Azerbaijan marked June 20, World Refugee Day, with an international effort to boost awareness about the life and human rights of more than one million of its own.
"There is one refugee per hundred people when comparing the number of the world's population with the number of refugees,” Azerbaijan’s Vice Premier Ali Ahmadov said in his remarks made at the international conference held in Baku.
Azerbaijan has one of the highest ratios of IDPs per person. Nearly 1.2 million out of the country's ten million overall population are IDPs and refugees, meant to be 12 IDPs per 100 people.
“This shows the seriousness of the problem of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Azerbaijan. It is obvious that injustice prevails in the world, which led to the problem of refugees and IDPs,” Ahmadov said.
The United Nations adopted the Refugee Convention in 1951 and its relevant Protocol in 1967 to help protect refugees, considered one of the most vulnerable populations in the world. According to UN standards, refugees should get, at a minimum, the same standards of treatment received by other foreign nationals in a given country and, in many cases, the same treatment as nationals.
Protecting those who are forced to flee, and supporting the countries that shelter them, have been called “shared international responsibilities” in the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is expected to propose a Global Compact on Refugees as part of the New York declaration, in its annual report to the General Assembly in September.
“As a result of Armenia’s military aggression and occupation, Azerbaijan has one of the largest internally displaced population per capita in the world,” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry’s Spokesperson Hikmat Hajiyev said in a written statement issued at the meeting in Baku.
“Armenia, in blatant violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, unleashed a war against Azerbaijan and occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions of Azerbaijan, and conducted ethnic cleansing against more than million Azerbaijanis in seized lands and in the territory of Armenia. Currently, the number of IDPs and refugees exceeds 1.2 million, as a result of the increase of the displaced population.”
Forced displacement of Azerbaijanis from their homeland occurred during a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which belongs to Azerbaijan and is recognized both historically and internationally as part of Azerbaijan. The USSR’s degradation in the late 1980s and early 1990s bolstered Armenia's leadership to kick off an all-out military campaign against its eastern neighbor Azerbaijan in 1991, in order to gain control of Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region, where ethnic Armenians had been living alongside indigenous Azerbaijanis.
The war lasted until 1994 and ultimately resulted in Armenia occupying more than 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territories – the Nagorno-Karabakh region, plus seven adjacent districts. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed during the fighting; nearly one million were displaced, while another 4,000 were taken captive, held hostage, or went missing.
Despite a formal ceasefire going into effect in 1994, Armenia continues to occupy the region and the surrounding districts, in what is blatant violation of the four UN Security Council resolutions passed to end the conflict peacefully.
IDPs in Azerbaijan today live in settlement towns in various regions throughout the country. The central government in Baku provides all necessary assistance to residents through various programs and state-funded projects. Over $5.2 billion has been allocated since 1994, in an attempt to help IDPs improve their living conditions.
In 2010, the government launched the “Great Return Program,” addressing the issue of rebuilding life in the occupied regions following their liberation. Within the program more than fifty families returned to Jojug Marjanli village of the occupied Jabrayil region, which was freed from Armenia’s troops in 2016 as a result of the deadliest resumption of war since the 1994 ceasefire.
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