Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry to blacklist The New York Times journalist

[ 10 April 2015 14:16 ]

Baku. Malahat Najafova – APA. Seth Kugel, who published an article on The New York Times has illegally visited Azerbaijan’s occupied territories and violated law of Azerbaijan Republic on “State Border”.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told APA, commenting on the article “A Warm Welcome in the Caucasus Mountains” published by the New York Times.  

Hajiyev said this article, distorting the real situation in Azerbaijan’s occupied territories, is disrespectful to the readers of the newspaper and the rights of more than one million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons who have been subjected to the bloody ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories.

“It is regrettable that such an article appeared in New-York Times. The article, which prepared by the order of the Armenian lobby, does not cover the facts of plundering the property in occupied Azerbaijani territories, destruction of material-cultural samples belong to the Azerbaijani people, as well as Islamic monuments and mosques,” the spokesman noted.

“I would like to remind the management of New-York Times, which published this biased article about the "tourist" trips to the occupied territories, that such transnational crimes as human trafficking, production and sale of drugs, illicit arms trafficking, training of terrorists are committed in these territories,” he said.

Hajiyev stated that Seth Kugel will be included in list of undesirable persons of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.  

Traveler S.Kugel has written an article titled “A Warm Welcome in the Caucasus Mountains” for The New York Times paper. The article is about his day of rest in Nagorno Karabakh. The author claims that about 150,000 Armenians live in Nagorno Karabakh. “To the west is an easygoing border with Armenia; to the east is a disputed boundary with Azerbaijan, which sees regular sniper attacks and, last year, a downed helicopter incident. The area [Nagorno Karabakh] is complicated history goes back centuries. Most recently, a bitter war was in the early 1990s, in which the Armenian-majority enclave declared independence”, says the article.

The article says that though Nagorno-Karabakh is not recognized by any member of the United Nations, it has its own flag and government; it is deeply connected with and dependent on Armenia. The author mentions that the area’s tourism options, and is generally considered safe for travelers. “As it turned out to be excellent for travelers on a tight budget, my weekend there cost almost exactly $100 half of which was my portion of a six-hour shared taxi”, he wrote.