BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 11. Azerbaijan, unfortunately, is one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world, Trend reports.
More than 98,000 hectares have been cleared today.
Since the end of the second Karabakh war, 307 persons have been harmed by mines in Azerbaijani territory that has been freed from occupation. Additionally, 251 (101 civilians) of them were hurt, and 56 (43 civilians) of them were killed. Following the local anti-terrorist actions, a sad new fact came to light. The surviving members of the Armenian military have placed at least 500,000 additional mines on Azerbaijani soil.
Mines pose a severe threat to the security of Azerbaijanis by delaying the process of resettling them in their ancestral territories. Along with Azerbaijan, some nations experience this issue. Vietnam, Angola, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic are also among the nations with the highest mine contamination rates.
The scale of the mine threat and its consequences make it necessary to solve this problem at the global level. A group of foreign NGOs and civil society activists have launched a petition entitled "Global Initiative for a World without Mines", and this is a very important step to solve the problem.
The petition was posted on the Jotform international platform as part of the international campaign "World for Peace in the Caucasus". The petition stated that mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) pose a serious threat to the health, life, and safety of the civilian population. Mines continue to kill and maim people even after the end of conflicts.
According to the campaign's creators, even after the second Karabakh war in 2020, Armenia has continued to mine Azerbaijani territory. Only after Azerbaijan constructed a border checkpoint on the Lachin route was the situation brought under control.
The petition's authors are outraged that Azerbaijan learned that the remnants of the Armenian military forces have planted at least 500,000 new mines along the 480-kilometer line as a result of local anti-terrorist operations conducted on September 19–20 of this year. They demand that Armenia give Azerbaijan maps of recently planted mines right away.
Therefore, the world community should appeal to Armenia. Regrettably, Azerbaijani society is also observing double standards and the approval of several resolutions and remarks that are critical of Azerbaijan. The campaign's creators believe that the world has forgotten what justice really is.
Additionally, the appeal has already had a significant impact: more than 100 civil society activists from roughly 10 different nations said that they had joined the international campaign to organize efforts against mines and supported a worldwide solution to this issue.
