Armenian MPs should attend NATO session in Baku – newspaper
Novoye Vremya, Yerevan
12 Oct 04
The participation of Armenian parliamentarians in the NATO Rose-Roth
seminar taking place in Baku on 27-29 November is still undecided. The
majority of Armenian parliament members are sure that it is necessary
to go to Baku.
The reason for such a position is the fact that Armenia officially
declared its readiness to cooperate with the alliance. So there should
be no doubts. As expected, any activity by the Armenian side in its
relations with NATO is not taken seriously by the Azerbaijanis –
it turns out that the Armenians simply dream of finding themselves
in Baku. They give numerous examples [to prove this point]. The
leader of the Karabakh Liberation Organization, Akif Nagi, who has
been discharged recently, repeats all the time that the “insistent
desire of Armenian deputies to arrive in Baku is an attempt to knock
Azerbaijan together with international structures and to create
tension in such a way.”
[Passage omitted: more instances of Azerbaijani opposition to the
visit]
It seemed that after cancellation of the Cooperative Best Effort-2004
exercises [scheduled for September in Baku but cancelled after
Azerbaijan refused to let in Armenian officers to attend], the alliance
should understand that Azerbaijan is not the most favourable place to
conduct such measures, and Baku understands the partnership in its
own way. But this did happen. “It is simply unacceptable for NATO
that any member country should dictate its own rules of the game,
and for this reason the action of the leadership of the alliance
is quite clear,” the leader of the Armenian delegation to the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly Mger Shakhgeldyan said to the Novoye Vremya
correspondent. According to him, certainly there is a problem with the
security of the Armenian deputies in Baku. “It is enough to remember
how easily an aggressive crowd managed to overcome a police obstacle
the last time. It was only thanks to the NATO security service that
we managed to avoid trouble.”
[Passage omitted: some Armenian politicians support and some oppose
the proposed visit]
Judging from the press, official Baku is impatiently waiting for
the Rose-Roth seminar, especially after the failed September
exercises. Some Abseron [referring to Azerbaijani peninsula]
politologists are calling on radical activists to take care to avoid
the cancellation of yet another event staged by the alliance and not to
damage once and for all the way people view the country. But even if
this happens, in Baku they will say that the Armenians, who “against
the will of the people wanted to step on sacred Azerbaijani land” are
guilty once again. Or they will say there was simply no seminar at
all. The Baku mass media acted just in this way when they explained
why Azeri deputies did not participate in the CIS Interparliamentary
Assembly in Yerevan.