U.S. REVISES ‘ANTI-ARMENIAN’ KARABAKH STATEMENT
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
April 20 2007
Facing strong Armenian protests, the U.S. State Department has
revised a controversial passage in its latest human rights report
that described Nagorno-Karabakh as an Azerbaijani territory occupied
by Armenia.
The original version of the annual report released on March 4
said Armenia "continues to occupy the Azerbaijani territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani territories." The
statement was welcomed by many in Azerbaijan but was rejected as
inaccurate by the Armenian government and Armenian lobbying groups
in the United States.
Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said later in March that Armenian
diplomats have raised the issue with State Department officials. He
said the latter admitted that it was an "obvious mistake on their part"
and promised to "try to make a correction in that document."
The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) likewise expressed
"profound concern" at the reference. "To say that Nagorno-Karabakh is
an Azerbaijani territory and that Armenia occupies Nagorno-Karabakh
and other territories is to ignore the very fundamentals of this
conflict," Ken Hachikian, the ANCA chairman, said in an April 3 letter
to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The revised version of the U.S. report’s chapter on human rights
practices in Armenia does not refer to Karabakh as an internationally
recognized part of Azerbaijan and stops short of explicitly accusing
Yerevan of occupying Azerbaijani districts surrounding the disputed
enclave. "Armenian forces occupy large portions of Azerbaijan territory
adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian officials maintain that they
do not "occupy" Nagorno-Karabakh itself," reads the report posted on
the State Department’s website.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry refused to comment on what is a rare
change in the text of a department report made after its official
release. A ministry spokesman only reiterated Oskanian’s earlier
comments on the issue.
The ANCA, for its part, was only partly satisfied with the revision
which it said was made public this week. "We remain concerned that
the amended text continues to fall short of accurately describing the
situation, as well as by the fact that the Azerbaijan section of the
report continues to make incorrect assertions, thus making its text
inconsistent with the State Department’s own revision of the Armenia
section," its executive director, Aram Hamparian, said in a statement.
Washington has always stated that it supports Azerbaijan’s territorial
integrity in the Karabakh dispute. But that has not kept it from
helping to draft over the past decade peace proposals that would
essentially pave the way for international recognition of Karabakh’s
secession from Azerbaijan.