By Mark Dovich
A military court in Azerbaijan Tuesday sentenced Vagif Khachatryan, a 68-year-old Armenian man from Nagorno-Karabakh, to 15 years in prison.
Khachatryan was detained by Azerbaijani border guards in July during a medical evacuation from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Unable to access medical care in Nagorno-Karabakh, which at the time was grappling with a near-total blockade by Azerbaijan, Khachatryan was scheduled to undergo heart surgery in Yerevan. He was instead taken to Baku, where he was charged with “massacring and deporting” Azerbaijanis during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war.
The court found Khachatryan guilty of genocide and forcible population transfer.
Khachatryan and his family repeatedly and strenuously denied the charges, while the Armenian government decried the trial as a “sham” that was held in violation of “international legal standards and guarantees related to human rights.”
“I’m an innocent person,” Khachatryan insisted in his concluding remarks before the court.
Khachatryan is one of several dozen Armenians currently held in Azerbaijan. That includes eight former senior Nagorno-Karabakh officials, who were arrested during September’s mass exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh at the same Azerbaijani checkpoint where Khachatryan was detained three months earlier.
After keeping the region in near-total isolation from the outside world for more than nine months, Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh in September, leaving hundreds dead. After fewer than 24 hours, the Nagorno-Karabakh government collapsed, prompting nearly all of the roughly 100,000 Armenians still living there to flee to Armenia.
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