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    Categories: 2023

RFE/RL Armenian Service – 07/29/2023

                                        Saturday, 


Karabakh Man Arrested By Azerbaijan During Medical Evacuation

        • Artak Khulian

Vagif Khachatrian and other patients from Nagorno-Karabakh pass through an 
Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor, .


Azerbaijani security forces arrested a seriously ill resident of 
Nagorno-Karabakh as he was being evacuated by the International Committee of the 
Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenia on Saturday.

Vagif Khachatrian, a 68-year-old resident of the Karabakh village of Patara, was 
among patients escorted by the ICRC to Armenian hospitals for urgent treatment. 
He was detained at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor in what 
Karabakh’s leadership and the Armenian government condemned as a gross violation 
of international law.

Azerbaijani authorities said later in the day that Khachatrian was taken to Baku 
to stand trial on charges of killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani 
residents in December 1991, at the start of the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war. 
They claimed that he was indicted on these charges in 2013.

A senior Karabakh official, Artak Beglarian, rejected the “false” accusations. 
He insisted that like many other Karabakh Armenian men, Khachatrian “defended 
his homeland” during the 1991-1994 and did not commit war crimes.

“He was neither a commander nor a deputy commander. He was a driver,” 
Khachatrian’s daughter Tsovinar, who accompanied him during his aborted trip to 
Armenia, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. She said her father was due to undergo 
a heart surgery in Yerevan.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry condemned Khachatrian’s arrest as a “blatant 
violation of international humanitarian law” and “war crime.” “It is aimed at 
completely disrupting the ICRC’s activities in Nagorno-Karabakh at a time when 
Azerbaijan is keeping the Lachin corridor closed and impeding the entry of other 
international organizations to Nagorno-Karabakh,” it said in a statement.

Nagorno Karabakh - A Red Cross vehicle leaves a hospital in Stepanakert in 
December 2022.

Khachatrian is the first Karabakh patient arrested by the Azerbaijani 
authorities during the medical evacuations organized by the ICRC after Baku 
halted last December commercial traffic through the only road connecting 
Karabakh to Armenia. The Red Cross did not immediately react to his detention.

There was also no immediate reaction from Russian peacekeeping forces stationed 
in Karabakh. It is not clear whether they tried to prevent the man’s arrest.

Azerbaijan has repeatedly suspended the medical evacuations. On June 15, it also 
banned the ICRC and the Russian peacekeepers from sending limited amounts of 
humanitarian aid to Karabakh, aggravating the shortages of food, medicine, fuel 
and other essential items in the Armenian-populated region.

The worsening humanitarian crisis there led the United States, the European 
Union and Russia to renew their calls for the lifting of the Azerbaijani 
blockade. Baku continued to reject such appeals this week.

Gurgen Nersisian, the Karabakh premier, on Saturday also blamed Armenia for the 
crisis and Khachatrian’s “kidnapping” in particular, saying that this was made 
possible by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s May 2023 pledge to recognize 
Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh.

Armenian opposition leaders have likewise claimed that the far-reaching 
concession made by Pashinian only emboldened Baku to tighten the screws on the 
Karabakh Armenians.


Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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