Petition calling "war criminal" Armenian president submitted to UN
By Mushvig Mehdiyev
A petition calling for the international community to recognize Armenian President, Serzh Sargsyan as a war criminal reached the floor of the United Nations.
The campaign, which has been initiated in Azerbaijan, seeks to reveal the horrors which Armenia's officials conducted against Azerbaijan in the 1990s. Launched in January the petition succeeded in collecting over 100,000 signatures, thus calling for the UN to hold Armenia's incumbent president liable for the war crimes he committed.
The petition was delivered to UN Security Council on February 26.
Azerbaijan's First Deputy Speaker, Ziyafat Asgarov stressed that since Sargsyan was one of the perpetrators of the Khojaly genocide, he would have to answer of his crimes before an international court.
Azerbaijan's Khojaly city came under attack by the Armenian armed forces in 1992, where the Armenian soldiers killed 613 civilians, mostly women and children, disabled a total of 1,000 people, exterminated completely eight families, and killed both parents of 25 children and one of the parents of 130 children.
The campaign which ran under the slogan - "Hundreds of thousands of signatures to recognize Serzh Sargsyan as a war criminal" - aimed to make Armenia's war crimes known to the greater public. Rights activists also sought to exert pressure onto Armenia.
It was under Sargsyan's leadership that Armenia's military massacred its way through the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
When Thomas de Waal, a senior associate at Washington DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace interviewed Sargsyan back in 2000, the then-Armenian Defense Minister Sargsyan confessed that the Armenian army had indeed carried out some ethnic cleansing in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in order to achieve its goals.
Since Armenia has regularly violated Azerbaijan's territorial sovereignty, carrying out heinous crimes against civilians. Armenia has carried out almost daily incursions into Azerbaijan.
Parents and relatives of dead Azerbaijani soldiers view Sargsyan as the main guilty party.
Daily aggression by Armenian forces along the line of contact has claimed the lives of tens of servicemen, leading Sargsyan to pledge “a bloody revenge” on Azerbaijan.
As for the possible changes in the OSCE Minsk Group composition, Asgarov said that the current co-chairing countries - the US, Russia and France are permanent members of the UN Security Council as opposed to the proposed new members - Germany and Turkey.
"Turkey plays an important role in maintaining stability in the Caucasus,” he said. “Germany also expressed support in this issue. These countries’ joining the OSCE Minsk Group would be a good sign. But the three permanent members of the UN Security Council have failed to achieve results in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement so far. Anyway, we will hope for positive results."
On February 19, at the winter session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna, Deputy Chairman of the OSCE PA's Committee on Political Affairs and Security, Azerbaijani legislator Azay Guliyev submitted Azerbaijan's proposal to expand the OSCE Minsk Group from three to five by attracting Germany and Turkey.
Azerbaijan's internationally recognized Nagorno-Karabakh territory has become a conflict zone following Armenia's aggression in the early 1990s. As a result of Armenia's armed invasion, 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory is under Armenia's occupation, nonetheless the OSCE-brokered peace talks to solve the problem.
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