Orkhan Sattarov, the head of the European Office of Vestnik Kavkaza
A few days ago the Armenian media published a small article on a trip by a German delegation to Nagorno-Karabakh to monitor ‘elections’ on the territories which are controlled by the unrecognized separatist regime. The article says that the delegation includes members of Die Linke party Pjotr Stefan, Jan Luzak and Sven Diderich, as well as the former ambassador of Germany to Armenia Hans-Jochen Schmidt. The information is interesting due to the fact that not all the names are actually real, while those which are real are actually biased. Let’s analyze this step by step.
Vestnik Kavkaza has already reported on Hans-Jochen Schmidt (see Confused Ex-ambassador) http://vestnikkavkaza.net/analysis/politics/51385.html. Staying in Nagorno-Karabakh in October 2013, Schmidt stated that a group of German observers who came to Azerbaijan, having been invited by the honorary consul of Azerbaijan to Germany Otto Hauser, “spent the majority of their trip resting at a yacht club.” Otto Hauser reacted to the message immediately, warning the former ambassador that he could sue him for slander in Germany. Schmidt didn’t expect such consequences and blamed the Armenian information agency Panarmenian for everything, stating that he didn’t say these words. Panarmenian published a video which confirmed that Schmidt really did say this. Finally, the former ambassador, who had been found to be a liar, changed his tactics and said these words were taken out of the context. Today this person plays the role of an observer at elections to an unrecognized parliament of an unrecognized regime. However, he won’t have an opportunity to rest in a yacht club due to the geographical peculiarities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.
Everything is clear with ex-ambassador Schmidt, who has been awarded by the Armenian Foreign Ministry. However, the story about members of Die Linke Pjotr Stefan, Jan Luzak and Sven Diderich is much more complicated. We have contacted Die Linke, and nobody knows such people in the party. They know a person whose name is Sven Diderich. He is a researcher on housing policy in the faction of Die Linke in the Bundestag (he is not an MP, but an employee of the party), but they don’t know how he can be connected with the conflicted region. It should be noted that speculations over the party’s name in the context of private activities by its employees are an old, but ineffective method.
Speaking about Jan Luzak, there is an MP in the Bundestag whose name is Jan-Marco Luzak. However, he is not a member of Die Linke, but a member of the CDU. He is not a significant person in the party. We don’t know whether he is meant to be one of the observers in the delegation. Finally, it is a mystery to us who Pjotr Stefan is; but we are sure that there is no serious politician or expert with such a name in Germany. Of course, this didn’t embarrass ‘the Foreign Minister of the NKR’, Karen Mirzoyan, who welcomed the unknown delegates from Germany hospitably. Even such a delegation is a success for the unrecognized minister.
