ICRC reveals names of missing people in Karabakh war

/By AzerNews/

By Sara Rajabova

The Karabakh War erupting after Armenia’s territorial claims against Azerbaijan killed over 20,000 Azerbaijanis and injured almost 100,000, while 50,000 were disabled. Still, fate of more than 4000 Azerbaijanis remains uncertain.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has today unveiled an updated list of names of 4,496 missing people, registered by its Baku and Yerevan offices and by its mission in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

The updated list was presented to the parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the ICRC said in a message on December 15.

For more than two decades Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a state of war following Yerevan’s aggression, ethnic cleansing policy and illegal territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Armenia occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions in a brutal war in the early 1990s.

Ignoring the long-lasting efforts of international organizations and Azerbaijan’s repeated calls for peaceful solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenia still holds the Azerbaijani lands under the occupation.

The ICRC stated that although over 20 years have passed since the signing of a ceasefire agreement, there is still no information about the fate of the missing people.

Azerbaijan’s State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People has registered 4,016 Azerbaijani citizens as missing persons. The people, who are being searched for today, have gone missing in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions of Azerbaijan.

While Baku is open to render all information about the missing people, Armenia with all efforts ignores the calls on providing information about the Azerbaijani citizens in Armenian captivity and missing people during the Karabakh war. The majority of those captured during the hostilities are children, elderly people and women.

The ICRC presented the previous list of names of the people missing during the conflict in 2004. Under international humanitarian law, parties to a conflict should make every effort to clarify the fate of missing people.

However, Armenia ignores international norms and rules avoiding to give information about the missing persons, mass graves and the people who can give testimony in connection with captives and hostages taken during the conflict.

The available data shows that Armenians have grossly violated the rules and provisions of the conventions on captives and hostages. They subjected hostages to brutal forms of tortures and forced them into hard labor.

Armenian generals had even kept some hostages in their own homes, which is a violation of the international law.