By Aris Ghazinyan
ArmenianNow Reporter
A United Nations committee has recommended that Azerbaijan pay compensation to Armenians who were driven from their homes as a result of the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) published a report “On Azerbaijan’s compliance with the points of the International Treaty on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”.
Publication of this document on November 26 was a total surprise for official Baku and came just days after the UN indefinitely postponed discussion of an Azeri resolution on “the situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan” in which special attention was paid to the return of Azeri refugees to the seven districts controlled by Nagorno Karabakh’s army.
Some political analysts characterized the succession of events as a “boomerang effect” for Azerbaijan after the United States, France and Russia warned that discussion of Baku’s draft resolution at the UN would jeopardize the work of the OSCE’s Minsk Group in seeking a solution to the Karabakh issue.
The committee, as one of the official expert structures of the UN, recommends in its report that the authorities of Azerbaijan should guarantee payment of compensation or alternative homes to Armenians and representatives of other ethnic minorities whose apartments have been taken over by Azeri refugees. According to a number of Armenian analysts, this recommendation is a very important nuance that has not been considered for a long time.
“The 170,000 Azeris who lived in Armenia up until 1989 migrated from the republic in conditions totally different from those in which 300,000 Armenians were driven out of Azerbaijan,” says Alexander Manasyan, an expert on Nagorno Karabakh and professor at Yerevan State University.
“Armenians left all their property in Azerbaijan, including tens of thousands of completely furnished apartments, as they had no possibility to sell them. As to the Azeris who lived in Armenia, they got a good bargain when selling their houses, cattle and other property – they were residents of rural areas and even received monetary compensation from the Government of Armenia.
“There are precise statistics on this account – 80,000 Azeris had an opportunity to sell their houses or exchange them with Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, and the same number of people received compensation after the Spitak earthquake.”
In the opinion of Armenian political analysts, the report’s significance comes in its establishment of the incomparability of the “starting conditions” of the two sets of refugees. It also promotes a more accurate approach to the true number of refugees.
“The Decree “On the resolution of problems of settlement of Azeris expelled from their historical territories in Armenia as a result of the ethnic cleansing committed by Armenian nationalists” signed by the former president of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev in 2001 is remarkable in this aspect,” says Vardan Mkhitaryan, of the Faculty of the History of Armenia at Yerevan State University.
“It is mentioned in the Decree that ‘since 1987, more than 250,000 of our compatriots have been expelled stage by stage from their native homes and became refugees’. We shall not dwell on the reliability of Aliyev’s statistics; however authorities in Baku speak today about a million refugees. It is obvious that this is simply impossible.”
The UN Committee’s report also expresses concern over the absence of an independent judicial system in Azerbaijan in the matter of protecting human rights. It recommends the Azeri government “to take steps to protect economic, social and cultural rights without any discrimination”.
“It is also a very important point that, while there is a local Azeri radio broadcast in the capital of Nagorno Karabakh today and its announcer is an Azeri woman living in Stepanakert, the citizens with Christian names are being persecuted in Baku,” says Vardan Mkhitaryan.
Official Baku has not yet responded to the UN Committee’s recommendations, but analysts believe it has still had an effect on non-governmental organizations operating in Azerbaijan. In particular, the Forum-18 human rights organization has disseminated a statement harshly criticizing the Azeri authorities for their refusal to issue birth certificates to children with Christian names.
In this regard, the Baku “Ekho” newspaper published an article entitled “The New Report with Old Data or the Case of Luka Eivazov” in which the case of 18-month-old Luka Eivazov from the village of Alibad of the Zakataly region of Azerbaijan is cited as an example.
“We have letters from villagers and 98 percent object to Christian names being registered,” says an employee of the registry service of Alibad village, Aybeniz Kalashova, in this regard.
“Luka is not an Azeri name and it is unlikely to have been chosen by the child’s parents. Most likely it has been chosen by some sect,” says a representative of the Ministry of Justice of Azerbaijan, Mehman Sultanov.
Forum-18, in its turn, says that “the child’s parents are Baptists and this is the last in a whole series of incidents of official refusals to register Christian names”. Meanwhile, the organization reports, “children cannot be taken to kindergartens, cannot go to school, get medical aid, or go abroad without birth certificates”.
Mkhitaryan comments: “In this case, it is only remarkable that the human rights organization operating in Azerbaijan issued this text immediately after the report published by the ECOSOC.
The link between these two events is obvious. It only remains to wait for the official reaction to the report.”
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