict.

By Daniel Baer

The first 100 days are not even over, and the Biden administration’s national security and foreign-policy team has already dealt with major fires around the world—from the Saudi-backed war in Yemen to a military coup and brutal crackdown in Myanmar to calibrating the relationship with a bristling China.

Late last year, a war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and although the bullets and bombs have stopped for now, the underlying conflict has not ended. It is an example of the kind of problem that slips out of the headlines and, therefore, away from the firefighters’ view. That’s too bad—not only because the smoldering embers could ignite further violence and human misery but also because firefighting is about preventing destruction, not about construction. If all one does is put out fires, one never builds anything. In other words, moments of relative calm, however tense and enduring the challenges might be, often present the opportunities—however difficult—for actual progress.

Though its roots go back further (they always do), in its contemporary incarnation the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted three decades ago, as ripples of the Soviet Union’s slow-motion collapse began radiating outward from its epicenter in Moscow.

Until a new wide-scale war broke out in September 2020, the conflict over the status of the majority-Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories had been mostly frozen since 1994, when a Russian-brokered cease-fire ended several years of war that killed thousands of people and displaced more than a million in the two former Soviet republics. Since 1997, the United States, Russia, and France, as co-chairs of the Minsk Group at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), have been charged with facilitating negotiations toward a lasting resolution.

But in recent years, diplomacy faltered, and outbreaks of violence along the line of contact became more frequent, including a four-day conflagration in 2016. The 1994 agreement left Armenia in de facto control not only of Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian region that had been part of Azerbaijan in the Soviet Union, but also of adjacent Azerbaijani territories—and it was signed in part because of Azerbaijan’s fear at the time that Armenian troops might make further gains, including attacking Azerbaijan’s second-largest city, Ganja. But in the intervening decades, Azerbaijan’s oil money combined with military, intelligence, and training support from Turkey—and Armenia’s relative poverty and dependence on Russia—created a situation where the party dissatisfied with the status quo, Azerbaijan, had accumulated significant advantages in military power. This loaded the spring for renewed conflict, and the failure of the parties to negotiate effectively—and of the international community to pressure and incentivize them to do so—released the spring in the new war that broke out last year.

This time, roles were reversed as Azerbaijan reclaimed territory adjoining Nagorno-Karabakh and wrested control of a significant portion of Nagorno-Karabakh itself before the parties signed another Russian-brokered cease-fire late in the night of Nov. 9, 2020. Notably, that agreement provides for 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to be deployed along a new line of contact and in the corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper—a step that worries many who have witnessed how in Georgia and Moldova, two other former Soviet republics, Russian so-called peacekeepers have undermined sovereignty rather than reinforced it.

The new status quo is unlikely to change in the near term, nor do the two parties seem willing to move forward constructively. And the Nov. 9 agreement is only a cease-fire, not a peace accord. Furthermore, the deep involvement of and ambiguous objectives of Russia and Turkey make things even more complicated, and the situation on the ground is already a morass of sensitive transit routes and mountainous terrain. Looking at maps of the conflict area can actually be confusing rather than clarifying.

Today Azerbaijan, though drunk with victory, remains a brittle and repressive petrostate held back by official corruption and economic stagnation. Armenia’s democratic reforms, a source of hope after the 2018 political transition, are—like its prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan—on the ropes, as weak institutions and a disheartened populace prove vulnerable to Russian disinformation, corruption, and anti-Western narratives. Though an improvement over his predecessors, Pashinyan has proved an unsteady steward of

Armenia’s democratic transformation. This month, he called for snap elections in a bid to escape the political crisis precipitated by anger over Armenia’s defeat. Either way, Armenia is likely to remain painfully dependent on Moscow. And leaders in both Baku and Yerevan have prepared their populations for war for more than a generation and have done little to lay the groundwork for peace. Against this backdrop, senior officials in the Biden administration might well argue internally that they should keep an eye on the situation but focus their energies elsewhere—and not attempt to play a leading role diplomatically.

