Hungarian expert: Hungarian people stand not by government but by gravestone of murdered Armenian soldier
The world must know that in the question of Ramil Safarov the Hungarian, Christian people stand not by the government, but by the gravestone and the family of the murdered Christian Armenian soldier, Gurgen Makaryan, Péter Farkas Zárug, a Hungarian political analyst and Assistant University Professor, told Panorama.am.
“In Hungary the foreign policy of the second Orbán cabinet has arrived at its final bankruptcy. The Hungarian nation does not want blood money for the Armenian serviceman, it abhors the promise of a fistful of dollars,”he said.
The analyst said that there is no one today in the civilized Christian world, who receives not with acute embarrassment or loud denunciation the act of the muddle-headed, blundering Hungarian Foreign Office in returning Major Ramil Safarov to his home in Azerbaijan.
“The Foreign Affairs’ vacuous excuses and the sheepish presentation on behalf of the Orbán cabinet of a memorandum to the Azerbaijani ambassador in Budapest, all aim to prove that from János Martonyi to Zsolt Németh, from Péter Szíjjártó to Viktor Orbán everyone was convinced that the Azeris will keep Safarov in prison until the end of his life. They are trying to make us, Hungarians, the Christian nations of the world and the Armenians of the world believe that they trusted the Azeri promise that the ax murderer will be treated as guilty and subject to due punishment,” said he.
In his opinion, following the 2004 language training course within the NATO Partnership for Peace, during one night of which an Azeri officer hostile to Armenia executed in his sleep the Armenian serviceman, official participant at the event, it became clear that Hungary had no extradition agreement with Azerbaijan and for a crime committed on its territory, Safarov was to face trial for murder in Hungary.
“Besides, Safarov could not be repatriated for trial, since due to the state of war with Armenia, his act would not be regarded as a crime by Azerbaijan. Bearing in mind the above, according to the code of practice and rules of international law, the sentence also needed to be enforced and served on the territory where the crime was committed, i.e in Hungary. The international judicial interdiction of extraditing Safarov thus did not only apply to the trial stage of the case, but also to the duration of serving the sentence,” said Zárug.
As he said, in the spirit of eastern opening and in pursuit of sources for the external financing of Hungarian state debt, in his second premiership Viktor Orbán has already paid two visits to Azerbaijan.
“He has been in negotiations with President Ilham Aliyev – son of Heydar Aliyev, the communist ex-KGB boss promoted to president – who pardoned Safarov the minute his plane landed in Baku. He rewarded the ax murderer with a new apartment, promotion and back-dated wages, while the Azeri foreign office expressed its gratitude to the Orbán cabinet for more than a year’s fruitful co-operation,” he added.
The analyst said that, of course, in Hungary each played the same tune, that the silver piece is not his, he struck no deal, nor indeed was there ever a word uttered around the dinner tables laden with Eastern wealth and arrows of irony aimed at EU bureaucrats about a fistful of dollars. Albeit only a week earlier it was the Orbán-leadership itself that boasted in its media that it was on the brink of a three billion government bond agreement with Azerbaijan.
He wonders whether the government correctly assesses that this is in the longer-term interest of Hungary, for which it is worth swallowing this ‘tiny’ bitter pill. How long can one impute interests to again and again trample underfoot their moral fundaments, only because there are some who – following today’s increasingly confused Hungarian foreign policy directions – assert that: this is the Hungarian interest!
“No! The interest of the Hungarian people – with or without the expected Azeri billions – would have been that the Hungarian state defends its sovereignty and Safarov complete his prison sentence in Hungary. It was not a Hungarian interest to be branded as Judas by the entire Christian civilization. It was not in our interest to be made the laughing stock of the international community of nations. No! All well-intentioned Hungarians, Armenians, Christians, Europeans and democrats are united in their protest against this. This is alien to our civilisation,” the expert added.