The recent fatal incident on the Nakichevan border was evidently a Turkish-Azerbaijani attempt to escalate tension in the run-up to the Genocide centennial, says Vardan Devrikyan, an Armenian literary critic and a veteran the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

“The closer we are to the Genocide centennial, the more Turkey will use Azerbaijan as a second front to distract attention,” he told reporters on Saturday, calling for a higher degree of attention to the Turkish factor.

Devrikyan said he doesn’t think that the choice of location was accidental given that the situation on the Armenia-Nakichevan Contact Line has always been relatively calm.

“Armenia thus experienced the breath of war, as the shootings were closer to Yerevan,” he said, noting that the Nakichevan Line of Contact is not limited to an Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
Larisa Alaverdyan, a former ombudsman also attending the news conference, said the periodic shootings against the border villages of Tavush have come to be perceived as something ordinary in Armenia, with the repeated violations of ceasefire on the Nagorno-Karabakh Azerbaijan Contact Line not catching any attention at all.

“The government bodies’ behavior forces the defense and security agencies to shoulder the entire burden. But the question has to be included into international organizations’ agenda,” she said.

Alaverdyan added that Armenia’s failure to respond to the statements by James Warlick, the US co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, put the country in a position of a guilty side that appears unable to resort to any resistance.

“We too, have the right to speak about the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in the language of international law. We must never have our heads down whenever an ignorant politician addresses a letter which is later read out by another politician who is equally illterate,” said the former ombudsman, referring to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s letter which president Norsultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan read out at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council’s recent summit in Astana (in the letter, the Azerbaijani leader said Armenia has to make reference to internationally recognized borders when acceding to the Eurasian Economic Union – Ed).

Alaverdyan added that Azerbaijan seems to be taking advantage of the situation in Ukraine and Syria where, she said, violence against civilians has gone unpunished. “Azerbaijan seems to be getting a carte-blanche, seeing those countries’ example,” she said.