Urge elected officials to aid refugees

Every year, on June 20, the United Nations marks World Refugee Day. This day represents a global call for action, promoting engagement in local and governmental levels to raise awareness of the plight of millions of forcibly displaced people.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of people uprooted by war, conflicts, ethnic strife and human-rights violations has been soaring. According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, by 2009, some 40 million people worldwide had been forced to flee their homes by violence, war and persecution. Many conflicts cause mass deportation. Innocent people flee for years without finding a durable solution. A case in point is the long-lasting Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the South Caucasus region, where some 16 percent of Azerbaijan has been occupied by neighboring Armenia. This violent conflict caused nearly 1 million humiliated and abused ethnic Azeri, Kurdish and other refugees from Armenia and internally displaced people — or IDPs — from Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions of Azerbaijan, to flee their homes. This action by Armenian armed forces against Azerbaijani civilians was the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the region.

According to the U.S. Refugee Committee's report in 2000 on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, "more than 568,000 persons from western regions of Azerbaijan under Armenian occupation since 1993, including 42,072 from Nagorno-Karabakh, remained displaced within the country."

As a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenian aggression caused the Azerbaijani economy to lose billions of dollars, the devastation of Azerbaijani cultural heritage, physical destruction of homes, as well as moral and material damage to Azerbaijani refugees and IDPs, for whom the status of "refugee" has become a lifestyle.

Every eighth person in Azerbaijan has "refugee" or "internally displaced person" status — one of the highest rates for any country in the world.

There are other similar cases around the world where injustices have occurred. To help all these refugees and IDPs, and to at least minimize the occurrences of such injustices in the future, we are calling upon our elected officials to exert pressure on perpetrator nations to:

1. Require compliance with all relevant United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

2. Supply any U.S. military, security, economic and technical aid only after the State Department has certified that perpetrator nations have ceased occupation and withdrawn their occupying forces from the victim nations, such as Azerbaijan.

3. Stop all direct U.S. aid to such separatist authorities as those in Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Kanan Mammadov, an activist for refugees, lives in Sandy.