Zahid Jafarov: Deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia - genocide

As a result of the genocide committed under the guise of deportation, Armenians committed ethnic cleansing and created a mono-ethnic state in Armenia, Zahid Jafarov, a member of the board of the Western Azerbaijan Community (WAC) and chairman of the community's legal commission, told journalists, Report informs.

He noted that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's speech at the event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) served as a guide for the WAC: "This speech demonstrated that the return (of Azerbaijanis) to Western Azerbaijan is one of the priorities of the Azerbaijani state. What was committed (in the territory of present-day Armenia) against Western Azerbaijanis should be called genocide, since all these actions were aimed at ethnic cleansing."

Jafarov emphasized that Azerbaijanis were not a small ethnic group living in Western Azerbaijan: "We were residents of this territory with a distinct national identity. The genocide committed by the Armenians included not only physical but also moral annihilation. The destruction of national identity is more dangerous than physical annihilation. The destruction of Azerbaijani cultural heritage sites was nothing less than cultural genocide. All the crimes reflected in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were committed by Armenians against Azerbaijanis."