The ten trucks carried food and other essential items provided by the municipal administrations of several French cities and regions. Azerbaijan refused to let them proceed to Karabakh through a checkpoint which it controversially set up in the corridor in April.
“Here, at the Lachin Corridor, we can testify that no humanitarian aid can enter Artsakh, a gross violation of human rights. Our 10 humanitarian aid trucks are blocked,” Hidalgo tweeted from an Armenian border area adjacent to the corridor’s starting point.
The Armenian government also tried unsuccessfully to send 360 tons of flour, cooking oil, sugar and other basic foodstuffs to Karabakh in late July. Its aid convoy remains stuck at the entrance to the corridor.
Hidalgo likened the eight-month blockade to genocide when spoke to reporters in the nearby Armenian town of Goris.
“What is happening in Nagorno-Karabakh is something that resembles genocide perpetrated by an authoritarian regime against people seeking to exercise their rights,” the Socialist mayor told a joint news conference with other members of the French delegation headed by her.
Bruno Retailleau, a conservative French senator who also joined the delegation, accused Baku of turning Karabakh into an “open-air concentration camp.”
“This attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide targets 120,000 people, including 30,000 children,” Retailleau said.
Arayik Harutiunian, the Karabakh president, joined the news conference via video link from Stepanakert. He thanked the French municipalities for their initiative strongly encouraged by leaders of France’s influential Armenian community.
Harutiunian said the Azerbaijani leadership hopes that the severe food shortages resulting from the blockade will help it “bring Artsakh to its knees.” “But it will not succeed,” he said.
The visiting French officials called on French President Emmanuel Macron to urgently draft a resolution against the blockade and try to push it through the UN Security Council. France’s Le Figaro daily reported last week that Paris is “preparing to submit” such a resolution to the Security Council.
Macron pledged on Monday to seek stronger international pressure on Baku. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said the following day that the blockade is aimed at forcing the Karabakh Armenians to leave their homeland. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry rejected those statements as pro-Armenian and untrue.
Macron spoke with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by phone on Tuesday.
