\"These officers represent the occupational army. Their hands are soaked in blood. They have raped our women and killed our children. There is no place for them in Baku,\" exclaimed Akif Nagi, the chairman of the KLO. Other demonstrators carried banners and posters and demanded that the Armenian officers immediately leave the country. Several of them even succeeded at entering the conference hall way and breaking windows before being forcefully removed by security. Police subsequently intervened and arrested several protestors, including Akif Nagi.

The Karabakh Liberation Organization unites mainly the families of the war victims and displaced people from Karabakh. In the past, it has protested against the planned arrival of Armenian military servicemen to Baku to participate in NATO events, but this was the first case when the Armenian officers actually did come. In previous times, the visits were cancelled. The KLO belongs to the opposition in domestic politics and in the last presidential elections in October 2003, it supported the candidacy of Musavat Party chairman Isa Gambar.

The majority of local residents in Baku also voiced their criticism at the arrival of the Armenian officers. Many respondents believed that the representatives of the enemy\'s army should not be allowed in Baku. \"What will Armenians think? They will think that it was OK to occupy our land and now to come to the capital city of Azerbaijan, sit here, eat here and laugh at us! What a shame!\" said an old man to a local media outlet, which widely covered the event. Even deputies in the Parliament debated the issue and expressed their anger at the situation.

Meanwhile, the official Azerbaijani government took a constructive approach to this issue and decided to allow the Armenian officers to participate in the conference. \"The relations between Azerbaijan and NATO should not become the hostage of our relations with Armenia,\" said deputy foreign minister Araz Azimov. He also added that reacting emotionally to these kinds of situations was the not best thing to do. \"We need to be more pragmatic than this.\"

Bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and NATO has been indeed increasing since Azerbaijan joined the Partnership for Peace Program of NATO in 1994. Lately, Azerbaijan has sent peacekeeping troops to the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan and the recently signed an Individual Partnership Program between Baku and NATO will further increase the cooperation. That is why it was important for the Azerbaijani Government to host this NATO conference at the highest level.

The visiting Armenian officers were tightly protected by security forces during their stay. During the debates in the Azerbaijani Parliament it was revealed that they did not even receive a visa from the Azerbaijani embassy in Georgia, as was announced earlier.

The majority of analysts in Azerbaijan believe that the KLO protest was not a sporadic event but rather the logical consequence of the deadlocked negotiations in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process for the past 10 years. The Azerbaijani society has been getting increasingly frustrated with the stalemate and thus becoming more supportive of a military solution to the conflict. Many people do not believe that the international negotiations will produce any results and that the occupied lands will be returned. Thus, the internal hostility towards Armenia increases year by year. Several months ago, another indicator of this growing hostility took place in Budapest, where an Azerbaijani officer presumably (the court case is ongoing) murdered his Armenian colleague. These are simply symptoms of Azerbaijani society’s increasing impatience towards the Karabakh problem.

Meanwhile, dozens of Parliamentarians in Baku signed a petition calling for the release of the arrested members of KLO, and the ANS TV has voiced concerns at the brutality of the police forces while dispersing the crowd. Even the Azerbaijani Human Rights Ombudsman Elmira Suleymanova asked for the release of the arrested demonstrators.