AZERBAIJAN SHOULD BE BROUGHT TO COURT
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
http://artsakhtert.com/eng/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1532:-azerbaijan-should-be-brought-to-court&catid=3:all&Itemid=4