Azernews.Az

Events will be held in over 50 countries this year over the 20th anniversary of the Khojaly massacre of Azerbaijanis committed by Armenian armed forces as part of a campaign aiming to increase awareness about the tragedy, says the head of a group working to promote international recognition of the genocide.

Elshad Iskandarov, secretary-general of the Islamic Conference Youth Forum for Dialogue and Cooperation (ICYFDC), said that protests on this occasion -- which are annually held in countries around the world – this year will be the most massive since the "Justice for Khojaly" campaign was launched in 2009 for several reasons.

"The recognition of the Khojaly events as genocide by the parliaments of 51 [Organization of Islamic Cooperation] countries at ICYFDC’s initiative, this year’s functions overlapping with the 20th anniversary of the massacre, and more diaspora and foreign public organizations’ joining the campaign this year has contributed to the wider scale of the campaign," Iskandarov told a news conference Wednesday.

During the Karabakh war, on February 25-26, 1992, Armenian armed forces invaded Khojaly, a town located in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno Karabakh region. During the attack, 613 people, including underage children and women, were brutally killed and hundreds of others disabled. 1,275 people were captured, including 150 whose fate is still unknown, and 5,379 people were ousted from their homes.

Iskandarov said that since February 14, conferences, roundtables, art exhibitions, protests and public awareness activities on the Khojaly massacre have been held in numerous cities of the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, UAE, Ukraine and Turkey. He particularly emphasized the appeal sent to the Dutch parliament urging it to denounce the mass killings, in support of which 1 million signatures had been collected, as well as a conference in Budapest which focused on holding the culprits legally responsible for their actions.

Iskandarov also said activities aiming to convey the truth about the Khojaly massacre will be launched in other major cities of the world this week.

According to him, monuments commemorating the Khojaly and Srebrenica massacres will be unveiled in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sarajevo on Friday. The opening is to be attended by the initiator of the "Justice for Khojaly" campaign, Vice-President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, Leyla Aliyeva, as well as officials of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Next Tuesday, a film about the Khojaly events shot by European filmmakers will be presented, Iskandarov said.

In Romania, conferences on the Khojaly massacre are planned, while in Canada, representatives of the Azerbaijani community will hold protests outside the Canadian parliament and the Armenian embassy in the country. In Turkey, thousands will gather on a central square for a rally being held under the "We all are from Khojaly" slogan. France will host an international conference on the Khojaly genocide, and in Belgium protesters will demonstrate in front of the European Commission building. A number of events are planned in other countries as well.

Since the lengthy war with Armenia in the early 1990s, which displaced up to a million Azerbaijanis, about 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory, including Nagorno Karabakh and seven surrounding regions, has been under the occupation of Armenian armed forces. A fragile ceasefire was signed in 1994, but efforts by OSCE mediators representing the U.S., Russia and France have been largely fruitless so far.

This story is published by AzerNEWS Weekly under a project funded by the Foundation for State Assistance to the Development of the Media under the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.