HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH HELSINKI (Formerly)

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MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION, TEL and FAX(7095)265-4448
MARCH 2, 1994
PRESIDENT LEVON TER-PETROSSIAN
MARSHAL BAGRAMIAN PROSPECT, 26
375019 YEREVAN
BY FAX:52-15-81

DEAR PRESIDENT TER-PETROSSIAN,

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH\HELSINKI (Formerly Helsinki Watch) is the largest human rights organisation in the United States. We have closely followed the Armenian massacre of the Azeri people in Nagorno Karabakh, and have published two reports on violations of the Geneva Conventions.

I am writing you to express our organisation's deep concern about the deaths of Azerbaijani prisoners of war in Armenia. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the following men were shot to death in an Armenian detention camp in Sritak in late January or early February:

1. Rustam Ramazan-oglu Agaev,(birthdate unknown), from Masalin District

2. Elman Mamed-oglu Akhmedov, b. 1961, from Yevlakh District

3. Elshan Hussein-oglu Akhmedov, b.1974, from Saatlin District

4. Bakhram AKIF-oglu Giiasov,b. 1972, from Siazan

5. FAIG Gabil-oglu Guliev, b.1969, from Baku

6. Enver Asker-oglu Jafarov, b.1972, from Sumgait

7. Eldar Shahbaba-oglu Mamedov, b.1966, from Baku

8. Girshad Kniaz-oglu Mamedov, b.1974 from Yevlakh

I thank you for your attention to this matter and look forward to learning the results of the investigation.

Yours sincerely,

Jeri Laber
Executive Director

Cebbar Leygara, Kurdish Leader - October 13, 1992

"Today's ethnic cleansing policies by the Serbians against Croatians and Muslims of Yugoslavia, as well as the Soviet Republic of Armenia's against the Muslim population of neighboring Azerbaijan, are really no different in their aspirations than the genocide perpetrated by the Armenian Government 78 years ago against the Turkish and Kurdish Muslims and Sephardic Jews living in these lands."

THE COMMITTEE FOR PEOPLE'S HELP TO KARABAKH (OF THE) ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE AZERBAIJAN SSR - 1988

An Appeal to Mankind

During the last three years Azerbaijan and its multinational population are vainly fighting for justice within the limits of the Soviet Union. All humanitarian, constitutional human rights guaranteed by the UN Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Helsinki Agreements, Human Problems International Forums, documents signed by the Soviet Union - all of them are violated.

The USSR's President, government bodies do not defend Azerbaijan though they are all empowered to take necessary measures to guarantee life and peace.

The 240,000 strong army of Armenian terrorists with Moscow's tacit consent wages an undeclared war of annihilation against Azerbaijan. As a result, a part of Azerbaijan has been occupied and annexed, thousands of people killed, thousands wounded.

Some 400,000 Azerbaijanis have been brutally and inhumanly deported from the Armenian SSR, their historical homeland. Together with them 64,000 Russians and 62,000 Kurds have also been driven out, a part of them now settled in Azerbaijan. Some 80,000 Turkish-Meskhetians, Lezghins and representatives of other Caucasian nationalities who escaped from the Central Asia where the President and government bodies did not guarantee them the life and peace also suffered from these deportations.

One of the scandalous vandalisms directed not only against Azerbaijan science but the world civilization as well is the Armenian extremists' destruction of the Karabakh scientific experimental base of The Institute of Genetics and Selection of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR.

We beg you for humanitarian help and political assistance, for the honour and dignity of 7 million Azerbaijanis are violated, its territory, culture and history are trampled, its people are shot. There is persistent negative image of Azerbaijanians abroad, and this defamation is spread over the whole world by Soviet mass media, Armenian lobby in the USSR and the United States.

We are for a united, indivisible, sovereign Azerbaijan, we are for a common Caucasian home proclaimed in 1918 by one of the founding fathers of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic - Muhammed Emin Rasulzade.

But all these goals and expectations are trampled upon the Soviet leadership in favour of the Armenian expansionists encouraged by Moscow and intended to create a new '1,000 Year Reich' - the 'Great Armenia' - by annexing the neighboring lands.

The world public opinion shed tears to save the whales, suffers for penguins dying out in the Antarctic Continent.

But what about the lives of seven million human beings? If these people are Muslims, does it mean that they are less valuable? Can people be discriminated by their colour of skin or religion, by their residence or other attributes?