UN Secretariat circulates letter from West Azerbaijan Community as official document

The UN Secretariat circulated this appeal as an official UN document under the agenda items of the Security Council, General Assembly, as well as the UN Economic and Social Council.

As previously reported, the Community of West Azerbaijan sent a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres with a request to send a UN mission to Armenia to help launch a process for the peaceful, safe and dignified return of Azerbaijanis exiled from Armenia, the press service of the community told Azertag.

In the letter, the community asked to organize a special interagency UN mission with a mandate of security, repatriation, reintegration, property rights and cultural heritage. The dissemination of this appeal as a UN document offers the main UN bodies and qualified structures, as well as relevant departments of the Secretariat the opportunity to begin concrete work on issues related to West Azerbaijan and structural dialogue with the Community of West Azerbaijan.

The community believes that ensuring the right of return will be an important contribution to achieving the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights and other fundamental human rights documents, as well as to the process of establishing lasting peace in the region.

To recap, several mass deportations of Azerbaijanis from Armenia occurred throughout the twentieth century, and have been characterised as acts of forced relocation and ethnic cleansing.

Prior to the October Revolution in 1918, Azerbaijanis made up about 43 per cent of Yerevan's population. Several times during the twentieth century, the Azerbaijani community was compelled to leave the territory of the First Republic of Armenia and afterwards the Armenian SSR.

In 1948, around 100,000 Azerbaijanis were deported from the Armenian SSR as a result of Stalin's policy. Their homes were afterwards occupied by Armenian repatriates who had arrived in the Soviet Union from other countries.

Azerbaijanis lived in the Armenian SSR until the commencement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1988-89 when all Azerbaijanis in Armenia were expelled.