Member of the Armenian Parliament Mane Tandilyan backs the decision to visit Baku. “There are no trivial platforms or unimportant discussions,” the lawmaker told reporters after her return from Baku.
“I got further convinced that the Azerbaijani side can turn any sitting into a platform of anti-Armenian propaganda, and it was very good we attended the conference. Our participation was a restraining factor,” she said.
Mane Tandilyan, along with Chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs Armen Ashotyan, attended a conference in Baku organized by the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly last week. The agenda was non-political, discussions focused on women’s rights and gender issues. The Armenian delegates were not there to discuss the Karabakh issue, but political issues were not avoided.
As it could be predicted, the visit of Armenian lawmakers was accompanied by protests. “But official Baku had one task of protecting their physical security and was doing so,” Tandilyan said.
Expert of Azerbaijani studies Ashot Movsisyan is confident that any platform should be used to give a worthy response to Azerbaijani approaches. He believes that such meetings allow to assess the attitude towards Armenians or the real level of hatred for Armenians. According to him, the recent visit shows that “nothing has changed.”
