1 / 1

On February 24-25, the Winter Meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) began, and the Head of the RA NA delegation to OSCE PA Eduard Aghajanyan took part in its works in Vienna. He delivered a speech at the joint meeting, particularly noting:

“Dear colleagues,

I believe that the speech of my colleague from Azerbaijan once again confirmed all of the arguments, without an exception, of the speech that I had today during the joint session. But trying to transmit this dialogue into a more constructive phase, I would like to say the following.

The current debate is dedicated to discussing the need for interparliamentary dialogue at times of heightened tensions in the OSCE area. And indeed, parliamentarians do have the extra freedom for a more flexible, transparent and direct dialogue, than do our counterparts who represent the executive branch. And in this context I believe that the role of parliamentarians on the road of building sustainable peace is at the grassroots level. Namely, among other functions, interparliamentary dialogue should facilitate and help establish a dialogue between the societies of conflicting countries. And on the road of building mutual trust it is of utmost importance first and foremost to stop and eliminate any form of xenophobia and hate speech among both societies.

Dear colleagues, unfortunately in the case of Azerbaijan, before referring to societies, we must firstly address the issue of xenophobia and hate speech on state level.
Here are a few of the examples of such behavior by the president of Azerbaijan.

Referring to Armenians the latter says: “They have neither conscience, neither morality. They don’t even have a brain.” Or “for 30 years this land was in the hands of wild beasts, in the hands of predators, in the hands of jackals”.

One could argue that the climax of state level Azeri xenophobia was the so called “trophy park” in the center of Baku, where amongst other things, humiliating mannequins of Armenian soldiers were illustrated as means of entertainment for the visitors. By the way, the mannequins were later removed to avoid a stricter interim measure carried out by the International court of justice. Nonetheless, the international court of justice did carry out an interim measure, where amongst other measures, it stated that Azerbaijan must take all necessary measures to prevent the incitement and promotion of racial hatred and discrimination, including by its officials and public institutions, targeted at persons of Armenian national or ethnic origin.

Dear colleagues, having said that the inter-parliamentary dialogue is of great importance in facilitating inter-societal dialogue, I believe that first of all we should eliminate state level xenophobia and hate speech. Otherwise, there is and will be no room for inter-parliamentary dialogue.

Hence, I urge our Azerbaijani colleagues to stop this behavior, if we are honest about our desire to reach a long lasting peace in our region. Thank you.”