The recent murder of 65-year-old Seyran Sargsyan, a resident of the town of Chartar in Martuni region of Artsakh, became another defiantly cynical crime of Azerbaijan against the peaceful population of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Recall that according to the message Prosecutor General’s Office & Republic of Artsakh, “On December 3, at about 13.00, in the town of “Gurusu” in the Chartar community, a group of Azerbaijani servicemen, under the threat of weapons and with the use of violence, seized Seyran Smbatovich Sargsyan, who was engaged in animal husbandry. The man was transported to a military post on the Kohak hill, where he was brutally killed out of ethnic hatred.
Another, in fact, fascist act of the Azerbaijani side, actually became a consequence of impunity for the previous major provocations – the murder (in the presence of a peacekeeper!) on October 9 of a tractor driver during agricultural work in the Martakert region and the shooting on November 8 of a group of workers repairing a water pipeline supplying a peacekeeping post near the town of Shushi, as a result of which a 22-year-old resident of Shusha died. Stepanakert, three were injured of varying severity.
Official Baku does not even hide its goal – to achieve a complete exodus of Armenians from their native Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). This is precisely what the systematic killings of civilians in broad daylight are aimed at.
Alas, we have to reiterate that the ineradicable predatory instincts of nomads to this day make the representatives of the newly-born nation behave like the most real barbarians and vandals – not only to kill people unlike themselves, but also to destroy centuries-old spiritual and historical monuments temporarily the occupied territories of Artsakh, trying to erase the thousand-year-old Christian Armenian trace there and “substantiate” the claims to these ancient lands of their 100-year-old state-like formation, the artificiality of which even stones cry out.
The ongoing criminal actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces are seriously disrupting the normal life of residents of border settlements. Openly and brazenly challenging the peacekeepers, the Azerbaijani military terrorize the peaceful Armenian population near the demarcation line. All this testifies to the falsity of the peace-loving statements of Baku and Ankara. What kind of peace and the establishment of communications can be talked about when a peaceful resident of Artsakh, a worker, is directly adjacent to an armed Azerbaijanian, shooting at him and stealing his cattle. What kind of cohabitation can we talk about when the Azerbaijani authorities instill in children from the cradle an animal hatred of Armenians …
In reality, ethnic and religious propaganda of Armenian hatred in the neighboring country only intensifies, completely revealing the true purpose of the criminal regimes in Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Different generations of Artsakh people paid dearly and are still paying for upholding their primordial right to live freely in their native land. More On March 23, 1920, in the Karabakh city of Shushi, a massacre of the Armenian civilian population was carried out, organized and carried out by the so-called. Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920). Much has been written about the atrocities of the Caucasian Tatars (later called Azerbaijanis), and we will not repeat ourselves. Let us only note that the consequences of these fanatics were very figuratively described in his poem “The Phaetonist” Osip Mandelstam, who tasted “fears that are natural to the soul” in a city torn apart by predators with “forty thousand dead windows.” and the burning of the once prosperous city and important cultural center of Transcaucasia were a continuation of the Turkish policy of Armenocide and pursued a specific goal – the expulsion of the indigenous population from the city and the region as a whole and the establishment of the bloody domination of an alien element in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The successor of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic – the present Azerbaijan Republic, among other things, also inherited the criminal policy of its predecessor. Evidence of this is the pogroms and the forced displacement of the Armenians of Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s (massacres in Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, etc.), the blockade, shelling and bombing of peaceful Karabakh cities and villages, and then the unleashing of a large-scale wars against self-determined Nagorno-Karabakh (NKR) in 1991-1994. Regular gross violations by Azerbaijan of the open-ended ceasefire agreement concluded in May 1994 resulted in a bloody “four-day war” in April 2016. The whole world then was horrified by the Sabbath of a large group of Azerbaijanis with the severed head of an Armenian soldier of Yezidi origin, the reprisals in the “Ishilov” style over the helpless old men of the Azerbaijani military who had penetrated the Talish village of the Martakert region of the republic at night. All this was painfully reminiscent of the cruel reprisals of Azerbaijani askers against women, children and old people in the village of Maraga in the Martakert region of NKR in April 1992. “They are not of the human race,” – this is how the Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords of the British Parliament Baroness Caroline Cox described the murderers of civilians, having visited the site of the massacre.
To this day, the Azerbaijani side mocks living and dead people, cynically ignoring all civilizational and human norms.
Last year’s 44-day war against Artsakh, now with the open intervention of Turkey and the participation of thousands of terrorist mercenaries on the side of Azerbaijan, was distinguished by an even greater ferocity of the enemy, both in terms of the methods of warfare and the weapons used, so and atrocities against the civilian population, prisoners of war, hostages and the wounded. The videos circulated in the media of the cruel massacres of Armenian prisoners and, on the contrary, the treatment of an Azerbaijani wounded prisoner of war in Artsakh are yet another confirmation of the gigantic civilizational abyss between Artsakh and Azerbaijan. However, what could be expected from a society that has mutants like Ramil Safarov as national heroes? ..
Today, as a result of last year’s unprecedented aggression by Azerbaijan, Turkey and international terrorism against small Artsakh, the city of Shushi, the historical cultural center of the local Armenians, is reoccupied and, like thirty years ago, before its liberation in May 1992 by an Armenian soldier, it again turns to the hornet’s nest, from where the whole Artsakh is terrorized. Obviously, the Baku regime will make every effort to completely destroy the Christian heritage of Shushi, as it was done, for example, in the once Armenian Nakhichevan …
The lack of a proper political and legal assessment on the part of the international community of the continuing crimes against humanity unleashes hands to the Azerbaijani-Turkish tandem. The Baku regime, more and more revealing its fascist appearance, expects that atrocities in the style of notorious terrorists against the civilian population will help it break the spirit of the Artsakh people. But the Artsakh people are not going to leave their land. They will continue to fight to live and raise their children in accordance with national customs, covenants and the spirit of their ancestors.
The world must realize once and for all that the Karabakh conflict is not a territorial dispute, but the struggle of the Karabakh Armenians for survival on their ancient land. The sworn enemy does not differentiate between military and peaceful goals, trying to destroy everything living and inanimate as much as possible. The fascist tandem Erdogan-Aliyev does not think about a political solution to the Karabakh problem, but dreams of expelling the Armenian population of the region and taking possession of the territory of his residence.
At the same time, any sane person understands perfectly well that Artsakh cannot have a place in the medieval family sultanate, where representatives of national minorities are humiliated and oppressed with impunity and where Armenians are pathologically hated.
Artsakh today is waging an unequal struggle not only for its survival, but also, figuratively speaking, for the salvation of world civilization and universal values. The heroic defense of the Artsakh people symbolizes the struggle between good and world evil. And the entire civilized world must side with this struggle …
Ashot Beglaryan, Stepanakert