This would be a mistake. Instead, the new U.S. administration should see the South Caucasus region as an opportunity to demonstrate the value of serious U.S. engagement and use it as an example of President Joe Biden’s commitment to a pro-democracy foreign policy centered on universal values and human rights. This is not to suggest that a dramatic breakthrough is obviously in reach; there is plenty of reason for sober analysis and skepticism about outcomes. But without energetic U.S. diplomacy, there is significantly less hope for progress.

By the decree of President of Russia Vladimir Putin, Head of the Free Legal Aid Center (adjunct to the religious organization of the Russia and New Nakhchivan Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church) Ruben Margaryan has been awarded the 2^nd degree medal “For services provided to the Homeland”.

Margaryan has been awarded for his successes and longstanding and faithful work.

We are de facto in a kind of situation that sees the Armenian authorities take sides with the Turkish agenda instead of pursuing their national interests, a Yerevan-based expert in Turkish studies said today, warning of potentially realistic hazards.

“The de facto authorities of the Republic of Armenia have initiated – are de facto pursuing – actions to normalize the relations with Turkey. But that normalization does not stem from the position of Armenia; it is rather a pan-Turkish program which Turkey has been permanently aspiring for since the first days of Armenia’s independence,” Varuzhan Geghamyan told Tert.am.

He warned, in particular, of programmed actions aiming to satisfy the “Turkish preconditions” (refusing to pursue the Genocide recognition campaign and giving up the territorial claims for Artsakh, as well as opening the highway corridors through Armenia’s southern region of Syunik).

Foreign Minister Ara Aivazian is expected to resign from office soon amid “extremely serious” controversies with the incumbent government.

168 Zham: The paper draws attention especially to statements by different government officials – including Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – not coordinated with the minister and running counter to Armenia’s official foreign policy. The kind of rhetoric reportedly turns out controversial to an extent that it later creates problems for the entire diplomatic corps.

Aivazian, who was appointed to office on November 18, a week after the end of the second Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) war (after the his predecessor, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, handed in his resignation), is said to have been facing problems shortly after the start of his official tenure, particularly his visit to Moscow back in December (where he made very tough remarks against Turkey’s non-constructive regional policies, particularly its role in the 44-day fighting). Reports later spread that the statement angered Pashinyan, causing him to have a “serious conversation” with the minister. 

The paper claims that episodes of the kind had a “repeated nature” over the recent period, especially with regard to Turkey and the prospective relations with other countries in the region. This is reported to be the cause of the repeated rumors that the foreign minister may step down soon. Aivazian, however, remains “modestly silent”, refraining from any comments on the issue, says the paper.

by PAUL ANTONOPOULOS,

Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) that is in a ruling coalition with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), made new provocations against Greece.

“My advice to the grandchildren of the criminals who drank the blood of the Muslim Turks is not to test our patience and they should immediately stop their provocations and harassment,” said the leader of the Far Right political party.

“The rematch for the Morea uprising has not been seen yet, this account has not yet been closed,” he said in reference to the Greek War of Independence that began in the Morea, or more commonly known as the Peloponnese.

“The Morea uprising is one of the bloody and devastating disasters that marked the Turkish nation in the past,” he continued in another tweet.

“And in this uprising, a real genocide took place, nearly 40,000 Muslim Turks were killed,” the extremist leader said in reference to the Peloponnese being rid of non-Christians during the Greek War of Independence.

He of course omits that most of the Muslims in the Peloponnese did not identity as Turks, but rather as Greek or Albanian Muslims.

Bahçeli also omits 400 years of Turkish massacres and enslavement over the Morea.

“What an example is humanity when it is still silent against this mass murder,” he continued.

“On this occasion, I wish God’s mercy to the Muslim Turks who were martyred in the Morea uprising and lost their lives by being thrown into the tunnel of violence and terror, and I remember them all with respect and gratitude,” he continued.

“Our blood is still on the ground, when the day comes, the price will of course be paid,” the Far Right leader threatened.