Azerbaijan confirmed on Thursday, October 5th, that it had detained an ex-president of its recently captured separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which agreed to reintegrate with Azerbaijan in the wake of Baku’s lighting offensive last month. Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general and security service said in a joint statement that Arayik Harutyunyan was detained on Tuesday on “suspicion of waging an aggressive war” against Azerbaijan and alleged war crimes. The 49-year-old headed the separatist government during the 2020 armed conflict between Baku and Yerevan for control of the mountainous enclave and stepped down in early September, shortly before Baku’s offensive.
Separatist authorities in the breakaway region agreed to disarm, dissolve their government, and reintegrate with Azerbaijan following Baku’s one-day military operation in late September. The central government in Baku is holding “re-integration” talks with separatist leaders, but Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev has said criminal investigations have been initiated into crimes committed by 300 separatist officials. Several senior representatives of Karabakh’s former authorities and military command have been detained.
The Armenian foreign affairs ministry has said the country “will take all possible steps to protect the rights of the illegally arrested representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh, including in international courts.” The United Nations Human Rights Office has urged Baku to afford the detainees “full respect and protection.”
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev skipped the summit in the Spanish city of Granada on Thursday, which gathered the 47-nation European Political Community (EPC)—an informal group that includes all 27 European Union countries and many NATO member states, along with their European neighbours, but excludes Russia. An Azerbaijani official cited “pro-Armenian statements by French officials” and French plans to deliver military equipment to Yerevan as reasons for Aliyev’s absence.
EU officials had hoped to bring about what would have been the first face-to-face meeting between Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan since the offensive. But an Azerbaijani official alleged there was an “anti-Azerbaijani atmosphere” at the EPC summit and said Baku wanted the meeting to take place in Turkey. Pashinyan is attending the summit and expressed regret that it would not be an opportunity to meet Aliyev and sign a “turning point document.” Aliyev’s absence torpedoed EU hopes of using the forum to ramp up diplomacy around Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a key figure in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, is also missing the EPC summit for the second time in a row.
The European Parliament (EP) adopted a resolution on Thursday condemning “in the strongest terms the pre-planned and unjustified military attack by Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh” and calling “for an immediate and complete end to the violence against the people who have remained in the region.” Azerbaijan’s offensive prompted most of the 120,000 ethnic Armenian refugees to flood into Armenia. The EP recalls that the attack took place in the context of a major humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, following Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin corridor for the past nine months. The resolution says that the use of coercive practices to remove a civilian population from a territory may amount to a crime against humanity, and “the current situation amounts to ethnic cleansing.”
The EP calls for the EU to adopt sanctions against the individuals in the Azerbaijani government, and for the EU’s dependency on gas exports from Azerbaijan to be reduced. The resolution also condemned the Hungarian government for blocking a joint statement by all EU member states condemning the military operation by Azerbaijan.
Hungary recently signed an agreement with Azerbaijan for the South Caucasus country to provide 100 million cubic metres of gas this year and establish a gas transport link with Hungary. A spate of other European states are also looking to Azerbaijan for help in the midst of the war and the energy crisis. The European Commission gave its blessing and financial support to a deal struck last year between the leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary on the construction of an electric cable running under the Black Sea to carry green Azeri energy from planned Caspian Sea wind farms to Europe.
