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UC Irvine ASA, AYF and ANCA Counter Azeri Propaganda

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  • UC Irvine ASA, AYF and ANCA Counter Azeri Propaganda

    UC Irvine ASA, AYF and ANCA Counter Azeri Propaganda

    Friday, March 1st, 2013

    Azeris had hired armed security guards during a college campus event

    BY HASMIK PILIPOSYAN


    On the night of February 25, the Azerbaijani Student Association
    (AzSA) of UC Irvine, which formed in 2012, organized a film viewing by
    Thomas Goltz, a war correspondent and professor at Montana State
    University, which attempted to depict the events of Khojaly as ethnic
    cleansing committed by Armenian soldiers against Azeri citizens. Many
    Azeris as well as many Armenians showed up including the Orange
    Country ARF, AYF, ANCA, and UC Irvine ASA in support of preventing
    false statements and accusations from contaminating the true reality
    of the conflict.

    Before the audience was to view the film, one of the Azeri students
    stood at the podium and shared her story of how she became a refugee
    of Nagorno-Karabakh due to destruction of her town and home, which was
    quite disheartening considering the hundreds of thousands of Armenian
    and Azerbaijani refugees affected by the conflict. After, AzSA
    president Jadiv Huseynov provided some statistics and history of the
    Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, stressing the historical and cultural
    significance of the region mainly to Azerbaijan, failing to mention
    the presence of Armenians in the region for thousands of years that
    lived in the ancient historical Kingdom of Artsakh. Today, much of
    historical Artsakh extends into the region of Nagorno-Karabakh and is
    controlled by the republic.

    Huseynov went on to speak about the events of Khojaly, directly
    announcing it as `ethnic cleansing' perpetrated by the Armenian
    soldiers and the Russian 366th Motor Rifle Regiment on the night of
    February 25-26, 1992. He claimed that `613 civilians including 106
    women, 63 children, and 70 elders were tortured to death' and how the
    Human Rights Watch called it the `largest atrocity of the conflict'.
    Furthermore, with the increased tension quickly building in the room,
    he alluded to Markar Melkonian's book about his brother, Monte
    Melkonian's, life with an incorrect analysis of a statement Monte
    wrote in his personal diary stating that by the morning of February
    26th, 1992 the `refugees had made it to the eastern cusp of
    Mountainous Karabakh...toward safety in the Azeri city of Agdam, about
    six miles away' and how an Azeri refugee woman testified how the
    Armenian soldiers `just shot and shot'. However, Azerbaijani president
    at the time, Ayaz Mutalibov told Czech reporter Dana Mazalova `the
    Armenians had, in any case, provided a corridor to let the civilians
    escape. Why then would they shoot?' Huseynov unacknowledged the fact
    that the Armenian soldiers had sent out warning via radio of the siege
    of the city and how they had opened a corridor for Azeri civilians to
    escape safely, but with the command of the Azeri mayor of Khojaly,
    Elman Mammadov, the civilians were to not leave. The AzSA president
    also declined in recognizing the pogroms against Armenians in Baku,
    Sumgait, and Kirovabad perpetrated by Azeri soldiers and leaders, who
    were later given higher ranks in government and parliament by
    president Aliyev.

    The night proceeded to the documentary by Thomas Goltz titled
    `Azerbaijan Through Foreign Eyes'. The film was very poorly made and
    failed to depict any factual and eye-witness evidence of the events of
    Khojaly as Goltz himself was not witness to the events and merely
    served as a sympathy show. Following the film was a question and
    answer session that completely undermined Goltz' credibility.

    One of the Armenian students questioned Goltz about Akram Aylisli's
    treatment and book burning in Azerbaijan and the case of Ramil Safarov
    as contradictory to Goltz' claim of `tolerance is embedded in Azeri
    culture'. Goltz answered the student with merely a poem that was
    absolutely irrelevant to the topic and then he sat down, while the
    student remained dumbstruck by the `intellectual's' absurd and foolish
    response. Another student asked about President Ilham Aliyev's
    anti-Armenian campaign enforced throughout Azerbaijan and his
    Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year award bestowed by
    the OCCRP, in which the professor simply replied `I say he should
    change his act'. During the Q&A session, Huseynov, would constantly
    stand and answer the students' questions himself while Goltz simply
    sat and listened. Many of the Azeris sitting in the audience rarely
    made comments.

    Perhaps the Azeris were not prepared enough to enforce their
    propaganda and create an atmosphere of sympathy. They usually work
    quite well in attempting to alter history but seem to always fail as
    facts and the truth triumphs all.

    - See more at: http://asbarez.com/108608/uc-irvine-asa-ayf-and-anca-counter-azeri-propaganda/#sthash.coCeRSBI.dpuf

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