Your trusted source

The Azerbaijani troops violated the rights of the residents of Tegh, a village in Armenia’s Syunik Province, as a result of their criminal actions on July 19, Armenia’s Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) Arman Tatoyan said in a statement.

In particular, on the basis of complaints and alarms, the fact-finding activities of the human rights defender revealed the following:

First, it turned out that on July 19, between 10am and 10:30am, one of the residents of Tegh village was harvesting grain with a combine on the land legally owned by him and his family.

The land plot of the villager is located in the immediate vicinity of the Azerbaijani positions. Nevertheless, the combine operator had to collect the wheat from the peripheral parts of the land as well to make the work complete.

When the combine operator completed the work in one of the peripheral sections, he was about 150 meters away from that place, deep in the territory of the Republic of Armenia and noticed that a group of Azerbaijani servicemen were approaching him. The Azeri soldiers threatened the villager with firearms, yelled and shoved him, trying to take him and the combine to their positions.

The results of the ombudsman’s fact-finding activities confirm that the Azerbaijani troops factually illegally deprived of liberty the farmer, a resident of a village in Syunik Province of Armenia, who had been harvesting grain on his own land, and obstructed the work for a long while.

The combine operator immediately contacted the head of the Tegh community. Subsequently, due to the efforts of the community leader, the Armenian armed forces and the command staff of the local Russian border troops, the combine and the combine operator were returned to the Armenian side at around 4:30pm.

The ombudsman will provide objective evidence of this incident, including to international and intergovernmental bodies.

The fact-finding activities also revealed that in addition to the incident, Azerbaijani forces fired shots near the villages of Khnatsakh and Aravus in the Tegh community on the night of July 19-20, disrupting the peace of the villages. The shootings stopped only after the preventive measures taken by the Armenian military protecting the civilian population.

All these incidents were confirmed by the Tegh community head, local residents, media reports, as well as the official statement of the Armenian Defense Ministry on the July 19 incident.

“The human rights defender of Armenia specifically states that the above-mentioned criminal actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces, which grossly violate the rights of the civilian population of the Republic of Armenia, should be viewed as a joint intention.

“This is also confirmed against the background of the shootings that the Azerbaijani armed forces continue to provoke in other parts of the Armenian border, near civilian settlements, and deliberately disrupt the peaceful life of the border residents, violating their rights to life, health, property, mental integrity and other vital rights,” Tatoyan said.