AGBU Europe Campaign for Karabakh

8 October 2009

It is time for the EU to support the development in Nagorno Karabagh and contacts between Karabagh and Azerbaijan.

AGBU Europe’s new campaigning is to press the European Union to provide humanitarian and development assistance to Nagorno Karabakh, to establish confidence building measures between Karabakh and Azerbaijan and to send observers to help monitor the cease-fire.

Nagorno Karabagh has been effectively independent since it won the war against Azerbaijan in 1994 but there is a real risk that the war will resume. Isolated from the world by geography and politics, the small Republic can count on no one’s help except Armenia’s.

Karabakh is reserved special treatment by the international community. There are other non-recognized states in the region: Transdniestria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia. These all benefit from some form of international peacekeeping; they are involved in some form of internationally funded projects; and their residents enjoy contacts with the other countries. Not so Karabakh.

The European Union is not involved in policing the cease-fire, they fund almost no development or humanitarian project there, and have not sponsored contacts between the inhabitants of Karabakh and of Azerbaijan. Far from frowning on Azerbaijan’s policy of boycott of Armenia and Karabakh, the European Union has largely followed Baku’s wishes. In fact, Karabakh is the only part of the region, which the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, has not visited.

Most people in the EU would agree that this policy is wrong. But they are unlikely to act unless we, European citizens, tell them to change course.

Click here to download the “project “paper proposed by AGBU Europe

Click here to download the Armenian version

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