FACTOMETER
en
ру
հյ
On April 13, the footage with the participation of an Azerbaijani soldier arrested near the village of Achanan in Syunik region, in which he was beaten by Armenian residents who found him, was widely circulated on social networks.
The authorities of Azerbaijan demand an investigation and have appealed to international organizations to support the return of the two arrested servicemen to Azerbaijan.
Simultaneously, Azerbaijani officials and the media abuse the topic of violence against the serviceman and the detention of two servicemen, spreading blatantly false propaganda theses.
Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to Iran, Ali Alizada, is actively spreading false information.
Alizada shared the footage depicting the Azerbaijani soldier, captioning the video “Azerbaijan has always returned Armenian soldiers who crossed the border safe and sound” while Armenia “doesn’t even want to return them.”
However, this claim by Alizada is far from being true. For years, a number of Armenian servicemen and civilians who were captured by Azerbaijan were kept in prison, and in some cases, they were killed.
In 2018, the Azerbaijani military captured Berdavan resident Karen Ghazaryan claiming that he was a member of a subversive group. Later it was revealed that Ghazaryan had never served in the military and had mental health problems. Ghazaryan returned to Armenia only in December 2020, along with a group of people captured during the Second Artsakh War.
In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights released a judgement on the cases of Mamikon Khojoyan, a resident of Verin Karmiraghbyur village, Tavush region, and Karen Petrosyan, a resident of Chinari village. The two civilians crossed the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in January and August, 2014 accordingly, being lost in the area. Khojoyan, 77, died after returning to Armenia after two months in captivity, while Petrosyan died or was killed a day after being captured. Official Baku declared that the latter died of a “heart attack”.
A year before that, in 2013, a conscript Hakob Injighulyan also crossed the Armenian-Azerbaijani border due to being lost in the area. The latter was kept in Baku for about a year.
In November, 2020, after the end of the war, two civilians, Gevorg Sujyan and Davit Davtyan, were captured in the area of Lachin Corridor. The latter were traveling to Artsakh to carry aid. Sujyan is the Founding President of the New Armenia Homeland-Diaspora charity NGO. The two civilians were sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of illegal possession of weapons, illegal crossing of the border and espionage.
Another footage shared by Alizada allegedly compares the attitude of the Armenians to the captured soldier and the attitude of the Azerbaijanis to the Armenian captives during the Second Artsakh War, attaching a footage from 2020 in which the Azerbaijani soldiers help the Armenian soldier.
In addition to the fact that the shared footage does not give the full picture of the detention of Armenian prisoners of war, it is noteworthy that David Gishyan, the wounded soldier seen in the footage, was killed in captivity after the footage was shot, according to the Office of the Representative on International Legal Matters.
Alizada shared another post noting that the Azerbaijani soldiers have been in captivity “for four days already” while, according to him, Eduard Martirosov, a soldier of the Ministry of Defense detained on April 23, 2022, was allegedly returned to the Armenian side “within three days.” However, Martirosov was returned to Armenia on May 26, after being in captivity for about a month, due to the agreement reached during the tripartite meeting in Brussels on May 22 and the mediation of Russian peacekeepers in Artsakh.
Many instances of torture of prisoners of the 44-day war or degrading the corpses of the fallen Armenian servicemen were also recorded. Some of these instances are being investigated in international tribunals.
Thus, the Azerbaijani diplomat is making false statements: the Armenian prisoners of war and civilians kept in Azerbaijan have been repeatedly tortured, and in some cases they have been put to death apparently by the Azerbaijani state authorities or with their permission.
Ani Avetisyan
