BLOCKADE OF ARMENIA BORDERS – CONSEQUENCE OF TURKEY IMPUNITY

Pan Armenian News
21.04.2005 03:50

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ “How can the blockade of Turkey of the transport
communications leading to Armenia be explained if not by impunity of
the perpetration of the Armenian Genocide? However the circumstance
that the same state, which still ignores the urge of the civilized
world to immediately end the blockade of Armenia and establish
diplomatic relations with it, still claims mediator role in the Nagorno
Karabakh settlement is the most surprising, not feeling embarrassed
in supporting the position of solely the Azeri party,” Nagorno
Karabakh Republic President Arkady Ghukasian stated at the Ultimate
Crime, Ultimate Challenge: Human Rights and Genocide international
conference. The NKR President statement notes: “Such a peculiar
understanding of the mediator mission by Turkey directly issues
from its attitude to the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. And
is not it the same circumstance that makes the Azeri leaders give
Turkey a special role in the solution of the Karabakh problem? And
what if not a permanent genocide policy should the Azeri leadership
attitude to the Armenian population of the republic be considered
from the day of its founding? An obvious confirmation of it is the
history of the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous District. Within
the years of existence of the NKAD the Baku authorities worked for a
prompt change of the demographic situation in the district in favor
of the Azeri population aiming at further abolition of the Armenian
autonomy. To fulfill this task the Azeri leaders used such mechanisms
as outrageous social, economic and cultural discrimination of the
Armenian population, falsification of the history of the Armenian
people, ban for any economic and cultural ties of Nagorno Karabakh
with Armenia, destroying of Armenian cultural monuments, churches,
forming an image of Armenians in the Azeri society as if they were
historical and irreconcilable enemies of the Azeri and all other
Turkic peoples. Azeri leaders pursued just the same policy towards
the once Armenian majority of the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic,
which resulted in virtually no single Armenian remaining there in
the middle of the past century. I think that we should properly
present the grievous fate of the Armenians in Nakhichevan to the
international community as an obvious example of what would happen
in Nagorno Karabakh if it further remained part of Azerbaijan. All
the aforementioned mechanisms of discrimination policy by Baku
authorities formed favorable conditions for the future perpetration of
the next bloody genocide of the Armenians – this time in Azerbaijan,
whose political forces do not conceal they consider the “Armenian”
policy of the Ottoman and contemporary Turkey an exemplary one. Baku
authorities proved to be worthy students of their teachers. The
slaughter based on the ethnic criteria and the forced eviction of the
Armenian population from the places of their permanent residence in
Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, the regions of Shamkhor, Khanlar, Shemakhin
and others in Azerbaijan, the unprecedented siege of the NKR, daily
artillery bombardment of Stepanakert to annihilate its peaceful
population, the butchering of women, the old and children in Maraga
Armenian village, just as the continuing blockade of Nagorno Karabakh
and other glaring crimes of the Baku authorities against Armenians
fully fit the international definition of the genocide.”