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  • Azerbaijan Should Be Brought to Court

    AZERBAIJAN SHOULD BE BROUGHT TO COURT

    http://artsakhtert.com/eng/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1532:-azerbaijan-should-be-brought-to-court&catid=3:all&Itemid=4
    Thursday, 31 July 2014 11:27


    The events in Ukraine continue to draw the attention of
    the world mass media. The outbreak of a civil war between the
    government troops and the Russian population of the south-eastern
    regions of the country, which proclaimed two People's Republics -
    Donetsk and Lugansk - takes the lives of dozens of people, including
    civilians, every day. Surely, like any armed conflicts, this one is
    also accompanied by an information war, in which each party tries to
    blame the opponent for violation of international law, including the
    rules of war.

    It should be noted that the fighters of Malorussia, who are called
    "separatists" by official Kiev, get information support, first of all,
    from Moscow via leading Russian TV channels.

    However, we are not going to dwell on the nuances of the propaganda
    war, which also has its own rules and prohibited methods, to talk
    about who is right and who is wrong, whether the resolution of the
    Russian population on proclaiming the independent Republics is legal
    or not. We'll touch upon another issue - on the Karabakh associations
    in the context of the Ukrainian domestic political crisis. Though the
    two events - the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict and the war in eastern
    Ukraine - are spaced in time by more than twenty years, we cannot but
    make certain parallels, notice the similarities in their
    interpretation by the top leaderships of the metropolises. And as a
    result, similar are, actually, their actions on suppressing, in their
    interpretation, the "breakaway regions" and "restoration of the
    territorial integrity of the country". Like in the early 90s in Baku,
    those in Kiev did not want to even hear about the negotiations with
    the so-called "separatists" in early 2014, referring exclusively to
    the military option of the issue's solution. It led to a single result
    - the conflict rapidly deepened and developed into a full-scale war.

    I would like to focus on the military stage of the
    Azerbaijani-Karabakh and the Ukrainian conflicts. In both cases, the
    authorities of the metropolises again acted almost in the same way,
    using armored vehicles, heavy weapons and aircraft during the punitive
    operation. With, perhaps, the only difference that in the war against
    the NKR Azerbaijan entered into a conspiracy with Gorbachev's
    leadership of the USSR and used the armed forces of the Soviet Army
    against civilians. This monstrous military action went down in history
    under a very symbolic and ominous name - "Ring" Operation", during
    which hundreds of civilians were killed, thousands were taken prisoner
    by Azerbaijan, and dozens of Armenian villages were deported. Another
    difference is in the special brutality of Azerbaijanis who spared no
    one - children, women or the elderly - in the territories they
    occupied during the war. The savage killing of civilians in the
    Armenian villages of Maragha, Khramort and others gives all the
    grounds to state the fascist nature of the Azerbaijani authorities and
    their pathological hatred towards Armenians.

    A special issue is the artillery shelling from long-range weapons and
    the air strikes not only on military targets, but also on residential
    areas of cities and villages, the use of Grad multiple rocket
    launchers by both the Ukrainian and Azerbaijani authorities. If we put
    aside the purely propagandistic reports by Russian reporters and pay
    attention only to their videos, we can see extremely familiar pictures
    - frightened people in dimly lit basements, killed and wounded and
    terrible ruins of residential buildings. However, we cannot put aside
    the estimates that sound in the comments of the Russian party on the
    use of Grad mortar systems by the Ukrainian Army. The assessments are
    definite - the use of Grad systems against civilians is prohibited by
    international conventions, which means that it is a crime. As a
    summary, it is offered to submit corresponding materials to the UN
    International Court of Justice in The Hague. And this is fair, since
    no political goals can justify the mass killing of innocent civilians.

    The appeal to The Hague Court of Justice for a lawsuit against
    Azerbaijan has not lost its urgency even today, 20 years after the
    ceasefire establishment. The crimes committed by its political and
    military leadership against the peaceful Armenian population have no
    statute of limitation. The NKR authorities have a sufficient evidence
    basis irrefutably proving the genocidal actions of Azerbaijan. It is
    known that in the war against the NKR Azerbaijan initially used the
    Grad system against the peaceful settlements, the first time - in the
    Shahumyan region. Then, from January 1992, these systems, with the
    range of hitting the target amounting to 30 kilometers, were almost
    daily used for massive shelling of Stepanakert and the nearby Armenian
    villages from Shushi. After the liberation of the town of Shushi by
    the Karabakh forces, the Azerbaijani commandership intensified the
    airstrikes on the settlements, using again ball-, needle-, and
    half-ton bombs prohibited by international law, which led to
    large-scale civil casualties. Unlike the Ukrainian war that has been
    going on for four months, the Azerbaijani-Karabakh war lasted four
    years.

    Over twenty years have passed since the war, but the criminal nature
    of the Azerbaijani authorities has not changed. The top leadership of
    Azerbaijan does not even hide its intention to resume the hostilities
    if the negotiations held within the OSCE Minsk Group do not satisfy
    its annexationist claims for Artsakh. Azerbaijan should be brought to
    the international court - that is the imperative of the time.


    Leonid MARTIROSSIAN
    Editor-in-Chief of Azat Artsakh newspaper


    From: Baghdasarian
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