Azerbaijani civil society calls "war criminal" Armenian president
By Mushvig Mehdiyev
Azerbaijani civil society has launched a campaign for collecting signatures to recognize Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan as a war criminal.
The petition called "Hundred s of thousands of signatures to recognize Serzh Sargsyan as a war criminal" will be submitted to the UN Security Council, according to the initiators of the campaign.
A working group under the Council of State Support to Non-Governmental Organizations under the President of Azerbaijan aims to present the realities of January 20th and Khojaly tragedies across the world.
Shahin Ismayilov, a member of the council, believes that the campaign will impose a psychological pressure on the Armenian authorities led by Sargsyan.
Ismayilov said at a press-conference on January 28 that the working group plans to collect 100,000 signatures through cooperation with the government bodies, political parties and media.
Sargsyan was the commander of separatist Nagorno-Karabakh's "armed forces" during Armenian army's illegal military operations to occupy Azerbaijan's lands in 1992.
He is accused of wielding hostilities in Nagorn-Karabakh since the very beginning of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in early 1990s.
In his interview with Thomas de Waal, a senior associate at Washington DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace back in 2000, then Armenian Defense Minister Sargsyan confessed that the "Armenian army carried out some ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, otherwise it couldn’t achieve its goals."
These words could perfectly fit the thought lingering in the mind of a war criminal, since an ethnic cleansing is a painful crime.
"When a shell is flying in the air, it doesn't distinguish between a civilian resident and a soldier; it doesn't have eyes." In other words, Sarsgyan means that if there was a gun at his hands, the target didn’t make any difference to him, whether it was an armed soldier or an innocent civilian
Ismayilov said demonstration of a unanimous position of the Azerbaijani people is of major importance for the campaign.
Azerbaijani society blames Sargsyan-led Armenia for the regular and fatal provocations against Azerbaijan on the contact line. Parents and relatives of the dead Azerbaijani soldiers view Sargsyan as a main culprit of the continuous soldier deaths. As a proof of his criminal mind, following the very recent fire exchanges on the frontline that claimed the lives of 17 Armenian soldiers, Sargsyan pledged a revenge on Azerbaijan. In other words, he hinted to keep on conducting sabotage attacks on Azerbaijan in an effort to kill at least the same number of Azerbaijani soldiers.
Even the parents of the killed Armenian soldiers put all blame on Sargsyan for deaths of their children. During severe military skirmishes between the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies in last August, a large number of Armenians, including the parents of forces, civil activists, Diaspora members, launched a campaign on social networks to urge Sargsyan to refrain from sacrificing the young Armenian soldiers for his personal interests.
Ismayilov noted that in an effort to expand the signature campaign the working group intends to work tightly with the supporters of the campaign in other countries by spreading information about the petition.
In 1992, Khojaly, the second largest town in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, came under intense fire from the towns of Khankendi and Askeran which had been occupied by the Armenian armed forces earlier.
During the massacre, 613 civilians - mostly women and children - were killed, and a total of 1,000 people were disabled. Eight families were exterminated, 25 children lost both parents, and 130 children lost one of their parent.
Moreover, 1,275 innocent people were taken hostages - the fate of 150 of them still remains unknown. Some civilians were shot at close range, scalped, and burned alive. Some had their eyes gouged out and others were beheaded.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a lengthy war that ended with the signing of a fragile ceasefire in 1994. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. Since the war, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions.
Armenia continues the occupation in defiance of four UN Security Council resolutions calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of armed forces.
Peace talks brokered by mediators from Russia, France and the U.S. have produced no results so far.
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