The news portal of the Foreign Policy Association, headquartered in New York, U.S. has published an article by Rachel Avraham, an Israeli political analyst and journalist, CEO of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, headlined “Standing up to defend a strong US ally.”
“Throughout all of the years that the United States was in Afghanistan, the Azerbaijanis provided this service to American servicemen and servicewomen, without complaints. And when the United States decided that it was time to evacuate from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan worked together with Turkey in order to ensure that American servicemen and servicewomen got home safely.
Usually, when a US ally does something like that for the United States, most Americans would show their appreciation, especially when this same country is helping Europe to obtain energy security in the wake of the war in the Ukraine. However, Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, does not show any appreciation for what Azerbaijan does for the United States and Europe. Instead, he cares about getting Armenian votes on Election Day, which prompted him to throw American values such as appreciation for US allies out of the window,” the article said.
“Recently, Representative Adam Schiff has demonstrated how much he values Armenian votes over America’s national interests when he introduced the Artsakh Revenue Recovery Act, which targets Azerbaijani assets in the United States and delivers them to Armenians who were displaced during the Second Karabakh War and the subsequent military operation.
Never mind that Karabakh was recognized as part of Azerbaijan under four UN Security Council resolutions and the 30-year Armenian occupation of the area was considered illegal under international law. Never mind that during the Armenian occupation of Karabakh and the seven Azerbaijani districts, around one million Azerbaijanis were displaced from their homes and never got any compensation from Armenia for all of their suffering. Schiff wants to target only Azerbaijan and to have them pay for the Armenian settlers that got displaced from their homes,” the author mentioned.
“The West Azerbaijani community also wrote a letter to Representative Schiff, proclaiming: “This draft is ill-informed and discriminatory as it promotes one-sided and out-of-context narratives that totally ignores the plight and suffering of one group of people and puts premium on the other group. We understand that the ethnic and religious sympathy is the main reason for your discrimination against Azerbaijan. If advanced, such a document will be an affront to human rights and international law, serving as a harbinger for instability, human suffering and damage to the US regional role.”
The West Azerbaijani community added: “We, as people who spent most of our lives in forcible displacement and destitution due to Armenia’s illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing, understand the utmost value and imperative nature of the right to return. This right is a part of fundamental human rights without regard to ethnic or religious background. The UN team that visited the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan following the restoration of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty in September 2023 stated that “they saw no damage to civilian public infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and housing, or cultural and religious infrastructure” and “they did not come across any reports — either from the local population or from others — of violence against civilians following the latest ceasefire,” the article emphasized.
The full text of the article is available at the link below:
https://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2024/10/09/standing-up-to-defend-a-strong-us-ally/
