June 20 is the day the world commemorates the strength, courage, and perseverance of millions of refugees.
UN General Assembly adopted the resolution in 2000 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Since 2001, June 20 is celebrated as the World Refugee Day.
According to the UN, today there are about 20 million refugees and almost 40 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), while half of all refugees are children under the age of 18.
Azerbaijan is one of those countries that 20 percent of its territory is still under occupation and there are more than a million refugees and IDPs as a result of Armenian aggression.
In the late 1980s, as it was already clear that the Soviet Union was in its twilight, some nations decided to take advantage of what was a precarious geopolitical situation, including neighbouring Armenia, which was home to nearly 250,000 Azerbaijanis at that time. As the USSR was on the verge of collapse, Yerevan decided to expel the Azerbaijani population from the country.
Similar expropriations took place in 1905-1906 and 1918-1920 as a result of Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes. In the 1940s, nearly 100,000 Azerbaijanis were relocated from Armenia to the Kur-Araz lowland in Azerbaijan, following the orders of Joseph Stalin, who was at the time the leader of the Soviet Union.
In November 1987, according to eyewitnesses, the first four buses loaded with Azerbaijani refugees from the Armenian region of Kafan arrived in Baku, mostly with women, children and the elderly, who were severely beaten. Meanwhile, ethnic cleansing in Armenia reached its peak, as regions densely populated by Azerbaijanis were subjected to violence.
The winter of 1988-1989 is considered the worst period during what was some of the worst ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis in modern history. Tens of thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes and property, and pass through mountains to escape to Azerbaijan. December of 1988 became the final stage of expunging the Azerbaijanis from Armenia, a country that became a mono-ethnic state as a result of its policy.
In the wake of the ethnic cleansing policy against Azerbaijanis, Armenia attacked to the western territories of Azerbaijan when the USSR collapsed. As a result of the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, more than 750,000 citizens became IDPs in the 1990s.
UN Security Council and PACE resolutions demanding “withdrawal of all Armenian military forces from occupied territories of Azerbaijan” are still unfulfilled by Armenia.
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