"The National" authoritative periodical published the article of the President of the Republic of Armenia Armen Sarkissian. Below is an excerpt from the publication.
On September 30, I drafted a special letter to several world leaders to describe to them the situation in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region of the Caucasus inhabited predominately by ethnic Armenians. It has been attacked aggressively by Azerbaijan, with the full support of Turkey. I could hardly anticipate the scope of the aggression and the lack of humanity in the behaviour of their forces. Then and even now, the reality on the ground that my fellow Armenians are experiencing is more than alarming, and risks igniting further escalation and insecurity in the region and even beyond.
Months and even years before the military aggression by Azerbaijan on September 27, the Azerbaijani leadership was using very harsh, militaristic rhetoric and overtly voicing, at the highest levels of government, its intentions to resolve the conflict through a fully fledged war. Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia have been facing similar attempts for more than 25 years since a ceasefire was established after the first Karabakh war in 1994. Ever since then, the rhetoric and the destructive behaviour of Azerbaijan has never faded.
Nagorno-Karabakh – or Artsakh, as we call it in Armenia – has always been populated overwhelmingly by Armenians. It has never been a voluntary part of independent Azerbaijan. In 1921, Nagorno-Karabakh was given as a gift by Russia under Josef Stalin to Soviet Azerbaijan, which was not an independent state, but a part of the Soviet Union.
Following decades of continued discrimination, in 1987 and 1988 the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh began to raise their voices to re-join with Armenia. They conducted peaceful demonstrations and signed petitions. At the same time, ethnically motivated persecutions against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan mounted. There were pogroms and ethnic cleansing campaigns in a number of Azerbaijani cities.
During the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh declared their independence earlier than Azerbaijan. In fact, Azerbaijan declared its own independence from the Soviet Union in a separate process, without Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite this and other facts that, in Armenia’s view, make Azerbaijan’s claims baseless in the context of the international law, the government in Baku seeks has, for about 30 years, sought to oppress with military means the right of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh (or the Republic of Artsakh) to live in their homeland. It pursues a policy of forcibly capturing lands, cleansing them of their native inhabitants and heritage and ignoring the basic, fundamental rights.
