BAKU, Azerbaijan: Thousands of people affiliated with various civil society organizations have joined a petition, urging Armenia to release the location of landmines in liberated territories of Azerbaijan so that human casualties could be averted.
The International Eurasia Press Fund (IEPF) has initiated the petition, and it has been filed on the world-famous website www.change.org.
“The petition has aroused great interest in the international arena. The petition received 172,017 views. 23,227 people have shared the petition so far. In total, more than 500 comments have been written, all of which supported the legitimate demand of Azerbaijan,” the IEPF President Umud Mirzayev said.
“To date, 15,000 people have joined the petition. The petition has been joined not only in Azerbaijan but also in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia, Pakistan, Canada, the United States, Hungary, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia, Germany, Turkey, Australia, Singapore, Burma, and even South Africa and Kenya,” Umud Mirzayev said.
The petition calls for a protest against the nearly 30-year occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions of Azerbaijan, as well as the serious mining of those territories and the refusal of Armenia to provide maps of mined areas after Armenian troops withdrew in the post-conflict period.
“Armenia knows where the mines have been laid but refuses to disseminate this information under various pretexts,” it says.
It says that since the end of the conflict, 20 Azerbaijani citizens including 14 civilians have lost their lives from mine explosions while 85 citizens including 16 civilians have been seriously wounded.
“The petition is a joint appeal of many people on www.change.org to direct the world community, international organizations, and media to the mine problem facing Azerbaijan. Thanks to our unity, this statistic, which is growing every minute, brings us closer to our goal,” Umud Mirzayev emphasized.
