The Azerbaijani villagers were left without irrigation water at the personal initiative of Ilham Aliyev, political analyst, ex-foreign minister of the Nagorno- Karabakh Republic Arman Melikyan says in an interview with ArmInfo.
"Today we can confidently arrive at that conclusion given that Baku neglected the Artsakh authorities' all efforts towards establishment of a dialogue on mutually beneficial use of the water resources of Sarsang Reservoir. In particular, Azerbaijan ignored the cooperation proposals voiced by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs," Melikyan says.
In this light, the analyst qualifies the initiative of one of the PACE lawmakers strange at least.
On January 26, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted not to adopt a resolution on "Escalation of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh and the other occupied territories of Azerbaijan", based on a report by British former PACE member Robert Walter. At the same time, PACE adopted the second document based on the report "The inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water" by Milica Markovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina).
"In general, Markovic's report covered the humanitarian dimension of the Karabakh conflict, aiming to demonstrate the harm allegedly inflicted to the residents of the near-border Azerbaijani villages by Artsakh. As wee see in the reality, the harm is inflicted to the Azerbaijani villagers by the authorities of Azerbaijan, not Karabakh, thereby hindering mutually beneficial projects of water resource management," the analyst says.