BAKU, Azerbaijan, February 12
Trend:
Armenia’s arguments in International Court of Justice (ICJ) may turn against it as they are open to counteraccusations of cultural destruction and racial discrimination, Robert M. Cutler, a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, wrote in an article to the National Interest, a US bimonthly conservative international relations magazine, Trend reports.
In an article named “Overcoming Bias in the Azerbaijan-Armenian Conflict”, Cutler writes that ICJ granted Azerbaijan’s request that Armenia must take all necessary measures to prevent incitement and promotion of racial hatred. ICJ also denied Armenia’s request to use the term “prisoners of war/hostages” favored by the Armenian side.
Instead, the article writes, using instead the word “persons,” the ICJ further rejected Armenia’s request for “independent medial and physiological evaluations” of such persons.
“By rejecting Armenia’s pleadings, any manipulation or politicization of the “prisoner of war” issue is open to be construed as anti-Azerbaijani speech,” the article said.
The report emphasized that the ICJ rejected a whole series of Armenia’s pleadings. It rejected the request for the “right of access and enjoyment” of Armenia’s claimed heritage in Azerbaijan’s liberated territories. It rejected the request to oblige Azerbaijan “to facilitate, and refrain from placing any impediment on, efforts to protect and preserve Armenian historic, cultural and religious heritage.”
Additionally, the ICJ rejected Armenia’s request to prevent and prohibit “alteration” of that “heritage.” The ICJ limited itself to ordering the prevention and punishment of acts of vandalism and desecration of Armenian heritage.
The report adds that the ethnic cleansing of approximately 700,000 indigenous Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh region and adjacent districts during the early 1990s, who were forced to leave their lands in the 1990s when Armenia occupied them, is well documented and It might be further argued that such ethnic cleansing is part of a pattern.
“This is because it is less generally recognized, but equally well documented, that approximately 200,000 Azerbaijanis were ethnically cleansed from their lands in southern Armenia in the late 1980s,” the article said.
Turning to Irish senator Paul Gavan’s report submitted to the Council of Europe, the author points out an important description of “Nagorno-Karabakh” used in the report as a geographic region, not a self-governing entity, and that it is not a party to the conflict, which is exclusively between the states of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The report also points out publicly available, detailed, and heavily documented reports of a partial inventory of Armenian environmental destruction of the formerly occupied territories, adding that mosques in the formerly occupied territories were destroyed and desecrated, and “the graveyards have been vandalized.”
“The destruction and desecration are not limited to Muslim sites. There is, in addition, a credible video report of the destruction of an Orthodox church in the Karabakh region,” the article said.