YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—A senior official in Baku has rejected as biased a report by a leading expert on international criminal law who described the ongoing blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan as a genocide.
Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign policy advisor to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, said on Thursday that the report released by the founding prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, earlier this week “contains unsubstantiated allegations and accusations.”
In his 28-page expert opinion requested by Arayik Harutyunyan, the ethnic Armenian leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ocampo, an Argentine lawyer who served at the Hague court in 2003-2012, assessed whether the current siege of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan implemented by blocking the only road of supply from Armenia and resulting in a dramatically worsening humanitarian situation in the region amounts to the crime of genocide.
In the document that he released from New York on August 7 Ocampo gives a straightforward answer, stating that “there is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
The 71-year-old lawyer who successfully prosecuted for crimes against humanity three heads of state, including the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, says that “the blockade of the Lachin Corridor by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.’”
“There are no crematories, and there are no machete attacks. Starvation is the invisible Genocide weapon. Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks. Starvation as a method to destroy people was neglected by the entire international community when it was used against Armenians in 1915, Jews and Poles in 1939, Russians in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1941, and Cambodians in 1975/1976. Starvation was also neglected when used in Srebrenica in the winter of 1993/1994,” Ocampo writes.
In his expert opinion Ocampo also refers to the analysis of the Lachin corridor blockade given by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at Armenia’s request.
Still in February the United Nations’ top court ordered Azerbaijan to restore “unimpeded” traffic through the sole road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. It reaffirmed its position in July, a few weeks after Baku only tightened the de facto blockade by prohibiting all kinds of cargoes coming to the region.
Ocampo further maintains that “there is reasonable basis to believe that President Aliyev has Genocidal intentions.” “He has knowingly, willingly and voluntarily blockaded the Lachin Corridor even after having been placed on notice regarding the consequences of his actions by the ICJ’s provisional orders,” the founding prosecutor of the International Criminal Court concludes.
Meanwhile, in rejecting the Ocampo report, Hajiyev, according to Azerbaijani media, said: “It is biased and distorts the real situation on the ground and represents serious factual, legal and substantive errors.” Aliyev’s aide did not elaborate.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s leader Harutyunyan on August 8 issued an urgent appeal to the international community, asking for immediate action to lift the blockade imposed by Azerbaijan and prevent what he called “the genocide of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Meanwhile, in a post on Twitter today Armenia’s Ambassador-at-Large Edmon Marukyan wrote that Ocampo’s is “a solid report with facts and analyses, which may become a future indictment against the Azerbaijani leadership.”
Officials in Baku deny blockading Nagorno-Karabakh, saying that humanitarian supplies to the region could also be implemented through the Azeri-controlled town of Aghdam, which is situated to the east of the region and is away from Armenia.
Despite severe shortages of food, medicines, fuel and other essentials in the region ethnic Armenian authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh reject that offer, fearing that it could be a prelude to the absorption of what remains of the former autonomous oblast into Azerbaijan.
Authorities in both Yerevan and Stepanakert consider the Azerbaijani checkpoint at the Lachin corridor illegal as they insist its violates a Moscow-brokered 2020 ceasefire agreement that places the vital route under the control of Russian peacekeepers.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for decades. Some 30,000 people were killed in a war in the early 1990s that left ethnic Armenians in control of the predominantly Armenian-populated region and seven adjacent districts of Azerbaijan proper.
Decades of internationally mediated talks failed to result in a diplomatic solution and the simmering conflict led to another war in 2020 in which nearly 7,000 soldiers were killed on both sides.
The 44-day war in which Azerbaijan regained all of the Armenian-controlled areas outside of Nagorno-Karabakh as well as chunks of territory inside the Soviet-era autonomous oblast proper ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire under which Moscow deployed about 2,000 troops to the region to serve as peacekeepers.
Tensions along the restive Armenian-Azerbaijani border and around Nagorno-Karabakh leading to sporadic fighting and loss of life have persisted despite the ceasefire and publicly stated willingness of the leaders of both countries to work towards a negotiated peace.
