Joining the call are world-renowned actors Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Jean Reno, Fanny Ardant, Danny Boone, Juliette Binoche, Pierre Richard, Oscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin, world-renowned intellectuals Jacques Attali, Claude Lelouch, Michel Hazanavicius, famous TV personality Stephen Burn, world-famous chef Alain Ducasse.
“More than a century after the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman rulers of 1915, the same people are again victims of two authoritarian regimes which, in Baku and in Ankara, incite inter-ethnic hatred in order to endow their power with a new bloody trophy,” the open letter reads.
“The fate of the Armenians has just been brutally crippled in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region they call Artsakh. Humble and proud people have lived there for more than two millennia, firmly attached to their rocky, wonderful soil. They wanted to continue their existence where their ancestors had built their houses, their schools and their admirable monasteries, in the heart of impregnable mountains and hard-plowed plains,” the intellectuals add.
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“Without any human consideration, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Ilham Aliev’s Azerbaijan have strived to destroy this legitimate aspiration. For the Armenians, Karabakh represents above all a people – with its ancestral culture, its music, its dances and its desire to join the march of the world by opening up. For the authorities in Baku and Ankara, it is mostly a territory; on which the flag of Azerbaijan must float at all costs, whether by receiving support from Turkish special forces, sending volleys of kamikaze drones to crush civilian targets, or using jihadist mercenaries paid to kill,” they add.
“There is now evidence that Azerbaijan used cluster bombs prohibited by international law. The fight was totally unequal. The Armenians did not want this war, but they were forced to fight for their survival. For the Azeri regime, it is only a matter of nationalist pride. The leader of Azerbaijan was clear in his intentions when he said in the early days of the conflict: “We are hunting them like dogs.” He repeated this same sentence after the exodus of civilians he provoked in Artsakh, declaring himself proud to have kept this horrible promise. In the 21st century, such a detestation of humans, such exaltation of hatred, arouses the deepest indignation and has absolutely no place in the modern world,” the letter concludes.