NEWS.am posts the letter sent by Garen Nazarian, the Permanent Representative of Armenia to the UN, addressed to the Secretary-General concerning militaristic rhetoric and threats voiced by Azerbaijan.

“I am writing this letter in response to documents A/65/515-S/2010/531 and A/65/534-S/2010/547, circulated by Azerbaijan on 19 and 22 October 2010. The letters would have been discarded as repetitive withering passages of Azerbaijani anti-Armenian propaganda and apparent falsification of historic facts, if not for the recent loud and more frequent pronouncements of territorial claims against Armenia by the highest authorities of Azerbaijan accompanied by a new wave of militaristic rhetoric and threats.

As such, I would like to draw your attention to the following. Azerbaijan spares no means or effort to justify its aggressive stance through dissemination of animosity, racial hatred and prejudices against Armenians, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. It is appalling that even while making statements in front of children Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, is swinging swords bragging about Azerbaijani military might, existing weaponry and ammunitions, preparedness of the army and readiness to exhort to use of force: “… I have repeatedly said that present-day Armenia, the territory, called the Republic of Armenia on the map, is an ancient Azerbaijani land … Our children must know this, they should know that  present-day Armenia locates in ancient Azerbaijani lands …” (see News.az 16 October 2010, “On October 14 President Ilham Aliyev attended the opening of  new secondary school No. 1, Yevlakh”).

The Azerbaijani President makes such statements very often, the latest one being on 7 November 2010 (see official website of the President of Azerbaijan).

Such Azeri falsifications are endless, and the above-mentioned letters addressed to you completely misinterpret the statements made by the President of the Republic of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan. The statement has been published and is available on the official website of the President (www.president.am).

It comes as no surprise that such hateful statements being presented to the Azerbaijani public are being accompanied by the destruction of the Armenian cultural heritage and monuments located on the present territory of Azerbaijan. The annihilation of thousands of Armenian khachkars (cross-stones) in Nakhijevan, dating from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, is an apparent example of vandalism, when under the watchful eyes of the Azerbaijani leadership its soldiers bulldozed the world-known medieval Armenian cemetery and turned it into a military training ground with the sole purpose of erasing all traces or memories of Armenians.

Unfortunately, despite numerous calls made by Armenia, the fact of vandalism remains unaddressed by the United Nations system, and UNESCO in particular.

Being a member of the United Nations, Azerbaijan, with surprising persistence, acts in contravention to the purposes of the Charter of the United Nations, by threatening international peace and security, acting against the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and hampering regional cooperation. From the very outset, Azerbaijan adhered to the policy of solving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by force, carrying out ethnic cleansings in Armenian-populated areas of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, and unleashing military aggression with the participation of thousands of mercenaries from known international terrorist organizations against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh who had exercised their right to self-determination. Those directly responsible for those crimes are not only turned into heroes in Azerbaijan, but, at present, occupy high-ranking positions.

Continuing its policy of solving the Nagorno-Karabakh problem by force, Azerbaijan rejects the calls from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the OSCE participating States, the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries and other international organizations to reinforce the ceasefire regime, instigates provocations on the line of contact and attempts to hamper the negotiation process within the OSCE Minsk Group mandated with reaching a settlement to the conflict by the international community.

Resorting to such statements and actions, Azerbaijan tries to disguise its wrongdoings and evade responsibility for militarizing the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its consequences. If Azerbaijan is keen on achieving resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, it had better direct the energy and resources wasted on such groundless and provocative actions towards substantial rather than formal participation in the negotiation process within the OSCE Minsk Group.

I should be grateful if you would have the present letter circulated as a document of the General Assembly, under agenda items 33, 34, 39, 66 and 75, and the Security Council.”