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Azerbaijani Diaspora in US starts campaign against Congressman Frank Wolf

14 February 2012 09:50 (UTC +04:00)

In his address to the House, Mr. Wolf claimed that shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Armenians in Azerbaijan â€œendured great hardship, including pogroms in Sumgait (February 1988), in Kirovabad (November 1988) and in Baku (January 1990)â€.

â€œThis submission contains outrageous and completely inaccurate claims, long rejected by US government and viewed as biased and without merit by the American scholarly community and human rights groupsâ€, remind the Azeri Diaspora members in their letter to the Congressmanâ€™s office.

According to the campaigners, these accusations have always been a smoke-screen for Armenian aggression and occupation of Azerbaijan, such as its Nagorno-Karabakh region. This fact-based view is held not only by Azerbaijan, but also the US government, along with the UN and other international organizations.

â€œThe entire Azerbaijani population in Armenia was ethnically cleansed in 1987-1990 along with all those occupied Azerbaijani lands such as NK (some 800,000 people). Armenians did commit the bloodiest atrocity of the time, the Khojaly Massacre in 1992, when Armenian forces slaughtered over 700 innocent Azerbaijani civilians in just one night on February 25-26, 1992. According to the CIA, Armenia occupied 16% of Azerbaijan. The Human Rights Watch report "concludes that Karabakh Armenian forces with the support of the Republic of Armenia were responsible for the majority of abuses during that period", said the authors.

In their letters the Diaspora members also remind that Azerbaijan is a country with well-recognized positive record of tolerance, where Jews and Christians of all denominations, Shia and Sunni Muslims, Bahais and Agnostics, have lived side by side for centuries. Meanwhile, Armenia is a mono-ethnic state that regularly jails Jehovah Witnesses and has virtually no Jews left, as well as denies local Yezidi Kurds the choice to call themselves "Kurds".

â€œWe are urging Congressman Wolf to retract his CR submission, and issue a new CR to properly commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Khojaly Massacre - the biggest war crime and crime against humanity in the South Caucasus in the second part of the 20th centuryâ€, they note.