/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Thousands of Armenians gathered at Yerevan’s Republic Square on Tuesday, on the Day of Commemoration of Victims of Sumgait Pogroms, to protest against the anti-Armenians policies of Azerbaijan. The participants adopted a statement addressed to the international community. The statement specifically notes that for millennia, the indigenous Armenian population of Karabakh has been creating innumerable masterpieces of small and large-scale pagan and Christian architecture and cultural monuments on the territory of its motherland. Utilizing official atheistic ideology, the leadership of the Soviet Azerbaijan for decades was on a regular basis destroying thousands of Armenian historical and cultural monuments. Making use of the officially adopted policy of mass repression in the Soviet Union, party bosses of Azerbaijan were compiling lists of victims, mainly, from the Armenian population of Azerbaijan. In the period right after the World War II and up to the collapse of the USSR, Azerbaijan used all iniquitous means to expel the indigenous Armenian population. At the beginning of the perestroika, there were no Armenians in once Armenian Nakhichevan! The same fate was awaiting the Armenians of Karabakh.

In the end of 1991, Baku started full-scale military actions in Karabakh. Azeri authorities turned Shushi, Khojalu, Aghdam and other towns into menacing pillboxes, the liquidation of which became a matter of life and death for the people of Karabakh. The Armenians won this war against all odds, and paid for their freedom with thousands of lives. The Armenians were doomed to win; the alternative would have been death. Peace, which has been maintained in the region for the last twelve years, is guaranteed only by the Armenian regular army of Karabakh. Instead of looking for the ways to resolve the conflict, all these years Baku has been waging an unprecedented war, which according the international conventions is defined as xenophobia: hatred toward anything alien, and in this case, anything Armenian.

link: Full text of the statement