STEPANAKERT. – Artsakh has never exploited the matter of returning the dead, since we believe that exploitations on this matter are wrong, not only in terms of international law, but also in terms of ethics. Davit Babayan, Deputy Chief of Staff of the President of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) and Head of the General Information Department of the Presidential Administration, stated this when asked by Armenian News-NEWS.am to comment on Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement regarding negotiations on the exchange of the dead and detainees.
“Those people have already died,” Babayan said. “It’s not ethical to exploit the feelings of their parents, relatives. But we see that in Azerbaijan, on the contrary, they seek to exploit that topic; but that’s their affair. As for the return of captives, detainees, people who have accidentally ended up on the side of the adversary, we consider such an approach correct, both from the political and the ethical viewpoint, and that is a requirement of international law; there can be nothing else. But the question is what we are returning. Even if we use that term ‘exchange’ people with the same status; that is, if a person has accidentally ended up in the adversary’s territory, even if he is a military serviceman but has done nothing, has not committed a crime, naturally, the other party must return that person, even if it can’t ‘exchange’ [him] with anyone. But exploiting, declaring like Azerbaijan that it will return two Armenians in exchange for [Azerbaijani] terrorists and murderers, whose guilt has been proved in an open, transparent court process attended by international observers, human rights advocates, the media, is wrong.”
Babayan recalled that those Azerbaijanis have committed particularly grave crimes, killed two people—including a minor, wounded several people—including a young woman, and caused material damage.
“We can’t ‘exchange’ those people,” he said. “If anyone attempts to go on this road, it can cause a sociopolitical explosion here; that is, it can’t, but it will cause by 100 percent—with quite unpredictable consequences. I don’t think it’s possible, especially now.”
In his words, such a path deprives of the ethical right to condemn Azerbaijani army officer Ramil Safarov—who had axed to death Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan in his sleep in Budapest, Hungary, on February 19, 2004—and deprives of the right to be able to look into the eyes of the relatives of Margaryan, Smbat Tsakanyan, and of the other murdered Armenians, and even of the successors of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
“These are the links of the same chain,” Davit Babayan said. “If we let [them] go—and since returning [them] means that we actually are letting go of terrorists—it means that we are accepting and forgetting what happened to Gurgen Margaryan. Visits of politicians to the graves of those killed will be utter fraud. What [Azerbaijanis Dilham] Askerov and [Shahbaz] Guliyev have done is equal to what Ramil Safarov did. By releasing them, we reconcile with what he has done, we accept and forget about crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitations.”
