U.S. REVERTS TO ‘PRO-AZERI’ WORDING OF RIGHTS REPORT
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech rep.
April 26 2007
In a move hailed by Azerbaijan, the U.S. State Department has restored
the original version of its annual human rights report that refers
to Nagorno-Karabakh as an Azerbaijani territory occupied by Armenia.
The reference was dropped from the report’s chapter on human rights
in Armenia last week following strong protests from official Yerevan
and Armenian lobby groups in the United States. Its revised version
stopped short of describing Karabakh as an internationally recognized
part of Azerbaijan.
The significant change in the report’s wording was condemned by
Azerbaijan which cancelled on Sunday a planned visit to Washington by
a high-level government delegation. The move prompted U.S. officials
to reassure Baku that Washington recognizes Azerbaijan’s territorial
integrity in the Karabakh conflict.
The State Department denied on Thursday that it restored the
controversial passage under Azerbaijani pressure. "We didn’t do
anything under pressure," an official at the department’s Bureau of
European and Eurasian Affairs told RFE/RL from Washington. "We were
trying to correct some unclear language that led to confusion about
our policy. We’ve determined that our policy has not changed and that
we need to stand by the original human rights report."
"I think this whole thing from our side was a mistake in the way that
it was handled, and I’m sorry that that mistake has led to all of this
exaggerated press attention and has been blown out of proportion,"
said the official, who asked not to be identified.
The Azerbaijani government was quick to welcome the restored sentence
of the report which says, "Armenia continues to occupy the Azerbaijani
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani
territories." "This change is a very important news for me," Foreign
Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said Thursday, according to the Day.az
news service.
Predictably, Armenian reaction to the development was diametrically
opposite. "We thought the mistake [in the report’s original version]
was corrected and are bewildered by such an unserious approach to the
matter," Vladimir Karapetian, a spokesman for the Armenian Foreign
Ministry, told RFE/RL.
Karapetian said Yerevan hopes that the State Department will again
revise the report, arguing that U.S. diplomats had "recognized their
mistake" during talks with Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian and
other Armenian officials. He also pointed to comments made by Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza in an interview with the
Azerbaijani Azertaj news agency on Wednesday.
"We have admitted and corrected our mistake," Bryza was quoted as
saying. "We can not predetermine the outcome of negotiations on
Nagorno-Karabakh’s status."
Bryza, who is also the U.S. co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group on
Karabakh, could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.
The State Department official stressed that U.S. policy on the
Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute has not changed. "We support the
territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, but we hold that the future status
of Nagorno-Karabakh is a matter of negotiations between the parties,"
he said.
The Minsk Group’s existing peace plan, strongly backed by the U.S.,
paves the way for international recognition of Karabakh’s secession
from Azerbaijan by envisaging a referendum of self-determined in the
Armenian-controlled disputed territory. Diplomats privy to the peace
process say the conflicting parties have already agreed on most basic
principles of the proposed settlement.
In a joint statement last week, the group’s American, French and
Russian co-chairs reiterated their hopes that the presidents of
Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet and cut a framework peace deal shortly
after the May 12 Armenian parliamentary elections. They said another
Armenian-Azerbaijani summit "could mark an endpoint for negotiations
on basic principles and a starting point for a process to develop a
comprehensive settlement agreement."