US Azerbaijanis send letter of protest to PBS over the scheduled broadcasting of "A story of people in war and peace".
The letter reads:
Dear Mr. Getler and PBS Management,
As representatives of Azeri-American community and taxpayers, we are extremely disturbed to have learned that on October 24, 2010, the PBS is planning to air an Armenian-made documentary called "A Story of People in War and Peace". Authored by Vardan Hovhannisyan, this documentary about the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict around the Nagorno-Karabakh region would present a rather perverted interpretation of controversial history to the PBS viewer.
The documentary misrepresents the bitter Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as that of a freedom fight of Armenians in Karabakh against Azerbaijan. Yet the documentary omits the facts that from 1991 to 1994, Armenian forces invaded and occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions of Azerbaijan, ethnically cleansing over 800,000 Azeri civilians and leaving 30,000 dead. Since the ceasefire in 1994, Armenian forces occupy over 16% of internationally recognized (including by the United States) territory of Azerbaijan and hundreds of thousands of Azeris are unable to return to their homes.
Furthermore, speaking of war and peace, the documentary sidelines the worst war crime of the conflict to date. On the night of February 25-26, 1992, Armenian "freedom fighters" with support of Russian military personnel attacked the Azeri-populated town of Khojali, brutally torturing and massacring over 613 fleeing civilians among them 106 women and 83 children. Speaking of this act, then military commander and now president of Armenia, Serzh Sarkissian, said: "Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that [stereotype]." (Thomas de Waal, "Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war", NYU Press, 2003).
Since 1993, four UN Security Council resolutions (#822, 853, 874, 884) and several General Assembly resolutions condemned the Armenian occupation and called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, creating conditions for the return of refugees and a peaceful resolution of conflict. Yet driven by obsessive thoughts of ethnic superiority and intolerance, irredentist ideas of creating "Greater Armenia", historical revisionism and genocidal intentions against Azerbaijani heritage, Republic of Armenia and its "freedom fighters" in the occupied Karabakh are yet to listen to these international demands.
As PBS is a publicly funded service based on taxpayer contributions, we appeal for your common sense to cancel the broadcast of this documentary. We respect the freedom of information as a fundamental constitutional right, but airing of this documentary would be a severe disservice and an insult to intelligence of PBS viewer in favor of a limited interest group. This broadcast would serve as a disrespect to the memory of over 30,000 Azeris and Armenians who perished in this conflict and an added insult to hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani internally displaced people (IDPs) who are unable to return to their homes, many of them continuing to suffer in refugee camps.
Sincerely,
Board Directors of
Azerbaijani-American Council (AAC) and Azerbaijan Society of America (ASA).
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