KARABAKH ACCUSES OSCE OF IGNORING VIOLATIONS OF CEASEFIRE DEAL BY AZERBAIJAN (PART 2)
Interfax
March 16 2009
Russia
The OSCE’s passive attitude toward increasingly more frequent
violations of a ceasefire deal by Azerbaijan negatively influences the
situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, the Nagorno-Karabakh
Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Ministry reported earlier that "Azerbaijan
once again violated the ceasefire at the southeastern section of the
contact line between the Nagorno-Karabakh and Azeri armed forces in
the early hours of March 13, in which a Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army
serviceman on duty was killed by sniper fire."
Commenting on the incident to Interfax on Saturday, the Nagorno-
Karabakh Foreign Ministry called it symptomatic that the incident had
occurred the next day after the office of OSCE chairman-in-office’s
personal representative Andrzej Kasprzyk monitored the contact line
at this same area.
"This incident, which led to a loss of life, happened because of
the absence of a public response by the office of OSCE chairman-in-
office’s personal representative Andrzej Kasprzyk to increasingly more
frequent ceasefire agreement violations on the part of Azerbaijan,
which now occur even during monitoring conducted by the office of
the personal representative of the OSCE chairman-in-office," the
Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Ministry said.
"The absence of a political qualification of such actions, which
Stepanakert has repeatedly pointed to, only encourages the aggressor,"
it said.
"Azerbaijan does not even see fit to consider a proposal on withdrawing
snipers from the frontline as a confidence-building measure, which the
foreign ministers of the OSCE Minsk Group made at an OSCE ministerial
session in Helsinki on December 4, 2008," the ministry said.
A serviceman of the Defense Army of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-
Karabakh Republic was killed at the contact line between Azeri and
Nagorno-Karabakh armed forces in the early hours of March 13, the
Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Ministry said in a statement circulated in
Yerevan on Friday.
The serviceman, whose name has not been made public, was killed by
a sniper bullet at the southeastern section of the contact line,
the Foreign Ministry said.