GENOCIDE

The mass burial ground of victims of the genocide of Azerbaijanis in Guba has probably never seen so many visitors. This year not only members of the local public, scientists, politicians and intellectuals, but many foreigners, too, came to pay homage to the victims of the Armenians' crimes against humanity. And every year the number of people wanting to learn the shocking facts about Armenian fascism continues to grow.

Azerbaijani Genocide Day was endorsed by a decree of President Heydar Aliyev on 26 March 1998, 80 years after Armenian bandit formations under the command of Stepan Shaumyan and his party of Dashnaks, taking advantage of the Bolshevik coup, committed bloody carnage in Baku, Naxcivan, Samaxi, Guba and other towns, wiping out tens of thousands of innocent people. And these were not just Azerbaijanis. Among those wiped out were Lezgins, Jews, Russians and members of other ethnic groups who lived as one family in the most multiethnic country in the Southern Caucasus.

According to various reports, the total number of victims of the punitive operations carried out from March-April 1918 was about 30,000 - women, children and elderly. But they were not the only victims of these unprecedented atrocities. Historical documents also record the cultural genocide committed by the Armenians. Archive materials show that schools, culture centres, libraries and the Ismailliya building in Baku, home to a Muslim charity, were torched and destroyed and the Teze Pir mosque and other historical monuments were shelled.

Today Armenia continues its deliberate policy of destroying all traces of Azerbaijani history and culture in the Azerbaijani territories it occupies. This is shown by numerous dispatches from foreign media from Nagornyy Karabakh and the report of the OSCE's assessment mission on the results of its monitoring in autumn 2010, released in the run-up to the latest Azerbaijani Genocide Day.

This report differs significantly from the previous conclusions of the field mission five years ago. "The new report, apart from describing the wretched lives of the people in the occupied territories, carries a clear message that the international community is aware of the pointlessness of maintaining the status-quo. This is the main signal expected by the Azerbaijani side, which has more than once spoken about the impossibility of maintaining the current situation, Yerevan's main aim. The Armenian authorities have frequently obstructed the flow of credible information about Nagornyy Karabakh, and especially the occupied territories, for fear of information leaks contradicting the Armenian leaders' words about the easy lives of people in Nagornyy Karabakh. An example of Armenia's fears was the deportation of the Wochenzeitung und Neues Deutschland correspondent Andre Widmer from Yerevan airport in early March. Because of his reports about Nagornyy Karabakh and the adjacent regions, the Armenian authorities refused to grant Widmer a visa and so he was deported without explanation." This is an assessment published on the website of the Information and Analysis Centre for the Study of Socio-Political Processes in Post-Soviet Space at the Department of History of Neighbouring Countries in the history faculty of Moscow's M.V.Lomonosov State University.

The document states that, having travelled for more than a thousand kilometres across the territories, the co-chairmen saw indisputable evidence of the catastrophic consequences of the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict and the failure to achieve a peace process.

"Towns and villages which existed before the conflict had been abandoned and were almost totally in ruins. Although there was no precise data, the total number of people living in small villages and in the towns of Lacin and Kalbacar was about 14,000" says the summary of the report. Prior to the occupation, the population of these Azerbaijani districts was over 100,000.

The co-chairmen estimated that "there has been no significant growth in population in the occupied territories since 2005. Migrants (mostly ethnic Armenians) were resettled in these territories from Azerbaijani districts and they live in harsh conditions, with an undeveloped infrastructure, an undeveloped economy and limited access to public services. Many of them have no documents or identity papers".

Of course, developing the economy requires money, which Armenia doesn't have, and serious foreign investors are not going to risk their capital in an unrecognized entity in occupied territories, especially as no-one has revoked Azerbaijan's sovereign right to liberate its lands by military means.

Even the existing elements of economic activity, as well as continued artificial settlement of Armenians in the occupied territories, was deemed by the OSCE mission to run counter to the fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of the civilian population in time of war and the additional protocol of 12 March 1949, which Armenia signed up to in 1993.

The mission also recorded changes to the administrative borders in the territories occupied by Armenia, as well as to the names of a number of districts. At international level, Armenia describes the seven occupied districts around Nagornyy Karabakh as a 'buffer zone' or a 'security zone', to which the Armenians are allegedly laying no claim to. In point of fact, the OSCE mission revealed that the unrecognized regime included all these seven districts in its administrative division which, together with the populated areas in the mountainous part of Karabakh, make up the eight districts of the so-called 'Nagornyy Karabakh Republic'.

The co-chairmen also recommended that measures be taken to protect the cemeteries in these territories, which are evidence of the continuation of Armenia's cultural genocide. As a result of the Armenian occupation, about 1,000 Azerbaijani populated areas were pillaged, torched and demolished and numerous archaeological monuments, mosques and cemeteries were destroyed. Over 40,000 priceless articles and rare exhibits were stolen from Azerbaijani museums.

One way or another, the situation described during the course of the monitoring, reinforced the opinion of the co-chairmen that the status-quo is unacceptable. The OSCE report has been assessed positively in both Baku and Yerevan, and the document itself has given the Armenian people substantial food for thought. The international mediators' report should help to answer such questions as: what have 20 years of occupation given to the Armenians? Is there any point in continuing to carry the heavy burden of an illegal war when Armenia itself does not have enough to live on? Why is the Karabakh clan which rules Armenia so interested in maintaining the status-quo? Is this not a manifestation of genocide in relation to its own people?