“State-Sponsored Hatred Against Armenians Must Be Eliminated”: Ruzanna Avagimyan at the OSCE

On October 8, at the OSCE ODIHR Human Dimension Conference in Warsaw, Ruzanna Avagimyan, lawyer and attorney at the Union of Informed Citizens NGO, delivered a statement addressing state-sponsored hostility toward Armenians in Azerbaijan, dehumanization, and their consequences.

In her remarks, Avagimyan stressed that lasting peace is impossible without addressing anti-Armenian hatred, preventing the reproduction of hostility in educational materials, and ensuring accountability for officials who incite ethnic hatred.

The full text of Ruzanna Avagimyan’s statement is provided below.

“Mr Moderator, dear colleagues,

Today, we discuss whether people can live in dignity and safety without their ethnic identity making them a target. For Armenians facing Azerbaijan’s state-sponsored hostility, this is a question of survival.

While Azerbaijan speaks of peace, a recent analysis published by the Carnegie Endowment describes how its history textbooks still portray Armenians as a hostile people, relocated onto Azerbaijani land. Teaching the next generation to regard Armenians with hostility undermines the very peace that generation is expected to build.

An Armenian child has a name, a family, a future. Reducing that child to an inherited enemy makes their suffering easier to dismiss and violence against them easier to accept.

The scale of anti-Armenian hostility is laid bare by the exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh. After months of blockade that deprived the population of food, medicine and other essentials, with gas and electricity cuts, also disrupting heating in winter, Azerbaijan launched its September 2023 military offensive, forcing more than 100,000 Armenians to flee. The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was uprooted from its ancestral homeland, seeing no prospect of safety under Azerbaijani rule.

The depth of state-sponsored hatred directed at Armenians in Azerbaijan has no parallel in the OSCE region. What does Azerbaijan’s proclaimed tolerance mean when survival for an entire population means an exodus from its home?

This is why dehumanization cannot be dismissed as rhetoric. Its consequences are measured in human lives.

In 2021, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to prevent incitement and promotion of racial hatred against Armenians, including by its officials and public institutions.

I call on participating States to insist on concrete implementation: remove anti-Armenian prejudice from educational materials; ensure accountability for officials who incite ethnic hatred; and support independent monitoring of these commitments.

Lasting peace demands an education that rejects hatred, public discourse that refuses to normalize it, and equal respect for human dignity regardless of ethnicity.

Thank you”.