STATEMENT OF THE POLITICAL FORCES OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NAGORNO KARABAKH REPUBLIC

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic
2010-01-20 14:51

On January 19, the political forces of the NKR National Assembly,
in particular, "Democracy", "Motherland", and "ARFD-Movement-88"
factions, issued a statement related to the January 1990 Armenian
massacres in Baku.

Following is the full text of the statement.

Twenty years ago, massacre of the Armenian population was organized
and coolly implemented on the state level in the capital city of the
then official Soviet Azerbaijan – Baku. Thousands of innocent people –
women, children and old people – were killed with extreme brutality,
and tens of thousands of people, suffering from heavy physical wounds
and moral shock, were deported and deprived of their homeland.

In fact, the January massacres in Baku became the finale of the
violations and deportations committed towards the native and
state-making Armenian population of the Eastern Transcaucasia in
1905-1906, 1918-1920, and 1988-1990. It was the specific response of
the Azerbaijani authorities to the peaceful, just, and legal right
of the Nagorno Karabakh people to worthy life in their homeland,
which took place with the criminal connivance of the USSR authorities.

We, the representatives of the political forces of the National
Assembly of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, condemning once again the
violations committed towards Armenians in Azerbaijan during the whole
20th century, as a result of which the native Armenian population
was deprived of its inalienable right to state self-organization,
in particular, the massacres, which started on January 13, 1990 in
Baku, assess them as:

-a fact of mass violation of the human rights and freedoms, first of
all, the right to life;

-evident demonstration of the Azerbaijani state policy of xenophobia,
national intolerance, and ethnic cleansing;

-the heaviest crime committed against the humanity on the state level –
Genocide, the responsibility for which, according to the international
law, has no time limitation.

The Nagorno Karabakh Republic will seek the legal assessment of
the violations, deportations and ethnic cleansing implemented in
Azerbaijan and the punishment of the organizers, regardless of their
current political and public position and residence.

As demonstration of this legal and just intention, we call upon the
UN, EU, OSCE, and member-states of the OSCE Minsk Group:

-to hold an impartial investigation of the violations committed towards
the Armenian population in Baku between January 13 and January 20
and give the legal assessment to the actions of the organizers and
executors of the crime;

-not to equate the crimes organized on the state level in peaceful
conditions with the privations, which the region’s peoples suffered
due to the war unleashed by Azerbaijan.

To avoid further undesirable developments, we demand to condemn and
use corresponding penalties towards the criminal state. This is not
only the right of the sufferer, but also the duty of the international
structures, as Genocide is a crime against the humanity.