French mediator points to settlement in Armenian-occupied Azeri district

Turan news agency, Baku
15 Feb 05

Prague, 15 February: The OSCE mission to look into facts of settlement
in the seven Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani districts outside Nagornyy
Karabakh completed its work last week.

The French co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group, Bernard Fassier,
has told Radio Liberty about his impressions of the trip.

The mission became possible thanks to an agreement between Armenia
and Azerbaijan. The Armenians consented to the visit in exchange for
the assurances of the Azerbaijani authorities to stop pressing for
the discussion of the issue at the UN Security Council.

Baku maintains that the Armenian authorities have settled 23,000
Armenians on the occupied territories and demands an end to the policy
of “colonization”.

Fassier said it would be wrong to speak about deliberate settlement on
these territories except for Lacin [Lachin] District. The settlement
of other districts looks like “spontaneous migration”, he said.

‘The settlement of Lacin is encouraged and sponsored. But in the six
other districts, 80-90 per cent of settlers have either arrived on
their own or with the support of the Armenian diaspora. The number
of Armenian settlers in the occupied territories considerably differs
from the estimates of the Azerbaijani side,” Fassier said.

A considerable portion of settlers is made up of refugees from
Azerbaijan who emerged at the very start of the conflict in 1988. The
second group of settlers are people afflicted by the Armenian
earthquake in December 1988, while the third group of settlers are
those who left Armenia because of socioeconomic problems and livestock
breeding farmers who came from the mountains together with their
cattle because of the winter, Fassier said. He said many settlers do
not receive assistance from Armenia or Karabakh.

[Passage omitted: background information about the mission]