French MPs, over 170 in all, including Gérard Larcher, Valerie Pecresse, Xavier Bertrand, Laurent Wauquiez, David Lisnard, Bruno Retailleau, Olivier Marleix, François-Xavier Bellamy and Eric Ciotti, urged to prevent the “planned end” Nagorno-Karabakh and the risks of the massacre of the Armenian population of this territory.
According to Armenpress, the statement reads: “This is a cry of alarm that we want to present here. A cry of alarm from those who do not want to remain silent in the face of the planned end of the self-determined Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the risks of massacres that the Armenian population of this territory is exposed to.
Armenia is in a state of extreme weakening and isolation after the victory of Azerbaijan during the war in the fall of 2020. The "peace talks" with the regime in Baku that have been ongoing since then are completely unbalanced: the Azerbaijani authorities - a de facto and de jure ally of Russia, as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev recalled a few days ago - have been acting for six months in relation to the zone remaining free from the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, through an inhuman blockade with an openly declared desire to starve it to death and expel the 120,000 Armenians living there.
The Russian peacekeeping forces, which were supposed to guarantee free movement between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as provide supplies, have shown their incompetence. The decision of the International Court of Justice of February 22, obliging him to immediately lift the blockade, remained unimportant for Ilham Aliyev.
Left alone and without help to face the militant and demanding ambitions of an over-armed Azerbaijan, Armenia is now trying to maintain its territorial integrity. In this context, we make an official appeal to the President of the French Republic. France can intervene, France must intervene. We must do this because the Armenians of both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh not only embody democratic values in a region ruled by authoritarian, even dictatorial states without exception, but have also assumed the role of the vanguard of a common Christian culture. We have an obligation to do so because it is dictated by our responsibility to protect, which stems from our commitment to the United Nations General Assembly in 2005.
We can and must intervene by reconvening the UN Security Council to review ongoing negotiations. Because to accept these negotiations as they were before Chisinau, ie. to remove responsibility from France and the West, to leave the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh again, as we once left the Armenians of Cilicia, would mean agreeing to an inevitable war, the destabilization of Armenia and the region, which is dangerous for all of us.
Therefore, the Security Council should impose by its resolution the fact that a precondition for these negotiations should be an absolute guarantee of the exclusion of any process of ethnic cleansing against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. Such a security guarantee, which France must demand and provide, will rely only on a mandate given to an interpositional international force that will complement the ineffective Russian peacekeeping force (the extension of the latter's mandate after 2025 is at risk). Finally, this resolution should define, in fact restore, the principle of the right to self-determination of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh as the main guarantee of their fundamental right to life and dignity, to resist the Azerbaijani state, built on the basis of racial hatred.
We deem it necessary that President Macron reaffirm the principle of this fundamental right to life and dignity in Goris, at the gates of the besieged Nagorno-Karabakh, as his predecessors François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac did in Sarajevo.
In a world where destructive and expansionist forces are on the rise, France can and must take the lead in restoring the balance in the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations by revising the security architecture that has developed in the South Caucasus together with all our partners.
The manifestation of this reformulation should also be the strengthening of the defense capability of the Republic of Armenia, to which we must contribute. Because only Armenia, capable of defending itself (which is not the case today), will regain self-confidence, faith in democratic values, the bearer of which it is almost the only one in the region.”
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