A Baku-based organization calling itself the West Azerbaijan Community (WAC) has criticized an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on March 11 penned by the paper’s associate editor David Ignatius that highlights the plight of Armenians displaced from Nagorno Karabakh.

In the piece, entitled A cry for the refugees of emptied Nagorno-Karabakh: ‘We are nobody’, Ignatius writes there’s little international discussion on the “right of return” for the 120,000 Armenians who fled the region following Azerbaijan’s military invasion last fall.

The WAC, according to the Azerbaijan State Information Agency (Azertac), condemns the article, describing it as “provocative and biased”.

“The fact that D. Ignatius insists only on the right of Karabakh Armenians to ‘return’ shows how far he is from professional journalism,” the WAC states.

Ignatius writes that a senior U.S. State Department official told him that U.S. diplomats have raised the ‘right of return’ issue with Azerbaijani officials, but that Washington is focused on facilitating a peace deal between Yerevan and Baku.

(David Ignatius is the son of Paul Ignatius, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1967-1969) and Assistant Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson. Paul Ignatius’ ancestors hail from Agin, near Kharpert, in western Armenia.)