According to a diplomatic note sent by the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan to the OSCE head office in Vienna, the organization has only a month to close its Baku office. The Government of Azerbaijan said there is no need for more activities of the OSCE Project Coordinator in Baku, which means it considers the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of Azerbaijan and the OSCE on the OSCE Project Coordinator in Baku, signed on September 24, 2014, to be null and void.
The move to close the OSCE office came days after the expiry of the contract of the OSCE project coordinator in Baku, Alexis Chahtahtinsky. Chahtahtinsky was criticized by the US Ambassador to the OSCE, Daniel Baer, for being photographed with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
A Milli Majlis deputy, political scientist Asim Mollazade, told Vestnik Kavkaza that Chahtahtinsky's review vividly demonstrated the fact that "the OSCE cannot cope with the tasks facing the organization in many areas". "The OSCE is still unable to cope with security issues and conflict resolution. The OSCE Minsk Group turned into a refrigerator which has frozen the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The organization closes its eyes to its failure to comply with the basic documents and agreements, in particular the fact that all OSCE member states recognize the territorial integrity of each other," the expert explained.
Professor of the Western University, political scientist Fikret Sadykhov, also noted that the OSCE mission even in its former higher status "was not engaged in the essential problems of Azerbaijan and its concerns, but tried to impose its conditions, to change the priorities of the country's domestic and foreign policy," he said. The political scientist noted that "Alexis Chahtahtinsky is an ethnic Azeri, who became a French citizen, which the OSCE doesn't like along with his work with the Azerbaijani leadership."
