Over 170 French Members of Parliament, Senators and elected officials of regional bodies from the Republicans party, including President of the Senate Gerard Larcher, regional heads and mayors, have released a joint call for action to support the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“It is a cry of alarm that we want to launch here,” the French politicians said in the article.
“A cry of alarm by all those who don’t want to remain silent on the threat of the plotted demise of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and massacre of the Armenian population of this region.”
The article stated that Azerbaijan, a “de-facto and de-jure ally of Russia”, has been subjecting Nagorno-Karabakh to an inhumane blockade for already six months, with a explicitly stated aspiration of starving and expelling the 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The French politicians mentioned that Russian peacekeepers are unable to fulfill their functions and that Azerbaijan has ignored the International Court of Justice ruling which ordered it to end the blockade.
Armenia is now trying to save its own territorial integrity, facing Azerbaijan’s belligerent aspirations, the politicians said.
Addressing President Emmanuel Macron, the politicians said: “France can intervene, France must intervene. We must do it, because the Armenians of both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh not only embody the democratic values in a region where authoritarian and even despotic states rule, but have also assumed the vanguard role of common Christian culture for us. We must do so because that’s what our obligations assumed before the UN General Assembly in 2005 dictate.”
The French political figures call the French government to once again convene a UN Security Council meeting to “transform the circle of the current negotiations” and to force the fact that a “total guarantee” ruling out any process of ethnic cleansing against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh should be the precondition for talks, and that the resolution ought to restore the principle of the right to self determination of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh “as the main guarantee for their fundamental right to life and dignity to withstand the Azerbaijani state built upon the foundation of racial hate.”
“We find it imperative for President Macron to reiterate this fundamental principle of the right to life and dignity in Goris, at the gates of blockaded Nagorno-Karabakh, like his predecessors François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac did in Sarajevo.”
The politicians also called on the French government to help Armenia strengthen its defense capabilities.
