Joseph Knollenberg: “I respectfully rise to support the amendment by my colleague from California. As we all know too well, the countries of…”

“I respectfully rise to support the amendment by my colleague from California. As we all know too well, the countries of the Caucasus have been crippled by violence and conflict since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If one were to Nagorno-Karabakh or to Armenia or Azerbaijan, and many in this body have, one would know something about the geography. That, in turn, gives some glimpse of what the conflict is all about. For Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, this reality is worsened by Azerbaijan's devastating blockade of its neighbor. It is especially painful to see a country with the potential of Armenia recede into an economic stone-age at the hands of its neighbors. This is why, in the first place, we adopted section 907 of the Freedom Support Act with overwhelming bipartisan support. It prohibits the delivery of U.S. Government economic or military assistance to the government of Azerbaijan, unless it takes demonstrable steps to cease its blockade. They have not. They have not taken any steps. Section 907 sets reasonable conditions on the use of U.S. foreign aid. We struggled in last year's bill to ensure that it could not prevent vital humanitarian and democracy building assistance or export finance assistance to U.S. business. That took a tremendous amount of struggling, but it did come to completion. However, we cannot repeal section 907 until the conditions for its lifting are met. Unfortunately, Azerbaijan continues its crippling blockade of its neighbors.”