The Armenian Youth Federation of Canada (AYF) and the Armen Karo Student Association have organized a protest at the Azerbaijani Embassy in Ottawa, on February 22, 2011.

Several hundred Armenian-Canadians from across the country the will hold a demonstration voicing their concern over Azerbaijan’s ongoing aggression towards Armenians. The planned protest comes just days before the 23rd anniversary of the deadly pogroms of Sumgait on Feb. 27, 1988, which marked the beginning of a systematic campaign by Azerbaijan’s OMON Special Forces to use massacres and violence to forcefully uproot Armenians from Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh. The Sumgait tragedy and its bloody repetitions in Azerbaijan, lasting through the years of 1988 to 1991, led to the disappearance of 450,000 inhabitants living in an established Armenian community in Azerbaijan.

The Armenian-Canadians community believes that Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence must be universally recognized and that a return to Azerbaijani rule would jeopardize the lives of the Armenians living there and is therefore unacceptable. Furthermore, governments around the world must condemn Azerbaijan for their continued display of religious intolerance, aggression, and constant destabilization of the Caucasus.