ICRC should operate in Karabakh as per Baku’s rules Experts commenting

Employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were caught in flagranti delicto in the act at the Lachin checkpoint. As it turned out, they were involved in smuggling into the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. Only in the first week of July, during the inspection of ICRC vehicles, the Azerbaijani border guards found a lot of undeclared goods: mobile phones and technical accessories for them, almost a thousand packs of various cigarettes, 1,320 liters of gasoline. To say that the situation is amazing is to sin against the truth.

There are enough questions about their work. Why, for example, the office of this international organization, located on the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan, now interacts more with the ICRC’s Yerevan office, while there is a similar office in Baku?

In addition, both during the years of the First and Second Karabakh wars, the ICRC took a negative stance towards Azerbaijan, for the most part supporting and patronizing Armenia. And the current smuggling may be just the tip of the iceberg. Has this organization somehow reacted to the warnings of the Azerbaijani authorities - no, it passed everything on deaf ears, hoping that it would get away with everything.

Azerbaijani experts comment on the situation. The head of the South Caucasus Research Center, Farhad Mammadov, in an interview with Caliber.Az, said that it is on full display - the ICRC discredited itself.

"There are generally accepted legal norms that should be taken into account by all international organizations and foreign states trying on the role of mediators in the Azerbaijani-Armenian settlement, that is, to act, as they say, on the ground. One needs to do this both in its statements and in the regulation of activities. The fact that Azerbaijan openly calls on both the Russian peacekeeping contingent and the ICRC to organize their logistics through the territory of Azerbaijan in line with international legal norms.

"And it does not only call. Azerbaijan will not allow the activities of even a very authoritative organization or state to lead to some new status quo. We will form the status quo ourselves on our territory, guided by the unshakable principles of international law,” the expert stressed.

Political expert and MP Rasim Musabayov sees in this behavior of the ICRC that the situation has changed, but the organization did not notice and did not take it into account. Until recently, the order in which the committee's structures worked in our country was different. Under previous realities, Azerbaijan could not control, say, the Lachin road, while Karabakh existed for almost thirty years in a single customs and financial space with Armenia.

"The delivery of any goods to Khankandi from Armenia was considered practically the same as, say, buying cigarettes in Ganja to resell them in Tovuz. But now everything has changed - Azerbaijan has fully restored its territorial integrity for almost three years,” Rasim Musabayov noted.

"With the erection of the Lachin border checkpoint, the parliamentarian says, almost everything has changed. From now on, crossing the Azerbaijani border to transport some goods without a customs inspection, or clearance, without paying taxes, duties, and other procedures is already considered an offense.

This applies, he says, to the activities of the ICRC. It is clear that before Azerbaijan established its control over the border, `it was more convenient for the staff of the Committee to work from Yerevan for several reasons: medicines were brought from the Armenian capital, the sick were sent for treatment, as a rule, to Armenia – because the `Karabakh office’ of the ICRC was more closely connected with their delegation in Armenia”.

"Now Azerbaijan has the right to demand from the ICRC that all this activity be built in agreement with Baku and the rules that it has determined for its territory. Therefore, I do not think that the situation should be overly dramatized, but the rules must correspond to the existing realities - they must be adapted to the Azerbaijani legislation. Another opoint is how the situation will roll out: if the ICRC office takes a constructive position and the Armenians themselves in this territory are no less constructive, then the issue can be resolved in some flexible format, and if they resist, as the Armenians like to do and dance to their tune international organizations, it means that they will have to face the realities of Azerbaijan in a tough way,” Rasim Musabayov summed up.