With the March 5 terror attack, Azerbaijan was pursuing several goals. This was stated today, on March 9, at a government meeting by RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
He also added: “The first is to derail further negotiations with representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh and to create the necessary background for a new military provocation. The Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Ministry issued a statement yesterday expressing readiness to continue dialogue with Azerbaijan, and this is an extremely important statement.
I believe it is necessary to create reliable international mechanisms so that an uninterrupted, institutional (systemic) dialogue takes place between Baku and Stepanakert, and this could become an effective guarantee for the implementation of the aforementioned international agreement.
The next goal of the March 5 provocation was to create false evidence that weapons and ammunition were being transported from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. This topic is important for Azerbaijan especially after the February 22 decision of the International Court of Justice, when the court unequivocally and unambiguously rejected Azerbaijan’s request to apply interim measures against Armenia, by which Azerbaijan was accusing the Republic of Armenia of carrying out mining. With that rejection, the unfounded accusations against Armenia about mining that had been spreading on international platforms for several months collapsed. This was extremely important.
And so Azerbaijan was attempting to present the March 5 incident as proof of the transfer of weapons and ammunition from the Republic of Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, which did not succeed for two reasons. First, the police UAZ (a vehicle model) was not going toward Stepanakert but had left Stepanakert; second, Azerbaijan’s attack and also the UAZ’s trajectory from Stepanakert to the scene of the incident had been filmed by the video cameras of the Nagorno-Karabakh Interior Ministry, from which it was evident that the police vehicle contained nothing other than documents and service weapons”
Azerbaijan’s next important goal, according to Pashinyan, was the following: to shape new narratives through a bloody terror attack, new flows of information that would cover up a most important fact — that Azerbaijan is openly failing to implement the decision of the international court of justice, the International Court of Justice, regarding the opening of the Lachin corridor.
“Let me remind you that by a decision with binding legal force, the court obliged Azerbaijan to take all measures at its disposal to guarantee the uninterrupted movement of citizens, vehicles (transport) and cargo in both directions through the Lachin corridor. And this decision has not been implemented for 15 days, and this is exclusively Azerbaijan’s responsibility. On the contrary, Azerbaijan is resorting to new provocations to further aggravate the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.
With all this being emphasized, the need to urgently dispatch an international fact-finding mission to Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor is becoming increasingly urgent, in order to prevent Azerbaijan from unleashing a new aggression (attack) and Azerbaijan’s evident preparations to subject the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to ethnic (tribal) cleansing and genocide, which are expressed in failing to implement the decisions of international courts, keeping the Lachin corridor closed, and undertaking military provocations and terrorist acts,” Pashinyan declared.
He also reaffirmed Armenia’s aspiration to achieve peace in the region and its commitment to the peace agenda.
