Azerbaijan has impounded mine removal equipment for Afghanistan supplied by the international mine clearance organization The HALO Trust. Baku has long had a spat with the UK-based charity for conducting mine clearance operations in the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh without its imprimatur.
Azerbaijan, which provides a corridor for about a quarter of NATO's supplies for Afghanistan, has indicated in the past that its cooperation with the alliance is contingent on respect of its national interests. In Baku's eyes, The Halo Trust does not meet that requirement.
“[T]his organization should have ceased its work in the occupied territories [Nagorno-Karabakh] and should have offered apologies to Baku,” Nazim Ismailov, director of Azerbaijan’s National Agency for Mine Actions, said on July 8, APA news agency reported. “But they have not done it.” Azerbaijan has dispatched the equipment to neighboring Georgia instead of to Afghanistan, he added.
The Halo Trust began work in Nagorno Karabakh right after Baku's bitter and protracted war over the region with Karabakh separatists and Armenia ended in 1994. The organization says that mines and unexploded ordinance are a persistent problem in the territory and that it could take up to five years of intense work to clear the area entirely.
Committed to bringing the territory back under its fold, Baku tries to make sure that all ties between Nagorno-Karabakh and the outside world go through Azerbaijan.
Aside from The Halo Trust, journalists are another source of Azerbaijani irritation on this score; the country recently barred two Russian reporters who traveled to Karabakh without Baku's permission from entering Azerbaijan.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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