Artsakh Human Rights Defender Gegham Stepanyan issued a statement saying that due to the attacks of Azerbaijani troops in the summer of 1992, more than 20,000 Armenians in Shahumyan region of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic were forced to flee their homes, lost everything, faced many problems related to poverty, unemployment, integration, and widespread violations of their rights.
“The actions taken against the Armenians of Shahumyan region were a real example of ethnic cleansing, for which the Azerbaijani authorities were not held accountable.
“If there is even one Armenian left in Karabakh by October 1992, the people of Azerbaijan can hang me in the central square of Baku,” the Azerbaijani leader promised his people.
The expulsion of the Armenian population from the region on the basis of nationality, religion and ethnicity was not clearly assessed by the international community, and the issue of restoring their violated rights was not clearly fixed on the agenda. Many of the people who lost their homes were not recognized as refugees or vulnerable by the relevant international organizations and hence they did not receive support from the international community. While the Azerbaijani refugees were receiving huge international support, the Armenians were deprived of it.
Even today, when 40,000 people in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) are left homeless due to the Azerbaijani aggression against the people of Artsakh in the fall of 2020, when Artsakh needs the support of the international community to meet the needs of these people and create conditions for their subsistence, international organizations are indifferent conditioning their behavior with the international legal status of Artsakh.
This is a reprehensible indifference, and it does not come from the principle of universality of human rights protection.
The international community must take a clear position, and take steps to provide legal and political assessments of the crimes committed against the people of Artsakh, and carry out further work on socio-economic compensation,” Gegham Stepanyan said in a statement.
