By Oksana Musaelyan

The PACE session today adopted the “Inhabitants of frontier regions of Azerbaijan are deliberately deprived of water” draft resolution introduced by Milica Markovic from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resolution calls for unimpeded access by independent engineers and hydrologists to inspect and assess the situation on site. It emphasises the need for global management of the use and upkeep of the Sarsang water resources, with international supervision of the irrigation canals, the Sarsang and Madagiz dams, the schedule of water releases during the autumn and winter, and aquifer overexploitation. The Parliamentary Assembly is invited to ask the Armenian authorities to cease the use of water resources as a political tool.

How do you evaluate your draft resolution? Is it merely humanitarian with no political overtones?    

MM - The draft resolution I presented related to humanitarian, social and environmental issues and touched upon the life of the inhabitants. It is obvious that the story has its background and it is referring to the conflict of 1992-1994, and I sticked to that background. I could not escape that. 

However, Armenia cannot defend the stance and prohibit the one population, which is not Christian, to stop water supply during summer and give it during winter. 

This is not a question of prohibiting and not prohibiting; no?

It is actually the question of the conflict. It’s not politicians, but inhabitants who suffer the most.

You cannot escape the fact, and you actually mentioned ,that  the suffering is  because of the conflict. However, the issue you raise is secondary  and does relate to all the people on both sides who suffer from the consequences of the conflict.  Thus, it touches upon political aspects of the issue itself and an attempted resolution which are the purview of the OSCE Minsk Group and any intervention is considered to undermine its mandate. So what is the meaning of this resolution? Merely  to raise and specify one only problem concerning the consequences of the conflict?

My remark I really want to have a separation of the channels in order to provide all inhabitants to have a water supply and water resources. When we see the satellite images, we can see two very grave images of the reservoir Sarsang.  It was done during the war, so it impedes the water to flow down to the channels. And I am sure Armenians are also interested to have these channels separated.

Is it possible to do this  before a conflict resolution can be found?

I said that due to the effect that we have to separate and maintain the system here. The Armenian side has to withdraw from that territory in order to let international experts to come there and do their reparation. I am sure that international experts will not go there and do this while there are snipers there.