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YEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. On April 11 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Armenia hosted the “Maraga 30: Unpunished and Ongoing Genocide” Seminar dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Maraga massacre – the genocidal killings of peaceful Armenian population of the village of Maraga in Artsakh’s Martakert region committed by the Azerbaijani military.
The seminar was organized by the NAS Institute of History, the Against Legal Arbitrariness NGO and the Center of Human Rights and Genocide Studies NGO.
“This is history and we must remember it. This was the beginning of a series of genocides perpetrated by Azerbaijan against the Armenian people. Historians, all of us must work in order for this to remain in history as a memory, and that generations remember it,” NAS President Ashot Saghyan said in his remarks.
“Genocide happened all across Armenia. This was committed not only by the authorities of Ottoman Turkey but also by Azerbaijan which was created by the Young Turks and Turkey,” said Against Legal Arbitrariness Executive Director Larisa Alaverdyan.
NAS Institute of History Director Ashot Melkonyan said the Maraga massacre was one circle of the entire chain of genocidal policy.
“The genocidal policy directly passed on from the Ottoman Empire to the First Republic of Azerbaijan, it had other manifestations in the Soviet years, and during the third Republic we saw what manifestations happened by Azerbaijan in 1991-1994, in April of 2016 and in 2020. The Maraga genocide was left in the shadow. It was an example of a war crime against the peaceful population. This seminar will be another occasion to study in depth and note the entire genocidal policy which Azerbaijan inherited from Ottoman Turkey and continues to this day,” he said
The grounds and possibilities for a possible application to the international court over the Armenian Genocide was also discussed at the seminar.
The continuous genocide against Armenians, the responsibility of the Turkish-Azeri authorities and the issues of Armenians and Armenian communities in the post-war period were also discussed.
The Maraga 1992: Golgotha of the late 20th Century film was screened.