Baku, December 11, AZERTAC

On December 2, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives of the Belgian Federal Parliament discussed a draft resolution on Karabakh, and the draft document was adopted by the committee with a number of amendments and recommended to the Plenary. The text of the draft resolution adopted by the committee is expected to be put to a vote at the plenary session of the Belgian House of Representatives on December 17 this year. However, as a result of the zeal of pro-Armenian circles, the Belgian Senate decided to put the same text to a vote on December 11.

Mark Demesmaeker, a member of the New Flemish Alliance (N_VA) and chairman of the Senate’s Cross-disciplinary Matters Committee, is the chief initiator of the intended Senate vote on the draft. Demesmaeker is known as one of the main proponents of separatism in Belgium and a nationalist with a strong Islamophobic and anti-Turk sentiment. Importantly, Mr Demesmaeker has close collaboration with the leader of the principal Armenian Lobby of Brussels Caspar Karampetyan. It was with the organizational input and in the personal company of Karampetyan that Mr Demesmaeker illegally visited the Armenian-occupied territories of Azerbaijan in October of last year.

MP Kamal Jafarov, Chairman of the interparliamentary working group for Azerbaijan-Belgium relations at the Milli Majlis, has sent a letter to Senator Demesmaeker about the above-said issue. In his letter, MP Jafarov provided his Belgian colleague with abundant information about the subject-matter, reminding him that the international law and even the official standpoint of the government of Belgium itself are on Azerbaijan’s side regarding the issue of the Nagorno-Karabakh.

One more thing to point out is that various Armenian diaspora organizations and pro-Armenian forces are only attempting to have such resolutions adopted to conceal Armenia’s latest failures against Azerbaijan. In reality, the Armenian lobbyist cliques that could not have their way through in France saw their anti-Azerbaijani efforts in the Belgian parliament fall through, too. To wit, the initial draft of the resolution at hand proposed diplomatic relations with the now-buried occupational regime with a view to recognize and maintain its security eventually. However, the timely steps taken by the Azerbaijani Government and Milli Majlis made certain that that absurd proposal had been turned down. Also, all mentions of the puppet ‘artsakh’ name were deleted and the historical name of Nagorno-Karabakh was introduced to the draft resolution. What matters the most, the resolutions No. 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council were added to the draft. In other words, the document that the Armenians and pro-Armenian forces had been driving for so ardently culminated in the confirmation of Nagorno-Karabakh being part of Azerbaijan.

Besides, the following absurd ideas and proposals contained in the first version of the draft resolution were rejected and removed: ‘To demand of the OSCE Minsk Group to drop the idea of creating a corridor crossing the territory of Armenia to connect Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan and Turkey’, ‘to urge the Azerbaijani Army to withdraw immediately to the positions it had held before the 27th of September’ and ‘Armenia was forced to sign the 9th of November declaration on adverse conditions.’

In connection with the energetic, diplomatic support that the brotherly Turkey had given Azerbaijan, the document had contained certain calls for pressure on Turkey – those calls, too, ended up being rejected. The following unreasonable ideas were deleted from the text of the draft: ‘the immediate cessation of the conversations about Turkey’s membership in the EU’, ‘to communicate the protest of the Belgian Government to the Turkish ambassador’ and ‘to undertake all the possible arrangements for the exclusion of Turkey from the NATO.’

Despite the attempts of the Armenian Lobby to exaggerate and present certain articles of the draft resolution as their ‘successes’, in truth, the collapse of the resolution on the recognition of the fictitious ‘artsakh republic’ and the failure to secure the long-awaited ‘support’ in Belgium after France caused intense indignation and demoralization in the Armenian and pro-Armenian circles including the parliamentarians who had toyed with proposals of resolutions on ‘recognition of artsakh’.

The Armenians’ steps at replaying the French model failed; they could not make their main plot of ‘the artsakh recognition’ in the Belgian parliament come through. France virtually finds itself in isolation in Europe in this matter of recognizing the puppet regime in the wake of Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.

The Milli Majlis of the Azerbaijan Republic continues following the developments and will keep the public informed on a regular basis.