2023-09-20 19:32:45
After the offensive by Azerbaijani troops in the separatist province of Nagorno-Karabakh populated by Armenians, France’s reaction was very clear. In a press release published Tuesday September 19, the President of the Republic “condemned with the greatest firmness Azerbaijan’s use of force ». A little earlier, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Catherine Colonna had judged the operation “illegal, unjustifiable, unacceptable”.
Many elected officials from all sides also reacted. From Bruno Retailleau, president of the Les Républicains group in the Senate, who called on France not to let Azerbaijan « fatake one more step in its genocidal aims against the Armenian people”to Marine Tondelier, national secretary of Europe Écologie-Les Verts, who asked France and Europe to “take responsibility” and of “stop buying gas from Baku”.
French elected officials near the Lachin corridor
In reality, French elected officials have been taking turns in Armenia for several months. The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, went there in mid-January, paying tribute to the victims of the Armenian genocide at the Yerevan memorial. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe also made the trip at the end of February to condemn Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin corridor which is plunging the population of Nagorno-Karabakh into a serious humanitarian crisis. A corridor which the LR leader in the European Parliament, François-Xavier Bellamy, had approached a few days earlier to denounce “a new threat of ethnic cleansing”.
On August 30 again, around fifteen elected officials, including the mayor (PS) of Paris Anne Hidalgo, the LR president of the Hauts-de-France region Xavier Bertrand and Bruno Retailleau, went to the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan to support, in vain, the delivery of a humanitarian convoy. Baku denounced “direct interference” from France. French diplomacy refutes criticism that it does not have a neutral position. Minister Catherine Colonna was thus, in April, in Yerevan and Baku to try to play mediator, after other attempts led by Emmanuel Macron.
“The President of the Republic is doing his best but he is alone in moving the issue forward at the European level”notes Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, Renaissance deputy from Paris, who says “extremely worried” of escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Member of the France-Armenia friendship group in the Assembly, she explains why « lThe subject goes well beyond the ancient solidarity between France and Armenia”. “It is due on the one hand to the issue of national sovereignty and respect for territorial integrity, valid for all countries. It then relates to the particular place of Armenia: a separate state, governed by law, with a liberal tradition, which aspires to rapprochement with the European Union. It is therefore a real political subject, when Éric Zemmour, for example, sees it as a civilizational issue. she says.
“The Armenian question does not need a lobby”
In Parliament, the Armenian question is unanimous. MPs from all political parties voted on November 30, 2022 for a proposed resolution to demand “ending Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenia and establishing lasting peace in the South Caucasus”. Examination of the composition of the friendship groups also shows that 82 deputies chose to be members of that of Armenia, while only 10 are in that of Azerbaijan.
It is not considered well to maintain relations with this authoritarian regime, a “caviar diplomacy” that human rights organizations have accused in the past of having influenced French elected officials. If the Association of Friends of Azerbaijan, chaired by the former socialist deputy Jérôme Lambert, supports Emmanuel Macron’s peace efforts, it nonetheless deplored, on August 30, the « provocations » of French elected officials “under the influence of Armenian lobbies”. “Today, the Armenian question does not need a lobby, these are questions that all political parties are addressing,” retorts Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet. On February 21, 2024, the communist Armenian resistance fighter Missak Manouchian will enter the Pantheon.
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