Azernews.Az

BUDAPEST – A draft resolution condemning the Armenian genocide committed in the Nagorno Karabakh region and other occupied Azerbaijani territories in the early 1990s has been submitted to the Hungarian parliament.

The resolution, initiated by the Hungarian nationalist political party Jobbik, calls upon the Hungarian National Assembly "to initiate on every international forum the condemnation of the Armenian aggression", the party’s website said.

Marton Gyongyosi, a Jobbik MP and vice-chairman of the Hungarian National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee, who submitted the document together with the party’s leaders, pointed to the "urgent need for the settlement of the status of Nagorno Karabah and other occupied territories". He cited the importance of restoring the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, as well as settlling the status of refugees driven out by the Armenian invaders from Azerbaijani territories during the Karabakh war.

Gyongyosi told a press conference that following the fall of the Soviet Union, Armenia stepped up its territorial claims against neighboring Azerbaijan, and the armed conflict was triggered by the military invasion of Nagorno Karabakh and seven adjoining Azerbaijani territories.

Gyongyosi said that as a consequence of the attack by the Soviet-Armenian forces Azerbaijan lost 20 percent of its territories, 20,000 civilians were killed, 100,000 injured and close to 1 million people were driven from their homes.

According to him, the Armenian aggression reached its apex with the occupation of Khojali on February 25-26, 1992, when the Armenian forces committed ethnic cleansing, with a horrifying record: in a single day 613 civilians were killed, amongst them 106 women and 83 children. Gyongyosi stressed that although the United Nations Security Council, the European Parliament, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and NATO have condemned the genocide committed by the Armenians in numerous resolutions and called upon a swift settlement of the status of the Azerbaijani refugees – the humanitarian problem remains unresolved to this day.

"The genocide in Khojali was amongst the largest ethnic atrocities of the 1990s, which was unjustly forgotten and bypassed by the international community," Gyongyosi said.

The Jobbik MP said there are numerous national tragedies in world history, but "it is unacceptable that while we frequently remember and commemorate certain tragedies, we forget others". He added that Jobbik has always been an outspoken critic of double standards within the European Union, which – on other occasions – seems particularly sensitive in the question of human rights and human dignity.